This Week Has Been Awesome!

Elder Clawson, Elder F. and Julian.  Julian is the first baptism Jed has had a tiny part of in Albania.

 (We usually receive Jed's letter on Monday mornings around 10 or 11 am our time.  I thought I had plenty of time Monday morning to write to Jed, but at 6:10am I got an email from him asking if we were all ok, and a note saying he hadn't received any mail from his family.  Loser mom!!  I hastily wrote of this last weeks activities, and apologized for being so rotten. Jed was cute, and chastised me a bit, and then sent his weekly fantastic letter:)  I just love this kid!!

Dear family!!

This week has been awesome. This last Saturday was the day Julian got baptized. President and Sister Ford came up and a few of Julians friends and his fiance. I had to give a small talk which was about baptism and receiving the Holy Ghost. It was kinda short. My language abilities are not the best. But it was an awesome baptism. Julian wanted to be baptized by President Ford and it was super awesome. The spirit was really strong there and we all enjoyed seeing him be so happy. Me and Elder Foster heard him singing in the bathroom as he was getting changed.

Yesterday we got to confirm him and that was also really neat. Unfortunately none of our investigators came to church though. That was kinda sad. 

Elder Clawson overseeing the filling of the baptismal font.

SO another really interesting thing that happened this week was that I got to go on my first exchange. I got to head out to Lushnje with Elder Bullock. He's from Boise and he was pretty cool. So I took a bus to Lushnje which was about an hour drive south of Durres. We got there, unpacked and then went to a lesson with a kid named Juxhin. It's pronounced like Eugene. He got baptized yesterday in Lushnje. He was a super solid kid and we got along really well. We taught him with a kid named Bajtar. He was awesome too. They're both 18 and Bajtar is a recent convert. After that we had an activity with the youth and they had four girls that ranged from 17-18 years old. You can imagine how flirty they were with the new American kid that can't speak Albanian. So since I couldn't understand what the heck they were saying, I stuck with Juxhin and Bajtar. We went to a members house afterwards and the mom was blown away by how young I was. At the end of that lesson she kissed both of my cheeks and that kinda freaked me out but Elder Bullock said I should just accept it unless some teenage girl wants to kiss my cheeks. 

We went home after that and they (the Lushnje missionaries) have the nicest house in the whole mission. It was huge and awesome. I got to dance to Enya the following morning in nothing but my undies cuz they also had a really nice sound system. On Thursday we had zone conference and we got to see everyone from the south part. Which was everyone from Durres down. We talked about how our goals for the year were coming and so far we've been keeping up pretty well. After the conference the APs drove us back to Durres and I grew to love the APs. They are all so hilarious. Elder Webb and Elder Anderson. Funny dudes. 

Once we got back to Durres, we went out and met with Fabjan in his locale and talked to him about prayer for a second cuz he didn't have a whole lot of time. He seems pretty ready for baptism. We have another meeting with him tonight. 

Dritan and his family are doing well. I've started to understand them all a little bit better now so I'm feeling more comfortable around them. They had to get pushed back a week in their baptisms so they could all be baptized as a family.

We are teaching an English course now and we found two investigators from that. I got to teach the advanced class and we found two 18 year old girls that were interested in the Book of Mormon. We are starting to teach them this week hopefully. They seem pretty sincere. 

Anxhela is progressing still and we are going to invite her to baptism this week. I hope she says yes. 

Well I hope everything is going well at home. I miss you all and love you all so much!!
Love, Jed

Dear Mother, 

I am still staying safe and healthy. I'm going to start printing recipes off of the blog for Sunday meals. We made lasagna yesterday and that was pretty good. I hope everything is going okay. I love you so much. 

Jed

I didn't get a description of this room, but I'm assuming it is somewhere the missionaries visited on P-day.