August 29, 2016

Hey!

This week was a good one. We spent a good part of the first bit of the week working on getting things ready for our zone training, which we gave on Wednesday in Budapest.

We were given "finding" as the basis for the training, so we decided to make a little obstacle course out of the material and have practice scenarios that everyone could use to improve how they approach people to talk to them. We got the idea to do these little obstacles from Elder Lymer, who visited the mission back in April or May, and introduced to us the concept of an "elevator approach," in which you only have a few precious seconds to get out your once-in-a-lifetime, important message to people you meet. To capture that idea, we had everyone actually use the elevator in the mission home in Budapest and practice talking to people and using power-statements to introduce important, meaningful messages to people. We also devised some roles for each of the people participating to play, so that no one approach would be the same. The office secretaries, the Simkins (senior couple) and the Szabadkai's all helped in making the project a success. In the end, hopefully it was a good training and something that the missionaries can use!

The rest of the week consisted of normal missionary work here in Szombathely with Elder Fitzgerald, with the exception of Friday andSaturday. The Pápa elders came into town for splits, so I had a chance to work with Elder Smith for a day. He is incredibly intelligent and very knowledgable when it comes to just about anything. Needless to say, it was a great split and I learned a lot from being around him! His companion is a new missionary named Elder Biesinger who is just as great as Elder Smith is.

Szombathely also put on its annaul Savaria Carnival this past weekend. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were packed, and people came to the city from all over Europe to see the festival. The whole city dresses up and has something similar to a Roman renessaince festival. (Did I spell that right?) The large crowds and many shopkeepers who set up booths around the city made circumstances good for missionary work, and we tried to talk to lots of people as we were in the area.

I think that's most of the news for the week! Love you lots and we'll talk more in 7 days.

Elder Fitzgerald and I spent some time this week riding our bikes out to a little village outside of Szombathely up on the hill. We saw lots of really old, run-down farming houses, but only a few people, and none of them really wanted to talk... it was worth a shot, though!