the one about enduring to the end

...Wow. I didn't really expect missionary work to be this slow. But hey, I didn't come here for fast and exciting times, I came here to help lay the foundation of the church. The two are not necessarily welded together. Fatjon couldn't meet with us, but we hold out hope that he's still reading and praying. We've probably done about 15 hours of street contacting with moderate success (a promising phone number). I need to keep up my motivation, because we found out the other night I'm going to be here for another 6 weeks with my companion. I guess we'll just put our shoulders to the wheel and see how far we get.

We've been doing a lot of "turbo visits" to the members of the branch. Even though these people are fully active, it's good to talk with them and share a message, and they love having us over. A recent statistic from the missionary department said that one good referral from a member is equivalent to knocking on 1,000-2,000 doors while tracting, so we're giving it all we've got to get referrals. And it's fun talking to the members. A lot of them have led interesting lives. On Saturday we visited 3 very strong youth. It just so happened that they all were in the same house at the same time. One served a mission to Italy, another to England, and one to Russia. It's great to see such commitment and faith in these people.

Last Monday we took a district trip to City Park. A free bus takes you about 10 miles outside the city to this huge shopping mall complex. They have some very expensive stores, but we went there for the ice skating. It was fun; I didn't fall down once! Then we ate at the food court at AFC. Yes, that's Albania Fried Chicken. It's a good thing there aren't copyright or trademark laws here, or else this place would get the living daylights sued out of them. Their logo is almost the same as KFC, just with an "a" instead of a "k", and their "commercial" is a KFC commercial that they've zoomed in just enough so that you can't see the text on the bottom of the screen. We got a mini bucket with chicken strips, original recipe and hot wings (which weren't actually that hot). It was surprisingly the best chicken I've had in the country.

I'll keep pushing the handcart and report next week.

Elder Weaver