More Easter pictures

District Easter Picture outside the branch house.

Michaela Janae Whitaker

This past week was really full.

We got new two new elders with the transfer. They are pretty cool, and we get along really well as a district.

It was Easter this past weekend, plus conference. Gotta love conference weekend. I actually understood a lot more this time, as we watched every session in Hungarian. I didn't understand all of it, but at least I understood the main point so that was nice. From what I got out of it, there were a lot of talk about temples and marriage. I found that interesting. Oh! I'm glad that three new temples were announced. That's exciting!

I hope you all had a great Easter. Easter is one of the bigger holidays in Hungary. Let me tell you a little something about Easter in Hungary. Waay back when, there was a tradition started where guys would go out with buckets of water and cute poems and they'd go up to a girl and say the poem and dump the bucket of water on them. Then in return, the girls give them chocolate or painted eggs. Sometimes the boys even get money from them. Yeah, all of this was attractive at one time I guess? Anways, to this day they still carry on this traditon. Hungarians celebrate Easter on Sunday and Monday. Monday is when the locsolkodás (sprinkling) happens. Although nowadays boys just walk around with a bottle of perfume in their hand, and have a cute little memorized poem that they receite. Girls continue to give them chocolate eggs or hand painted eggs. The handpainted eggs are unbelievably pretty. Sister Layton and I got sprayed four times. It was so weird, but so cool at the same time. That was our easter.

Our investigators last week were troopers, given all the preparations they had to do getting ready for easter. We managed to meet with the majority of them. I think last week I talked about the person we were doing the none-smoking program with. The program was successful and to this day, he hasn't smoked a cigarette! We were so happy for him! It's been awesome to hear him talk about how he felt, that with God's help, he was able to go a whole week without smoking, even though he was around his friends who tempted him with cigarettes. We're so proud of him! Every day that week we called him, to ask him how he was and how the program was going. Come Saturday and time for us to end the program, which means no more calling him nightly, we told him it would be hard for us to not call him every night, although we did give him a scripture reading calendar so that he can keep up with his scripture reading every day after giving that to him he immediately bursts out and says, you guys called me every day last week to see how the program went, I will call you guys every day this week and tell you how my scripture reading is going, starting tonight. Sure enough, he called us that night. That moment when your investigator keeps daily contact with the you, whaaatt? That was like the moment of the week.

Hungarians celebrate Easter on Sunday and Monday, so we were supposed to work on Monday, we ended up doing a service project with the other elders and a member who's mom passed away about three months ago. We helped in helping pack up her apartment. Talk about a lot of things collected over a period of time. I had never seen so much...well...items in one little apartment. It was a good service project, although we barely made a dent in that apartment. We had a good time, and then afterwards we were invited out to another members house to have an Easter dinner, and that was yummy. 

I always say that the week was packed full, but then I realize how little I write, I'm sorry. I've gotten a little lazy lately with my blog emails. I'll have to get on those better. The upcoming weeks, I'll do better.

Love. Peace. Incense (:

Whitaker Nővér

Angol Óra tabling with the elders.... we all look so stoked. It's always a good time.

Okay, funny story about second picture. First of all, can you see our matching outfits... we didn't plan this, but we walked out and we were both wearing that bright blue color, so that was cool! (: Anyways, does one of my eyes look weird, specifically the right one. A few minutes before this picture was taken my companion and I were walking down the street and a bug flew into my eye and it wouldn't stop watering for like an hour. I kept on washing my eye out in the sink and all but it would just water so one of my eyes has make up on it and the other is just a mess. It's gross... but that was my day. It was good. haha. Stories of this missionary life.

Our District with our awesome investigator Gabor (the tall one in the middle) with a couple other members (background). Last Sunday together as a district, before transfers.

We went tracting the other day and tracted into this really really sweet older lady who let us in. She spoke English fluently because she's an English teacher. We spoke with her for about an hour and then decided it was time to leave, by that time it was raining heavily outside but we didn't have our coats with us so this sweet little néni gave us two spare coats and told us to bring them back whenever we come back next time. Too nice!! We just wanted to take a picture of these classy coats! The next day it was gorgeous