February 27, 2016

Hey!

Very short time to email, so I'll just say that we had a really great week! Probably the highlight for me was that we were walking in a smaller area of town, tucked away by the outskirts of Buda called Nyék, trying to talk to people at their homes. We hadn't had a whole ton of success, because most people were either not at home or said they were too busy to talk, and we were about to head back to the bus stop that would take us back to downtown Buda because it was getting a little bit late.

Walking up the last hill towards the bus stop, an old lady was standing in front of her house with a bucket full of concrete mix (dry) and scooping the powder into a pothole in the road. The rain had left the pothole filled with water, and she was stirring the mix into the water to try to fill in the hole and make the road level again. I'm not sure that that is sound logic to make a solid road and fill in any kind of hole, but we offered to help her in stirring in the concrete into her little puddle in front of her house. She told us that she wouldn't like any help, because she preferred to handle her problems on her own. "If you wait for someone else to solve your problems," she said, "you'll be left with puddles forever." She was right, to a certain degree, that the puddle probably would stay there until she or someone else came along to mix some concrete powder into the water.

She was impressed that we had offered to help, though, and she asked us why we were willing to stop and assist a stranger. We told her that we were Christian missionaries who wanted to be like Christ, and she thought that sounded alright. She told us that she wasn't very religious herself, and that she feels like she does well-enough just saying prayers by herself alone at her house, and that there wasn't really any need of an organized religion. She did say, though, that she always seemed to be blessed in her life, and that, whenever a problem came up to which she needed an answer, she would read in one of her books the exact thing that she needed to hear to help her in her life.

We thought that was something, because that's exactly what the Book of Mormon can do! We introduced her to it, and told her that its pages would contain all the answers she could possible look for, as long as she looked for them with prayer and faith. She promised that she would read it and look for the truth that might be found in it.

That's the story for this week! Not much time for anything else! Love you all and hope that life is good at home. We'll talk more next week! :)

Adventure map of Buda! All the fun stuff that we're gonna

have to try to see on p-days later on, filled with old 

paths and trails in the hills behind the city!

We were walking around an area of Buda called Szépilona, and we caught a glimpse of something big and yellow... with an Arizona license plate! Turns out it was a school bus, bought by a Hungarian and shipped to Europe to be turned into a restaurant-on-wheels. How crazy is that?!

Came to a pretty place called Makkosmária, at the end of the trail!

Ended up walking through the forest for a few minutes on
a little trail to get to a small village outside of Buda.
Crazy how close the forest is to the city!

The walk back from the village after we were done was
uphill and in the mud, so we ended up slipping and sliding
 a little bit... but we made it to the top and back to Buda again!