Week 2 Letter:

I can't believe it's already been 2 weeks! Sometimes it feels like I've been here for months, sometimes it feels like I just got here. I figure there are 104 weeks in 2 years, so every week makes up roughly 1% of a mission. I'm already 2% done!

Things are going so well! The language is super difficult, but my companion and I taught a really solid lesson to our "investigator" (just one of our teachers role playing as an investigator). Even though our Hungarian was probably on the same level as a caveman's child, we shared our message and I know our investigator felt the spirit. They say you need to make 30,000 mistakes before you'll learn a language. If that's the case, I only have like... 20,000 to go! While we were teaching, my companion started off and accidentally took us in a direction that we didn't plan on going. We decided to try to recover by reading a scripture, so my companion pulled out his scriptures and he gave her the wrong one! It ended up working out because the scripture was about feeling the spirit, but we were trying to talk about the apostasy... After that, my companion said, "when you read the scriptures, God blesses my family." The look on our investigator's face helped him quickly realize his mistake. We laughed a good bit about that one! 

I think my favorite elders here are Elder Lowder and Yasli Puff. Elder Lowder is going to Belgium and he's learning Dutch. He's a tall redhead kid and we just get along so well. We have very complimentary personalities. Yasli Puff (yasli is elder is turkish, and puff is pronounced poof) is a German/Italian who speaks 3 languages and is learning Turkish as his 4th. He's hilarious! We speak a little German back and forth every once in a while. It's nice to be able to at least use German, since I spent so much time trying to learn it. I can also understand most of what the Dutch elders are saying, since it's so similar to German. 

In the 2 weeks that I've been here, I have learned more Hungarian than I had learned after a year of German. The gift of tongues is real!

Well, my laundry is done and I should probably get going. The volleyball court isn't going to dominate itself. (We get extra gym time on p-days, so I have to go show Yasli Puff who's boss)

Sok szeretettel,

Burnett Elder

p.s. Vocab word of the week is "gyermekek" or "children". Whenever our district has a laughing fit during class, our teacher will shake his head and mumble, "gyermekek" and it always makes us laugh harder.