The Very Hungary Missionary

Hello friends and family! This week though! It's been an interesting one, that's for sure! We had plenty of programs to keep us busy. They all went really smooth. It's amazing how close you grow to people in such a short period of time. I really feel like these people I meet everyday are just my best friends! It makes missionary work so much more fun and enjoyable!

Hmmm... what can I tell you about my friends here in Szeged. Tuesday we met with RR (the man who quite smoking and has been our most solid investigator for weeks now), we taught him about the Sabbath Day and keeping it holy. He's been to church three weeks in a row now so it's safe to say that keeping the Sabbath Day holy was already on his to-do list, but we further explained to him what it exactly means and how we do it. The lesson went really well and he commited to keeping the Sabbath Day Holy. We went over to RR's on Friday again, and we brought a member, who happened to meet RR last Sunday when he was at church last week and came up to us personally and asked us if he could go to RR's next program with us. We taught the Word of Wisdom, which we were a little hesitant on doing especially since we had just given up smoking not too long ago (and is still doing good with that). We thought that maybe teaching the Word of Wisdom would be too much to ask of him in such a short time. RR is a coffee drinker and loves it, so asking him to give that up to sounded like a lot, but Sister Layton and I put our trust in Heavenly Father and received the impression to teach him the Word of Wisdom anyway, and that everything would be fine. Turns out that our impression was right (not a big surprise, right?). We went in and taught the Word of Wisdom and RR just accepted it. A part of me was super surprised that he accepted it so willingly, but the other part of me was like, "this doesn't surprise me at all, RR is and has been ready to accept this gospel and everything within it from day one." The lesson just went super well and we talked to him about drinking coffee afterwards these are his words exactly: "I won't be able to quite under a day, or maybe even a week, but with time I will quit drinking coffee. If I quit smoking in under a week with the Sister's help, I can quit coffee." Ugh! Can RR be anymore great?! Let me answer that for you...no! I think I already mentioned that during his non-smoking program week we called him every week to ask him how he was doing and such. Now he calls us! Not every night but every once in a while, he'll call and say "Hi Sisters, I just wanted to know how you guys were doing. How your day was? Can I do anything to help you?" Too sweeet of him, right? Anyway, that's the story with RR. Just being great as usual! Oh, and the last couple of times he's been at church he has stayed for all three meetings! Which is awesome!

Who else can I tell you about. I guess I haven't talked about LZ for a while. LZ is our other bap. date. She has been meeting with the missionaries for...well a while. It's been a real roller coaster teaching her. LZ has struggled with depression for a long time, and sometimes she has hard days and at other times she has harder days. We have been trying to meet with her often so that we can bring the spirit into her home. This last week when we met with her, she was more sad then usual so we told her that everyday at 19:00 we would stop by her house to ask her how she's doing and just visit with her. So far that's been really great for her, I feel. The other night we brought her a whole bunch of balloons (hearts, smiley face, decorated) to her hosue and I'm pretty sure that just made her day so much better. At least it made our day better, that's for sure! The look on her face was just a look of surprise and it made us happy that she was happy (: That's the best feeling, when you forget yourself and focus on others but then you do yourself a favor, in disguise, by making other people happy, which ultimately makes you happy! Then when you're happy, you just want to keep doing things that make others happy. It's like a big circle and it's great! We are going to continue to visit LZ until...well... we will do it for however long we need to. That's why were here!

Friday we had zone training, that's always fun. Not just because we get to see all the other missionaries in our zone, but because we get to receive training from our amazing zone leaders. I give zone leaders a lot of credit. We have the pleasure of serving with our zone leaders here in Szeged and they are just always busy, not just with mission business but with their own investigators and so on. After our zone training the ZL's were feeling a little bummed because well... for a number of different reasons so we went out for ice cream with them for a little pick-me-up. They expressed a lot of their concerns and frustration to us, and it was just kind of eye-opening to see how they see the mission. It's a completely different view from just being a regular missionary in the zone. They see and report for all the companionships in the zones and see what they do, how their work is, etc. and they just see a lot more than we do. We had a really interesting talk with them, but it was needed for both them and us.

