This week has been such an adventure! We had a service assignment where we helped a bácsi move some furniture. It was a pretty standard service assignment. We had a zone training which was amazing! We got the classic quote, "For every door knocked in Europe, someone is baptized in South America!" Though that may be true, I'm determined to flip it around. Every time we baptize someone here, someone in South America has to go knock on a door! Baptism is definitely possible here. We have 10 people on bap date in our zone alone!

Yesterday was Hungarian labor day (I think?) which is why we postponed p-day to today. We went to a huge festival in Hero's Square (go look it up, it's AMAZING) and we went music finding! Basically we played hymns on the guitar and sang while two missionaries street contacted. It was a lot of fun and actually really successful! I had the opportunity to go street contacting all by myself with no help! I basically would just say, "My friends and I are missionaries and we would like to share a quick message about families and Jesus Christ." and 9 times out of 10 people would just walk on by. That one time where they let you continue really catches you by surprise, let me tell you! I stopped this couple and explained what we were doing and they said, "go ahead!" and I just panicked and thought, "That's not your line! You're supposed to say no thanks and walk away!" But I collected myself and bore a simple testimony and handed them a little picture of Jesus with our information on the back page. It was scary, but great practice!

We were able to give a bácsi a Book of Mormon as well! He was very friendly and knew a lot about the Bible.

We also got our first let in! We were tracting a 10 story and we were about 2 floors down when I realized that I REALLY had to go to the bathroom. I told him we would go until I couldn't hold it anymore and then run back to the apartment. He jokingly said, "Watch us get let in!" We got to the last floor, second to last door.... and a néni let us in... She had a lot of stuff from the JW's and she was talking a lot about Jesus and how she's really sad about how wicked the world is. We tried to teach her a little bit, but she never stopped talking. She showed us pictures of all of her kids and told us about her family and neighbors for about an hour.  We call this getting néni blasted. They let you in just to tell you about their family, with no real interest in our message at all. I had to use the bathroom so badly the whole time, but there was no way I was about to destroy this nice old woman's bathroom like that.

We had an appointment with a man named Zsolti this week as well. We got to his house, which was really far away, only to find out he didn't care about our message in the least. He was only interested in learning English. He specifically wanted to learn English slang. He was very excited to have us over though, so we made the best of it. He showed us his glow in the dark toilet seat, with a little target in the toilet bowl, and he showed us these really big speakers he had fixed up. He was a speaker repair man or something so there were speakers EVERYWHERE! We taught him a little bit of English and then tried to mention the Gospel whenever we could. He told us that the next time we meet we would watch a movie and translate it for him when he didn't understand. We kindly explained that that isn't allowed and that our job isn't to teach the people of Hungary English. He drove us back to the bus station, but told us that he absolutely had to show us something first. He took his car off-road into this little park, which was super sketchy but whatever, Hungarians just drive wherever their cars fit. Anyways, he pulls up next to this hill and starts backing up the hill and was like, "This is my favorite hill. You see that school over there? I went there for 6 years. Okay, we can leave now." And that was that. He drove us out to this hill, which was like 15 feet tall at the most, just to show us the beautiful view of his elementary school. I love this country.

I love you all and hope you're doing well! Feel free to ask questions that I can answer in next week's email. We don't get a ton of time to email or read emails every week, but I'll do my best. Have a wonderful week!

Sok szeretettel,

Burnett Elder

p.s. I realize I didn't include a Hungarian word of the week last week, so I'll do two easy ones this week. Bácsi (batchee) and néni (naynee). A Bácsi is just an old man and a néni is an old woman. They're everywhere and they're all so similar. They're exactly what you would expect them to be!

Hero Square:

Train Station: