Week 20 & 21 English Lessons

June 03, 2021

Hello Everybody!

Short version: The last couple weeks have been really good, but really hard. Many of the members and youth in the ward don't love to call over Zoom with us. I don't blame them for not wanting to join yet another Zoom call, but it'd be a lot nicer if they did. I've been going on a little health spree so if I come back totally shredded, you'll know why.

Long Version: Most of the experienced missionaries headed home this week. Everyone who knew the language really well is gone and now it's time for everybody to put on their big boy pants. We have to translate meetings into English for sacrament or other important meetings that members attend. Since we still don't understand most of what the members are saying, we are going to be doing a lot of guessing. Worst case scenario, we figure out what topic the speaker is talking about and give our own little improvised talk until we can understand the speaker again.

Something fun my companions have been doing to keep it lively in the apartment is speaking in a New York mobster accent. There's a pretty great video I recorded of them. If you ask my mom to share it with you, she has a copy of it:)

I gave my companion a haircut and it turned out as terrible as we thought it would. He hadn't been able to get a haircut because he was in self-isolation for 30 or so days. Eventually our mission president told him it needed to be cut, but since we were still in isolation I got to cut it for him. I'll attach a picture of it.

We have a lot of time on our hands. We fill a lot with studying, but some days were stretching to think of ideas to fill our time and still be productive. We can't really do service or meet in person, and since members haven't been available lately to call over zoom we've been doing language classes in English. We teach people from all over the world on Facebook book messenger how to speak English better. We also have been holding an "English Connect" class which is specific to Lithuania and people show up to that too.

Other Interesting things from the past two weeks:

-I found a Russian Typewriter that still had a little bit of ink left in it. I was able to squeeze enough ink to formulate half a letter, but then it stopped. It looked like old Soviet style typewriter

- I've been trying to translate spiritual or motivational quotes into Lithuanian lately. If you have any good quotes you wanna share with me, send them my way (smith.andrew@missionary.org)

- they sell M&M flavored peanut butter here. I didn't buy it but maybe one day I will

- we accidentally breaded our chicken in baking soda thinking it was flour. That was the most disgusting, chemical chicken I've ever eaten. We marinated our chicken in balsamic vinegar before so there were probably a lot of chemical reactions going on. The classic science fair experiment every kid does in elementary school was on our chicken. That reaction was happening inside of our stomachs. We had to lay on the couch for a while and recover after eating some of it.

Here's a scripture that stood out to me this week from 1 Nephi 2:17 "and I spake unto Sam, making known unto him the things which the Lord has manifested unto me by His Holy Spirit. And it came to pass that he believed in my words." As far as I know, Sam didn't get a cool revelatory experience like Nephi did. From what we know, Sam believed on Nephi's words and that was enough for him. He doesn't get talked about a lot in the Book of Mormon but he's always in the background acting righteously and following the commandments and experiencing the same difficulty as Nephi and Lehi. We could all learn from Sam. He lived his life out of the spotlight, he didn't get his own book on the scriptures, but he was faithful in following the words of the prophet.