Oh my goodness, Friday morning. Every morning (almost) we go work out with the zone leaders at six, well Friday morning we went to our morning workout with them and as we were walking home, we hear this loud CRASH! I look up and all I see is a car flying in the air about to land on it's top. Sister Layton and I just stopped dead in our tracks as we see this car flying in the air. What happened is there was a four way intersection (with no yield signs, right-a-way signs or anything) and there was a car going through that and the other driver wasn't paying attention and just t-boned them right in the middle of the intersection, which caused the car to flip on it's top. Plus, there was a person who was riding a bike who got knocked off during all of this. When the car landed on it's top we see people roll out of the driver side and the passenger side and then people rushing to the back seat. Turns out there was a baby and a six year old boy in the back seat. Amazingly everyone just walked away from the accident. Nobody was crying, in hysterics, or anything and from what we could see, nobody was bleeding. Talk about a miracle. I just couldn't believe that the boy and the baby weren't even making a sound. I'm sure the little boy was in shock but the baby... wow! Anways, so Sister Layton and I stay at the scene of the accident until the ambulence and the police come, and then literally just turned to open our door into our apartment. It was right in front of our place. Then the rest of the morning we were a little shookin up ourselves so we spent all morning talking about well... tragedies. It was kind of a rough morning, to be honest. We had zone training and the rest of the day just flowed, but we had a pretty crazy morning. Oh and then we saw another accident later that day, but don't worry, this one wasn't that serious. In fact, it involved a plastic toddler bike and a three year old girl. This little girl was riding her bike in the belváros and she turned a little too sharp and fell over on the ground. She immediately got up and kicked her bike, while crying, and said "STUPID BIKE." It was pretty much the cutest thing I've ever seen!

Saturday was just an interesting day. We started off the morning by going to Sport Nap, where we usually play soccer. I consider myself pretty sporty, but when it comes to soccer, I'm pretty much useless. Actually I really enjoy playing goalie when I play, because my hand-eye coordination is a lot better than my foot-to-ball coordination although I usually use my hand-eye coordination in basketball, sometimes I put it to work in soccer. Anways, Sister Layton and I get to sport nap and we just went HAM on the playground equiptment. There is a little kid playground right by the sport pálya where we play soccer and instead of playing soccer we played on the playground and just turned into little kids. It was so fun! The rest of the day we just kind of remained little kids. I don't know what was up with us, but we were just so loud and obnoxious that day. Sometimes you just have to have days like that, you know?

Sunday, cool story time... We went to church on Sunday and it was really good. The talks we heard were good and all of the meetings were good. There was an LDS lady from Washington who was in Szeged because she works for the University of Portland, and she has some students over here, studying at the University of Szeged, so she had to do some kind of interview with them. I had to translate for her but it was good practice for me. She was super nice and she said that she'd give our English class and church cards out to her students. Finding through Americans in Hungary. Wooo! RR came to church and so did TG, but TG always comes to church, he's practically a member, without a record...yet! Anyways, after church Sister Layton and I went on a river walk with the Elders. Then we came home to have lunch, after lunch we went out tracting. We were kind of dreading it, honestly, because he had four hours of it scheduled.We had gone back to a building that we started a few weeks ago, but didn't get to finish, we finished that building with not a lot of success, so we were walking around our tracting area, wondering where to go. None of us really having the motivation to do anything. We started just walking in some direction and all of a sudden this lady stands right in front of us ( I have no clue where she came from) and says "Szia! Hi!" In surprise I say, "Szia, hello!" As her response was "Where are you from?" I told her that we were from America and then asked her how she spoke English so well, turns out that she just likes English and studied it on her own. Then she just randomly switched over to Hungarian, which wasn't a big deal, but we started talking at her bus station and all of  a sudden she says, "here comes my bus" but then she said that she would rather talk to us, but I told her we could get on the bus with her (who knows where that would have taken us) and talk to her, but by the time I got my words out the bus drove away and this lady literally busted a gut as it drove away. She was like, Oh my gosh, I just missed my bus! There was just perpetual laughter after this. At first I thought to myself, who is this lady?? We started talking to her, because, well... her next bus didn't come for another thirty minutes, so we had time...or rather, she had time. So we started talking to her, and we got to know her. She is a very interesting lady, very...outgoing and open, and just a hoot, to be honest. We didn't even have to suggest to meet with her as she was the one who was asking for our phone number and asking when we could come over to her house. We exchanged phone numbers and talked for a while longer. Let's just say she's super funny and we had a very humorous conversation. The bus came and we said goodbye, with a program scheduled already. Wednesday, which happens to be her name day. Hungarians don't just have birthdays, but they have name days, everyone has a name day and it's almost as big of a deal as their birthday. Anways, so later that night we are at home, making dinner, and we receive a call from an unknown number and it's CC. That same girl! She's a talker! She asked us what we were doing today (Monday) and when we told her that we might go to the Plaza to shop around a bit, she immediately asked if she could go with us. Haha, oh boy... this is going to be interesting. Don't get me wrong, she's super nice, but we might be hearing from her, at least, once a day. We'll see where it goes.

This was pretty much my week, pretty busy, but it's good. I like it that way. Six more weeks of this transfer! It's going fast. We're making the best out of it!

Love you all,

Whitaker Nővér

Michaela Janae Whitaker	10:31 AM (1 hour ago)
to Connie, me