#8 Kispest: Six Months in Hungary

April 30th is six months since I landed in Hungary, I landed in Hungary on October 31st, so I've been in Hungary six months now! Which is six months in Hungary and eight months as a missionary. Which is just crazy, it doesn't feel like it's been eight months at all!! Time flies!

It's been a good week, this week we had splits with the Zone Leaders in Pest. I went to pest with Elder Durney. Elder Durney has been here in Hungary for a year and a half, he is from Colorado. We did a lot of tracting but we found a building with a lot of really cool potential investigators. 

We also taught a mother and her 3 teenage daughters about the Book of Mormon, and testimony. (This mother has 7 teen aged children! an 18 year old son, 17 year old, 16 year old twins, 15 year old daughter, and 12 year old twin daughters). We gave them all copies of the Book of Mormon and they were all so excited and had so many questions. It was really cool.

We also taught Piroska néni (79 years old) again and we talked all about baptism and showing faith in Christ. We asked her to be baptized. We prepared our invitation to be baptized carefully, what we said was "we will be holding a baptismal service on June 17th...." and she just popped up and ran to get her calendar, and just started penciling it in. We then asked her if she wanted to be baptized, but before we could even finish our question she said, "Of course I do!!" She was very excited. We have some things to work on with her, but I hope she hangs in there.

Budai Zoltán also had his baptismal interview this week and it went really well, we reviewed them with him before the interview last week, and he just had such great and thoughtful answers, you can really tell that he really means what he says and wants to be baptized, he is so golden, so prepared it is amazing to me.

Also Hungarian ice cream, fagyi, is the best thing ever!!

We also went to a Nyomorultak (les miserables) and it was really fun to watch it in Hungarian. They did a really good job. It was interesting in Hungarian, they did have the words in English on a board up above the stage, and I did read that ocationally but I know the story pretty well that I didn't get lost. I don't speak Hungarian well enough to understand everything they said, but I would say I understood a third of what they said. In Hungarian, when you want to express something, there are more syllables in Hungarian that there are in English, and because of that it's hard for them to translate songs and make them work and so they had completely different words for everything. I understood enough Hungarian to recognize it wasn't a direct translation and that most of the things were different, but it was still pretty cool. At the end they did ovations. Hungarians don't stand until the very last one, but they do rounds of clapping, the first round of clapping, they were just clapping like crazy but then eventually they settled into clapping in unison and then they would change the rhythm of the clapping, speeding up and slowing down, all together. It would seem strange to an American, but it was cool.

In my personal study:

I listened to a talk by then President Holland, before he was an apostle and was the President of BYU. He was talking about Christ like leadership through looking at the life of Joseph Smith. He shared Moroni 7:44 “If a man be meek and lowly in heart, and confesses by the power of the Holy Ghost that Jesus is the Christ, he must needs have charity; for if he have not charity he is nothing; wherefore he must needs have charity.” Charity, the pure love of Christ, is so vital that even if we are humble and confess the name of Christ and we have a witness of the Holy Ghost, these are still useless unless we have Charity. We can’t lead unless we have Charity. He showed examples in Joseph Smith’s life where that is true. Also, Charity endureth all things, and he showed how Joseph was able to endure all things.

My news:

They are probably going to be changing the transfer schedules when the new Mission President comes in this summer. As they combine Hungary and Romania into the same mission they may need to go back and make Hungarian into a 12 week MTC language program (as it used to be when the two countries were in the same mission in the past). Romanian is a 6 week language, so they are on a 6 week transfer schedule, and the 6 week and 9 week transfers are not compatible, but a 6 and 12 week transfer system works together. So this may change my release date. I could be coming home three weeks earlier, or three weeks later. Of course I won't know for sure until the new Mission President is in place.

I'm doing good. I'm excited to talk to you on mothers day! I love and miss you! This is the last week of this transfer. It is crazy how fast these last two months have gone by. I cant believe that Elder Gabel is going back home in 8 days, I hope next transfer will be good too. I'm worried that I'll be training next transfer. I just have a feeling or something, but what ever happens it will be good if I trust in the Lord! Love you all.

Morgan Elder.

Word of the week: Sugárhajtásúvadászrepülőgép. (shoe-gahr-high-tash-ew-vahd-ass-rep-ooloh-gape): literally: Jet propelled hunting flying machine or just fighter jet.