Hey Family!!
I just have to start by letting you all know that I am loving it here in Durres. The first couple weeks were hard, especially trying to work things out with my companion but now things are smooth sailing. I am learning how to communicate with these people more and more and I am falling in love with Albanian. Where I am at there are two main dialects- Tosk and Gheg. The first is the kind that you learn from textbooks and is very "clean" as we say. Basically it is the kind that everyone can understand. The second is a very "thick" accent and much more fun to speak and so I am teaching myself/having members help me understand and speak it. Pretty much you can just cut off the end of a lot of words and get really lazy with your grammar so it's a lot of fun and it sounds really cool. I am hoping that at the end of my 4 months here that I will be able to be taken as a Kosovar but who knows??? My companion on the other hand is really struggling with the language and no one really understands her when she speaks Albanian so I am helping her as much as I can every day. It is helping me know more as I teach her what I know. Pretty much the best way to learn eh?
Now I want to talk about this past week. Like I had hoped a couple of weeks ago, this past week was amazing and full of many mini miracles! Lately we have been struggling (okay desperate might be a better word) with meeting with our investigators and also with finding new investigators. It seemed for a while that everything was stagnant or digressing and we were feeling very saddened by our lack of teaching. My companion has a great testimony and I was very excited to let her have the opportuntiy to let her share that with others but more often than not our lessons would fall through. But the great news is that this week everything has changed around, especially since we fasted on Saturday. I bear a firm testimony to you all that the Lord does and hear our prayers if we are sincere. In just a few days we were able to find five new investigators and able to meet with most of them. People suddenly became available and investigators have been finding us. The most miraculous were two sisters, one of which was an extremely inactive teenager who brought her sister to church and just showed up on Sunday. Another one called us and set up a time to meet without us even trying and she has so many good questions. She has a lot of potential!! This past week we were also able to find a couple of inactive members and invite to come to church again. The best part is that we were able to get two of them to come through the help of a member. There were also a lot of little miracles that added up to a wonderful week and we are planning for a great week to come as well!
Love you all! Hope to hear from you all next week!
Love,
Motra Hawkins
P.S. Here is me with a pomegranite our investigator gave us. Fun huh?
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