I'm Actually a Missionary Now

September 23, 2019

"I'm Actually a Missionary Now

მეგობრები!

       This week went by super fast! Going to ყაზბეგი was incredible! The drive was incredible! My pictures cannot describe it well, especially the ones that I took. They really are terrible in comparison. But, we had a great time. It took about three hours to drive up. We stopped at two places on the way. Gudauri and the Russian border. Both were pretty cool, but nothing compared to ყაზბეგი. To get to the temple that is on top of the mountain, you have to either hike or take a taxi. It was rainy and cold, so of course, we ran, ignoring any trails and scaling the steep hills that stood in our way. It was really fun. It was also great to drive up with all the missionaries and a couple of our friends that are learning about the church.

Running up the hill

Elder Hunt taking a picture of the temple/church.

      
 The rest of the week was good. Elder Hunt and I recommitted to SYL (speak your language, aka only speaking Georgian). On Tuesday and Wednesday, we went the whole day. It was very taxing on the brain, but very cool. During our district meeting, Elder Hunt (as District leader) asked everyone to do better with their SYL. We report our percentage of SYL each week and there is room for improvement from everyone. I honestly think the main reason Elder Hunt wanted us to go 100% for at least a few days was to show the other companionships that if the missionary who is the worst at the language (me) can go without English, they can too. Granted, Elder Hunt is probably the second best missionary at the language, but a chain is only as strong as the weakest link (again, me).

       We went on another split this week. This time it was Elder Hunt and Christensen while I was again with Elder Layton. This was a great day because it felt like the first day I was doing missionary work. I knew before I came here it would be hard to find people eager and willing to listen to our Gospel message, but it's been very difficult. As a result I see everything we do as important missionary work although it's not always what you hear about from the Ensign magazine or from General Conference. Nevertheless, I love the work we do. Anyway, onto the split. We met with one of our friends that owns a café. Next door is a man who owns a dentist office. He comes in and we carry on a short conversation in Georgian and when he says, "they don't be taxes in Alaska, right?" I have no idea what he has said. So he begins speaking in perfect English. He asks about what we are doing here in Georgia and we tell about that our purpose is to help others to come unto Christ. We tell him a bit about our church, clearing up some misinformation he had. We may end up meeting him again. Probably will. He seemed to enjoy our mission and the fact that we know some Georgian.

       After, we went to clean the church building and we met with and taught several people. Now, it is uncommon for us to actually have a sit-down lesson where we say, "today we are going to talk about...", but this day, we did that three times. It was awesome. One of those meetings, was with a Turkish fellow. He understands some English, but we skyped two missionaries in Bulgaria that translated for us. It was a neat experience. 

During the week we ate some amazing Iranian food.

We also ate at a very good restaurant.  We had salad, Georgian barbequed chicken, and Georgian Dumplings.  Each nub is one dumpling.  We ate 40 between the three of us.

A great ad we saw for Poofs.  The 'f' sound is just a soft 'p' sound in Georgian so, poofebi sounds a bit different.

Tuesday night we watched the BYU devotional by President Nelson live on Facebook. We were very excited to see what the prophet had to say. He gave a very simple message about 5 truths that are important for all to know. It was a very good talk and worth a listen. You can find it at churchofjesuschrist.org or at byuspeeches.org. It's worth a listen.