Week 57

February 8, 2016

Dear Family and Friends,

Funny story from last week that I forgot to tell. When we were coming back from immigration last week we have to take a bus to near the church, then get off and get on a different bus to get home. We get on the first bus and Sister Madison sits down and starts talking to this lady, so then eventually I go sit down with my back facing her near the front of the bus. All of a sudden I cannot hear her voice anymore and I wasn't quite sure which bus stop we were planning on getting off at. I start to try and look behind me, but the bus was really crowded. Finally I stand up after the bus had emptied out a little bit and I see she is no longer on the bus, she had already gotten off according to this old lady who saw me looking around. I then get off. Sister Madison has the phone, so I can't call her. I decide to start walking back to see if maybe she would be waiting at the stop before the one I got off. I had no idea when she got off. Then I get there to the stop before and she is not there. I keep thinking I should ask somebody to borrow their phone but decide to wait to see if a bus comes by with her on it. I wait for a few minutes and one bus that wasn't ours goes by, then I decide to start walking toward the next one. As I begin to walk away I see the number 10 bus, the bus we would be taking home, so I stop and look and there I see Sister Madison, Bestenlenher, and Jerman waving at me to get on. So I run a little ways back so I could catch the bus. I guess Sister Madison could not see me either so she got off early thinking I had already gotten off. She then called our district leader who just told her to keep going to where we were headed, which was home. Then somewhere in there she ran into the other sisters. I am so glad we were not separated for too long. I am proud to say that is the first time that this had ever happened to me in my whole mission. We then decided we should actually come up with a plan if we do get separated again.

In other news, we got to go to the dermatologist to get a little bump on Sister Madison's face layered off. We had service again where we unwrapped and stickered coffee again. We also had zone training which was really great as well. We were committed to begin to learn the members last names and begin calling them brother and sister with their last names. We have never really done that here because, first of all, they prefer their first names, and second, their last names are really hard and change according to marital status, age and gender. So I began working on those so I can address them all appropriately.

This week the sun has finally come out and has melted all of the snow and it feels so nice outside. I love when the sun comes out because all of a sudden all of the people are out with their families doing things together outside. 

On Saturday one less active member is in cooking school and she invited us to this thing where her school would be kind of showcasing what they do. We went to support her. It cost 5 euros and we were under the impression there would be just a bunch of free food to try, but we got there and there were a ton of young adults. We came to find out that it was actually a college fair and it was huge like all of Lithuania was there. We were afraid it was going to be a little hard to find her. As we were walking around we ran into her. It was good that we saw her so she could know we came for her. 

On Sunday we were able to go contact this lady who was a referral from another missionary's relative who bought a really nicely bound journal off of Easy from someone who lives in Vilnius. We went out to her house which is sort of in the country. She happened to be home and we didn't want to freak her out or anything and start teaching her the Gospel since she actually has no idea that was why we were there, so we talked about if she could bind our books and asked her questions about that. She didn't speak Lithuanian very well, or English, so she got her son who speaks English to translate. She said she could bind our books, so we got her number so we could bring our books back. We are very excited since they used to have a member in Riga that could do it, but she doesn't really do it anymore. All the missionaries will be really excited to hear. It was a really great and busy week.

Love,

Sister Brown