District Meeting

Hey everyone!

  Things are going pretty well here in Eskilstuna. This last week has been fairly ordinary, but it's been good.

  I suppose that the day of most note would have been last Thursday for a number of reasons. First off, it was my first day being in charge of a district meeting, so I got to give a lesson (this week it was about setting goals and planning, etc.). Overall, that went well, for a first meeting. To make it a little more interesting, though, the zone leaders asked if they could come on splits that day (which thrilled me, it seems like they were just here a couple of weeks ago), so I got to have the zone leaders at my first district meeting. Yay! It actually went well, though, and afterwards I got to meet with them and go over district leader responsibilities, etc. But then, just to make things a bit more interesting, President Newell decided to come then for interviews. He doesn't really give a lot of warning (we found out an hour before he showed up), so we found ourselves in the afternoon meeting him at the train station. Though despite all of that, the day actually went well. We met with President (because he's going around interviewing everyone in the mission), and I split off with Elder Jones. 

  We ended up having a good day together. I accidentally forgot something in the apartment, and Elder Jones accidentally forgot something at the church, so we ended up not being able to do what we had originally planned on (swinging by people across town), but we did some calling, looked in the area book, and tried to visit some people closer to the apartment and the church. Actually, it was good, and we got in contact with a former investigator, which was cool. It proved to be a good day.

  Aside from that.... Things have mainly just been work as usual. We've been trying to swing by a lot of potential investigators and old investigators, as well as tracting, contacting, etc. It's been good, I suppose. 

 I'm glad to hear that everything is good with you guys. Hope you all have a fun time in Utah! 

  Love you all,

   Eli

Zone Conference

Hey everyone!

 

  It's been good to be able to hear from you all this week and everything. It sounds like things are going pretty well back home. I'm sure you've all already heard this a million times, but it's super exciting that Kimberly got her mission call to Romania. That should be a super cool experience for her; I hope she enjoys it. 

  This week has been fairly good. Earlier in the week I had my last few days with Elder Miller. They went well; we were able to visit with several of the families in the branch here and have a good time with them, and we had a good last little bit together. I really enjoyed my time working with Elder Miller, he was a super nice guy and a good friend.

  On Wednesday came transfers. Miller left at just about 8 in the morning, and I got Elder Schindler about 2 hours later. So far things have been good with him. He seems like a really nice, amiable guy and he's a very motivated, hard worker. Based on our only few days together thus far, I have a feeling it's going to be a very productive transfer; I think we'll get a lot of work done. 

  On Thursday we had some sort of a crazy zone conference thing with about half of the mission. It was actually a really pretty good conference, it was focused largely on stress management and the like (because the church just released some sort of big program on training new missionaries for managing stress, etc.). It was good though, I feel like there was some good advice given.

  Also, it was pretty fun because it was with a solid half of the mission. I don't really know why they decided to have so many zones come to each conference, but I liked it. I was able to see a lot of people I have hardly seen since the MTC and talk some with old companions, etc (actually, all but one of my previous companions were there. cool!). But it was good. 

  Aside from that, the week has been  good. We've been doing a lot of work, swinging by old investigators, tracting, etc. A lot of stuff to keep us busy, but nothing too interesting...

 

Eli

Transfer News

Hey everyone!

  Everything is going pretty well here in Eskilstuna. This week has been pretty good, though not terribly out of the ordinary.

The weather here is starting to get a bit chillier around here; the temperatures are down around freezing, but it's not too bad. I think it'll probably be a bit colder in a month or two.

Our investigators are doing alright. L says she can't come to church very much because there's something in the air that bothers her lungs, but aside from that she seems really positive and really seems to like meeting with us (she actually called us earlier this week to set up an appointment). Our other investigators are doing okay, not too much is different with them.

  Probably of most note is the fact that there's going to another transfer (again). Elder Miller will be heading to Gävle and I'll be getting Elder Schindler as my new companion. I don't really know too much about him; apparently he came here about three months ago, so he's just finishing his training. Should be interesting. It was good being able to work with Elder Miller, though, I feel like we got along well and did some good work here. It's been good, and I'm looking forward to seeing how things go with Elder Schindler.

  Aside from that... umm... On Friday I got to try to make a video for Mom's birthday, so I was going around with a camera for most of the day. I hope that the investigators and branch members that I was filming didn't mind me filming them too much. I don't think they did, though. It was kind of fun trying to put something together. 

  I guess it's a bit of a short email this week. Next week should be more interesting because I'll have a new companion and we have a conference planned and a few meetings with some branch members and so on. 

Hope you have a great week,

    Eli

 

 

 

 

 

Halloween

Hey Everyone!

 

  I hope everything is going well for all of you guys back in the States! I hope you all had a good week. Things have been pretty good here, we've been out doing our thing. But it's been a good week.

 

  Earlier in the week (on Wednesday, I think), we ended up going on splits with the other Elders in our district, so I spent the day with Elder Grey. All in all, it was a pretty good day, but it was kind of interesting because they had apparently just called through a list of Potential Investigators and had set up a few appointments with people they hadn't met before. One of them was a guy that owned some sort of a business aimed at helping people from Somalia acclimate to Swedish society. When we met him he started showing us around his office and I honestly wasn't sure if he realized that we were missionaries and not business men. But eventually he did talk with us a little about what we can do to work together, and we ended up setting up an English class. It was, all in all, a pretty interesting meeting. 

 

  Later in the day we had a few other appointments that were a little more normal (though we did get to listen to an Irish lady explaining where Halloween came from and a middle eastern man talk about  Islam, and a few other interesting conversations). That evening, though, we went to the church because we were going to meet an old investigator there, and we found out that branch council was apparently that night (we thought it was a day later, but apparently not because of a Relief Society activity). So we were trying to arrange with the other Elders to have someone at the meeting and the investigator showed up, and we had to sort of stall until we could get everything sorted out. It was kind of interesting. We did eventually end up meeting with him, though, and it turned out that he mainly wanted to meet so he could teach us how to juggle. It was nice meeting with him, though, he was a super nice guy. Also, I can now kind of juggle 3 balls.

 

  The next day was Halloween. We met in the morning for a district meeting, and, after a somewhat shortened lesson, we ended up getting a pumpkin to carve, eating pumpkin pie (that was baked by Elder Grey the night before), and planning on carving a jack o lantern, though we didn't get around to it just then. So we had a few sort of Halloween related activities, and then we split and went our separate ways. Elder Miller and I actually ended up cleaning the apartment for a cleaning check and then carving the pumpkin we got. We made a pretty cool Jack O Lantern, though it's just an ordinary looking Jack O Lantern. And that was about all of the excitement for Halloween itself... there wasn't too much in way of celebration in Sweden. Apparently a few days later there was some sort of event on All Saints Day where they put a bunch of candles in a graveyard, but we didn't end up going because there isn't a cemetery easily accessible in town and the buses were on a holiday schedule. But next time, if we get a chance, it would be cool. 

  Aside from that, things have been going pretty well. I didn't actually get a chance to meet with L (our Finnish investigator) this week because Elder Miller met with her while we were on splits and she was feeling sick later in the week (which I believe; there's been some sort of bug going around). But we did meet with some of our other investigators, including another Finnish guy named S and a woman from Congo named F. We also met a few times with a less active member, P, who actually ended up coming to church yesterday, which was awesome. Either way, things are going pretty well here.

 Have a great week!

 

                                                              Halloween Jack'o lantern