I got transferred! ... there's an explanation point on that sentence, but I was actually pretty sad about it haha... I was only in my other area for 1 transfer and I love Tirana, so it was super hard to leave... now I'm in Elbasan serving with Sister Tengu, a native to Albania. I know what you're thinking, oh boy! She's gonna be so good at Albanian! However.... she speaks really good english... sooo... we'll see haha I try to speak in Albanian a lot, it ends up being 50/50... I'm excited for language study though! And golly, I have a walking dictionary with me always! So that's pretty cool :)
So, New Years... I have literally never experienced anything like it before in my entire life ... there has been some really strong wind lately. So strong that it will shake our building (we're the 9th floor). Between the building shaking and the constant explosions starting at about 4 pm, there were times I could have very easily confused it for our building actually exploding haha
I also sleep right next to a door that leads to the balcony. It's an all glass door so you can easily see outside. I woke up at midnight to gigantic fireworks exploding at eye level about 15 feet away from my face. Looking outside the window, there were fireworks exploding everywhere, and I mean everywhere! And these weren't little fireworks... I'm talking the big, Forth of July, up in the sky kind of fireworks. They were being shot up, down, sideways, between buildings, above buildings, in the streets, from people's windows, it was insane! There was not a place that you could look where there were no fireworks. Normally for a firework show, it's like this ... POP.... *pause* ... POP POP ..*pause*.. POP ..*pause*... POP POP POP ......... etc... and the grand finally of a bunch of fireworks for a few seconds... this was a constant, never ending stream of POP POP POP POP POP POP POP... the explosions just never ended! .....golly, firework shows will never be the same hahaha
Saying goodbye to people on your mission is probably the worst thing in the entire world... I hate it, so so so much. Anyways, there's an elderly less active member that we were working with in the area that I just got transferred from. Honestly, I didn't think we really meant that much to her. I knew she liked us, but ya know, just kind of eh about us. We visited her once a week and she's been coming to church pretty consistently now and is soon to be active again which is super exciting! Anyways, Monday night we were saying bye to people. We were about to go in and finish our studies (it was a normal work day) but we felt that we should say bye to her. We went over and told her we were leaving and how much we loved her and wow..... she was devastated. She said she's been so lonely and we've been the only people she's had, that we've become her girls to her and that she looked forward to us coming over all the time. That we've always been there for her and helped her to not feel lonely... I literally had no idea how much of an impact we had on her. It shocked me really. This whole time, I thought we were hardly making a difference to her when in reality we had meant everything to her. It just made me think of the scripture, "by small and simple things are great things brought to pass..." (Alma 37:6) Sometimes we have no idea what kind of a difference we're making in other people's lives, for good or bad.... I hope we're doing those little things to make a big difference in other peoples lives for the better. The kind that touches their hearts forever and we may not even know :)
Love you all!
Motra
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