Many Interviews

Things are going well here in Landskrona! This week has been quite good. I know I say this a lot, but most of the days have been fairly ordinary (well, as ordinary as days are when you're a Mormon missionary working in a city with a large Islamic population with a Fin). But everything has been going fairly well.

  Of note, I suppose that this Wednesday we had a zone training in Malmö. That went well; the zone leaders discussed a lot about how to teach effectively and help people keep commitments. It was good, they had some good insights on how to help our investigators and so on. It was a good meeting, though I honestly don't remember many specifics from it (I have stuff written in my notebook back home). We were also able to have interviews with President Newell, which went well. He's a really, really nice guy, and I think he interviewed everyone in Helsingborg and Malmö zones, which meant that he interviewed people from 8 am to about 4 or 5 pm straight. He's a very hard worker; I'm impressed with his resolve to do all of the interviews at once. After the meeting and interviews and everything, I got to go to the Malmö Migrationsverket (migration office) so that I could take a new picture and fingerprints for some documents here. That went well, although it took us quite a while to find the right place (we went to a migration office at first, only to find that that one was only for refugees and we had to take another buss part of the way across town to get to the right one. But we got there eventually, so it all worked out). Wednesday was an interesting day.

  In terms of events, I'd say that that was the most interesting thing this week. This week we've also, however, been able to work more with our investigator, A, towards baptism this coming Thursday (her birthday). She was interviewed by the Zone Leader and that all went well, despite there being a bit of a language barrier (she speaks fairly broken English). And then on the bus to church we ended up talking about some parts of the Plan of Salvation that we hadn't been able to go through yet in detail (though she had the pamphlet in Albanian, so that helped). At church that day, she ended up spending most of her time (aside from Sacrament Meeting) being interviewed by the bishop (who I think just wanted to talk to her because he hadn't had much time to talk to her before), the Zone Leader (Elder S), and the Mission President. So she was talking to someone or other for probably a good 3 or 4 hours. But she seemed okay with it and now she's good to be baptized on Thursday! We're looking forward to this for her (that's a really weird way to phrase that), I'm sure that she will have a very good experience then.

  Aside from that, things are going well here.