Week 95: the Concrete Block part 2, a Trip to Zagreb, and Video Filming

Hello everybody! This week was a pretty interesting. Make sure you have your seatbelts buckled.

Tuesday morning started off with another trip to the place where they do visa stuff, since it'd been a while since I gave them my passport, but I hadn't heard anything. In light of our Wednesday trip out of Serbia, I figured I should get that back. Anyway, so we went in and waited in some lines and whatever and I eventually got my passport back with yet another visa in it. That's 6 now: Serbia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Serbia, Slovenia, Serbia. We went from there to the church to work on finding people through Facebook, and then had lunch at Chinese 88. Have I mentioned that I really like Asian food, and that Novi Sad has a lot of Asian restaurants? It's great. After some studies we went over to that member's house to finish up the stuff with the Concrete block. So, that meant more digging and then moving the block into the hole that we dug for it. We were using metal pipe thing and also a wooden shovel to kinda slide the concrete block into the hole, and I realized that the block's weight was going to break the shovel if we moved the block much further. So, I said something, but we ended up continuing anyway...and then the shovel snapped, haha. Oops. We did get the block into the hole, though. We were even wearing our white shirts and ties this time. Then we finished up that stuff, went to English, and got some hispanic food for dinner. Turns out that I quite like chicken empanadas.

The very heavy concrete block we moved.

On Wednesday morning we grabbed 4 breakfast burritos from Tortilla Casa, and then the Čačak Elders came by to pick us up for a road trip to Zagreb. That is, there was going to be a training in Zagreb that the 4 of us were going to. So we ate our burritos in the car and told stories as inspired by Elder Jones' prompts: "Elder Christensen, tell me a story about a stop sign." "Um..."
In any case, we got there a bit early, so Elder Christensen and I were able to do our daily Facebook work even though we were far from home, and then we all headed over to the mission home for dinner. We ran into some of my Slovene-serving friends, and other friends like Sister Smith who was in Novi Sad at the very start of this transfer. The group of missionaries coming for this training were essentially one companionship from each of the 4 zones, plus Elder Christensen and I, and the "media sisters" from Zagreb that help with other online stuff. That evening we worked on some miscellaneous stuff, and then got to finish the night with some sports out on the Melonakos' tennis/volleyball court. That was really fun.

Our small group of missionaries at the mission home that came to train about FB Finding.

Thursday of course started with breakfast in the mission home, and then we all went over to the mission office to start the training thing. This training was all about Facebook Finding, the thing that Elder Christensen and I have been doing for the last month or so. There were two guys visiting from the Area Office in Frankfurt, and they gave everyone some more instruction and also got feed back from us. At the end of the whole thing they turned loose all of the other missionaries that are new to this and had them try it to. What was really cool was that all 4 of those companionships had really good discussions already starting up with people pretty quickly, including one person in Bosnia asking what the requirements are to become a member of the church! The Frankfurt guys even put in some money to have Facebook itself help advertise our stuff and get more people to see it. Since then, Elder Christensen and I have definitely been able to see the results of that, with how many people are starting to message the church's pages. So, the end outcome of the training was great, including that more missionaries are now trained on what this Facebook thing is even about, and a few more missionaries are also doing it for the other church Facebook pages that Elder Christensen and I haven't been assigned to.

It was nice getting to see other missionaries while at the mission home.

That evening we drove back with the Čačak Elders again, and got to Novi Sad just in time for dinner. There's one restaurant that happens to have really good sushi on Thursdays, so we took the Čačak Elders there, and the sisters came too. The Čačak Elders stayed the night with us, since Čačak was another few hours away.

On Friday, after Elders Schmaltz and Jones had headed on their way, we went to the church for district meeting and discovered that the sisters had done a chalk drawing of the Plan of Salvation on the sidewalk in front of the church. It looked pretty good, and apparently they'd seen some people stop and look at it. We had a nice district meeting outside where my chair kept sinking into the soft ground, and then Elder Christensen and I did our Facebook work to try to keep up with the people sending us messages. That evening we went to American Corner, like every Friday, and it was really fun. One of the girls there even started asking the sisters about how our view of Christ is different from the view of Him in the Orthodox church (the predominant religion here in Serbia).

Here's a video of the chalk drawing the sisters made.

Saturday morning had a little bit or church cleaning, and then interviews with President Melonakos. That of course means that Sister Melonakos came along and we got to talk with her. She was pretty excited to see Sister Icke play her ukelele. When we finished and were walking with them to get lunch at "Waffle Boss", I talked a bit with Sister Melonakos about her experience with learning Croatian (and such), and I was again really impressed with what she knows about these languages. Anyway, we got some delicious waffles with them before they left, had some studies, and then heard from the sisters that one of our investigators had shown up at the church. We did have a lesson scheduled with him for that day, but he'd come a whole hour early. This is the same guy that came an hour late on a different occasion. I guess he doesn't like schedules, haha. In any case, we rushed over there and had a mini lesson with him, but it didn't last very long since he was drunk or something. Oh well. That evening a church filming crew showed up to record some interviews with some members and also with Sister Marinković. Elder Christensen and I got pulled into that to help with interpreting, which was pretty interesting. But don't worry, I won't be in any of the videos. Somewhere in the middle of all that, the sisters had their German conversation group, and a fair number of people came. One of them was one of our members that happens to speak Hungarian as her first language, and somehow I ended up talking to her while waiting for the filming crew to do something. So, she taught me some small pieces of Hungarian. Apparently Hungarian is extremely complicated, haha. Anyway, one cool thing with the filming project was when they had the sisters act out teaching a lesson, just for video footage, without sound. The person that they got to be the one being taught was one of the people that comes to English all the time, and who has also come to church a fair number of times. The sisters started talking with her about the Book of Mormon as the filming crew did their thing, but then when the filming crew finished, the sisters kept going. Turns out the lady actually got interested while they were teaching her, and now they're going to meet up with her another time to teach her about the Book of Mormon for real. That was cool.

Sister Icke and Sister Marinkovic are teaching me some German.

Yesterday was fast Sunday, and the Nields were back with their 11 kids / children-in-law, so it was another full crowd. We had some fun translating back and forth between English and Serbian. After church, Elder Christensen and I had some business-type stuff to take care of, and then went home to do weekly planning and everything like that. Pretty relaxed day.

Your homework this week is to read The Family: A Proclamation to the World. One of the big posts this week on Facebook that has got people talking a lot was one about families. Families are very important in God's plan. The sad part is that nowadays people are losing sight of that importance.

Here are some photos! Have a great week!

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Elder Ryan Echols
Adriatic North Mission
Svačićev Trg 3/1
HR-10000 Zagreb
Croatia