24 January 2017

Hey hey hey!

I've already fallen behind on the Book of Mormon challenge. It's time to catch up! I can just use the picture you took for now, while I'm behind, so keep me updated on how you're doing! 

The kids are the Pawliks! They live in a city called Mielec about 2 hours from here, and their family will come in every other week and the other weeks they hold meetings at their house! We've had missionaries there starting this transfer! 

Kraków is beautiful, but the places we go to on a daily basis are pretty much normal city places. So that's why I don't talk about it much. But I really like the city square. It was saved during the second world war, so all the buildings are as close to original as they can be, and it's all really old. There's a church in the town square called St. Mary's church, and it's like over a thousand years old! It's amazing! There are a ton of churches. They're everywhere! If you look out of the window at our chapel (keep in mind that it's on the fourth floor) You can see three church steeples! The people here will talk with us a lot more, but less of those that talk will accept lessons. There's a lot of faithful, practicing Catholics here, and it throws me off because I'm so used to people saying that they're "believing but not practicing" (that's a very common one here)

I went on exchanges with the Elders in Mielec this last week. There's no public transport there, so we had to walk everywhere, and if you don't plan it out well, even though the city is tiny, it takes even longer to get places than in Kraków. We started to do English tracting, where we go around and advertise for our english class instead of talk about religion, and it worked out pretty well! Lot's of people were ok with it! We might have to do that here in the Krak!

Alright, so here's a list of people that we're working with, or recently worked with and have stopped:

Mark- he's moved back to America, and will be back here in March... The end. We had a lesson with him with President Turek, and it went really well, but we couldn't stop him from going back...

Darek- he's fallen off the face of the earth. No one knows.

Teresa- She's actually the other Elder's investigator, but she's being baptized this Friday!!!!!!!!!! She's stopped smoking, reads the Book of Mormon and other scriptures every day, and even got the courage to ask her boss to get time off on sundays to go to church every week! So amazing!

Kamila- Also technically the other Elders', but she comes to the English class and the religious class afterwards which we take turns teaching, so it's basically like we both teach her. She's planning on being baptized but is too afraid to tell her dad because he's VERY Catholic, and thinks that she's wasting her time with all this Mormon garbage, and we don't know what to do. Thankfully, many of the members here have come from similar situations, so they're able to help her.

Magdalena- She's a referral we got who's actually interested! She's in the same boat as Kamila concerning her parents, but we just started teaching her, so it's not yet a serious problem.

Romek- He's a less active member because he was in a big car crash and is stuck in the hospital for the rest of his life and also can't talk and can't move the right side of his body. We come in a couple of times a week because he lives right next to our house, and share a spiritual thought with him. He's taking it as well as he can, but he's got a pretty rough life.

So I can't really tell if this email has a general dark undertone to it, but if it does it's because we went to Auschwitz today. What an experience... Overall I'm very glad I went there but I don't really want to go back. The spirit that's there is just entirely different than any other place I've been. We stood at the wall where they executed hundreds of war prisoners, and inside the gas chambers where hundreds of thousands were killed, and I just couldn't comprehend it. The absolute horror that happened there was just too much. The entire area is so quiet and solemn there's no words to describe it, and I will definietly not forget it. The trials that those people went through put my life right into perspective, and I realized that I have not nearly as much to complain about as others. Some would ask why God let the Holocaust happen, I would rather thank God that it ended. 

We must never forget, lest it happen again.

I love you all so much!

Elder Liechty