January 2 2017

This week was nuts, I think that we didn't do hardly any missionary work this week. So the entire mission came together on Wednesday to meet at the Hotel in the middle of the czech countryside called Štamberk Hotel, which is owned by a memeber of the church, and we, as an entire mission, stayed there until Friday Afternoon! We went because President Pohořelický had planned several changes to the mission, and he wanted us all to be together so that we could learn about and accept the changes. These changes are not anything that most of you at home would understand, but for the sake of explianing, President changed the way that we measure "other lessons" and "new investigators" as well as he changed the "Standards" which are the numbers that we strive to achieve each week to measure our effectiveness as a mission. Each of the mornings we were there, we played floorball (hokey) for our morning workout, I can still hear the sound of us all walking out fo the gym at 7:00 after playing and then a random elder comes runing back all excited yelling, "we've got an extra 15 minutes!" and then a stampeed of Elders cramming back into the gym to play some more floorball. It was really fun! I remember it felt like we were all back in the Mtc for 3 days, not allowed to leave, strictly told to be in our living quarters at a certain time every night. We even had cafeteria food again... czech cafeteria food, but regardless... We had a Talent Show, and Each of the 4 zones were alotted 30 minutes to perform. In our zone we had Elder Johnson from my District get up and play some Jazz on the piano. My Companion turned to me and said, "we're singing Důvěra" (so Důvěra translates to Trust, and it is a song that is only found in the really really old czech hymn books from the time of communism. Here in UH we luckily have a large archive of old czech church material here so we found it. The reason it is so cool, is because the song Důvěra, is actually the song "Brightly Beams our Father's Mercy" in English, which is not found in the new czech hymnals. It's a treasure that we found here, and no other missionary has this song in czech but us.) so we sang Důvěra, and everyone loved it. On the way home, the sisters in our district lost their phone in Brno. So now we're wiating for them to get a new phone. But on our way home, we stopped in Brno again and Elder Geier and I went to the mall and Bought new suits. I have pictures, I'll send them. Dad you'll probably laugh. Still no news about Ipads, maybe we won't get them while I'm on my mission, bummer. M's Baptism was awesome, He was baptized by our Ward Mission Leader, the same man who let us skype at his house. Elder Geier Confirmed him, and I was able to help. We were told to be inside by 6:00pm on the 31st, and to be inside by 8:00pm on the 1st. There were a lot of fireworks and not to mention a lot of drunk people out and about on new year's eve. But we got to see some from our appartment window. (man, we're so wierd in the world's eyes) Something funny that happened at Štamberk, A sister missinary was playing pool, and President was playing with her. She Bet President that she could beat him, and she said, "if I win, you tell me where I'm going next transfer." (we're not supposed to know until this next Saturday). . . She WON, and president took her into another room and she came out smiling. . . she had received her Transfer Call early because she won the bet... Good grief. The rest of us have to wait. I love you all and I can't wait to see what this new year holds for all of us... I got out of the shower this morning just laughing at the fact that Trump is president... LOL.