#3 Pest: "And the Earth Shall Appear as the Garden of Eden."

Hi! This week the Cherry trees are producing fruit and its really fun to pick off the fruit while we are walking a long. On Friday we went to a small town called Felsőgöd, it is a 30 minute train ride north of Pest. We went there to look up an lady investigator and to have diner with the Farkasék; and the best part was just eating cherries all along the way. The Farkasék have been members a really long time, Orsi, the mom, has been a member since the 90s and she was one of the main translators for the Book of Mormon into Hungarian, as well as the other standard works and manuals for the church. She joined the church in the United States while she was working as a nanny for a family in upstate New York. After she joined the family she was working for fired her and she went back to Hungary, but later she came back to the States for school. She is the mother of six and is super awesome!

Last P-day we went to the "House of Terror" which is where the offices for the Nazi occupation forces were headquartered in Hungary from 1944-1945, and then the HQ and interrogation center for the Communist secret police from 1945-1967. It was really interesting, and it is more impactful than a normal museum because it is the actual building where these terrible things took place. While we were there we met an American woman from Chicago who talks to the missionaries at the airport all the time, she works at O'hare airport.

We went to visit the family that Elder Durney (my Zone Leader) found, the family with the mom and four teenage daughters... their teenage daughters are way too flirtatious, but it's comical because they are very young. Those little girls are relentless! They asked us to help them make stuffed peppers, and I was helping them because apparently I'm the best stuffed pepper maker in the whole mission. Yeah, so that was fun and funny.

Elder Durney

We also had a Zone day, and splits with the zone leaders this week. Zone Day is a bit different than Zone Conference. It was extra special this time because it was our last interviews with the president. Zone Day is like a reward for being good missionaries and President Szabadkai wanted us to have fun. We had our interviews first. It was good to have one last interview with President Szabadkai before he will be released. I'm really going to miss him! I've finally have reached the ability in speaking Hungarian to do my whole interview in only Hungarian, it was really cool, but also sad to have my first, only, and last interview completely in Hungarian. After President Szabadkai is released our new mission president is American and doesn't speak Hungarian, so we will have our interviews with him in English. The rest of the Zone Day was full of fun games, basketball, Frisbee, and we even did water balloons. It was cool to catch up with missionaries I've known on my mission, like Sister Smith. We got to watch a church movie called, "One Good Man," and that was great just because we got to watch a movie. We had Subway catered lunch. We played games with the senior missionaries. We love senior missionaries, you definitely know they love you!! (Grandma and Grandpa, if you ever run into Bob and Wendy Bugazzi, they are the coolest Canadians I know, who live in St George!! They served in Hungary... But, there are a lot of Mormon's in St George so you will probably never meet them, but you could look them up on Facebook and meet them that way. Anyway, they are really cool!) Fun times!!

The best day this week was definitely Tuesday.

We met this week with a potential investigator from India and taught him in English. His English wasn't very good so it was slow, but toward the end of our meeting we met his friend who showed up to meet him. His friend is also Indian, but he spoke English really well, and we were able to talk to him about the church too. We asked him if he'd like a copy of the Book of Mormon and meet with us and he was super excited about meeting with us. It's interesting how much interested foreigners are to meet with us than Hungarians.

We also had an awesome experience later when we were streeting. We were using the approach of asking people what they think the purpose of life is. While we were streeting we met a woman who said that was a hard question for her to answer right now. She said that her son was in the hospital and that she was going over there to visit him. Elder Fales asked if she would like us to come with her and minister to her and her son. That made her day. While we were traveling to the hospital she asked us lots of questions. We talked to her about the Book of Mormon and she said that she thought this book could really help her son and she wanted us to talk to him about it when we got there. Come to find out, she took us to a mental institution because her son suffers from schizophrenia. That was unexpected, and we were a little nervous, but he was mildly schizophrenic but he was put in there because the voices he hears tell him to do things that would hurt himself. 

We ended up talking with her and her son and some of her family that was also there about the restoration and the Book of Mormon, and they were all excited to learn about the things we were teaching. By the time we were done they all wanted copies of the Book of Mormon and they asked if they could come to church. They also really liked us, they were impressed that we could speak to them in Hungarian and understand them, they thought that was super awesome. I'm so glad we went and visited with them, they kept saying we were "aranyos." It's an endearing word in Hungarian that doesn't translate into English, but kind of means "you're so cute!" Our meeting with them was one of the best experiences of my mission and it was definitely a miracle.

That day we got 4 new investigators!

I'm doing well, and the work is going well.

Love, Morgan Elder.