Early Transfers

Nazdar!

Haha, for those of you wondering about the title (That is...if Google translate does things like it should...) That's right. Transfers again. 1 Week early. So much radost (joy). I'm very happy to email you again from Blava, the biggest little city I've every been in. My new companion is Elder R., who's from Provo/Washington State, and actually went to Timpview for school. We're really excited to be together for his last transfer, he was the first missionary to be trained in Banska Bystrica, and I was the second, so that's pretty cool.

Our week last week was very bittersweet. Don't get me wrong, I'm loving every single second of my mission. I even love the seconds where things don't go the way I want them to. I'm sacrificing a lot of time trying to get all of these photos to you, not in the normal fashion, so SORRY TO ALL WHO DON'T ACTUALLY WANT TO SEE THE PHOTOS!!! But I think it's worth it.

Highlights real quick:

W. ALMOST got baptized, and then she got sick, but she passed her interview and everything.

We got to live through a Russian Easter, which was sick.

Conference was amazing, loved Elder Holland, and Uchtdorf, and I've heard that I actually got to understand President Packer better than all of the English listeners, so that's pretty cool.

We totally went to the zoo. There were totally Dinosaurs there. Best mission experience yet.

M. is totally ready for baptism now too, and so it Andrew, so maybe that will be some motivation for our other investigators.

Love Brat P., he's so cool. Used to be the majster slovenska (Slovak Champion) in rowing, how sick is that?

Love you all, have a great week!

Elder Brousseau

Tyzden Skoro Krstu (Baptism Last Week)

Nazdar!

Hey so cutting right to it, W. didn't get baptized this week, and D, and her family are not getting baptized next week. It's too bad, just because we got so close this time, but the good news is: they all still WANT to have that happen because they know it's right, so we're going to continue working with them towards that goal. I was SO, SO, SO stressed last week because our investigators were having some trouble communicating with us. My great companion Elder Z. W. probably hates me at this point just because of how much I was stressing out, but you know, I'm totally ok with that, haha. Just kidding, we have a really good relationship, which is super nice, and he's really really helpful as a companion. Here's our week, I hope you like it as much as I did:

Pondelok (Monday): We went on a tour of Bratislava, the same one we went on last year, because the same lady (E.) still comes to English, and invited us to come again. She's so great, and man does she know a lot about Slovak history. We also taught S. I'm not quite sure if I've mentioned him before, but he's the coolest guy ever. He's a less-active member here, who is deaf, and slightly mentally handicapped as well, and he's the funnest ever to teach (Thank you Elder J. for teaching me ASL!!!). We also got a new investigator named H., who's from Vietnam. Speaking Slovak is a little harder in Blava (Bratislava), because there are so so many people that you meet who don't speak Slovak or any language similar to it, so you just kind of have to speak English...

Utorok(Tuesday): We had District lunch at the Narnia Pub. Pretty much the similarity with Narnia ends after you walk through the cloaks to get into the restaurant, but they do have one thing going for them: They serve capovana Kofola in liters. So very sick nasty cool. Later in the day, we taught D., who is very prepared, but very not married, so we're figuring out how to help her best at the moment.

Streda (Wednesday): Exchange in Centrum with Elder J. Something that really helped my mood though was teaching T. This kid makes me SO jealous of American missionaries. He's absolutely golden, he even defends us to his roommates and friends outside of lessons, and he and his twin brother are planning on getting baptized...in the U.S....That's right. He doesn't want to right now, even though he already knows it's true, and reads church sites and magazines and stuff, he's going to just make some missionaries in Philadelphia so happy. Dang you American missionaries, this isn't the first time I've run into this sort of thing...

Stvrtok (Thursday): We found the coolest people today, and I can't wait to get in contact again. One of them, when we contacted them said, "You know, I was just thinking about Adam and Eve, and that snake. If God knows everything, how didn't he know about that?" She was fascinated by our answer that indeed he did, and is excited to meet with us this week. I also was presented with one of the anti-material pieces of literature floating around in Slovakia trying to convince people not to talk to us. It's really not very good either, most of it is just fallacious information presented in a way that implies the wrong thing. The good news is, now one of our investigators has a whole lot of answers, and a faith destroying attempt was turned into a faith-building exercise.

Piatok (Friday): M. is not happy with us...Today we talked about the apostasy, and she was not happy with our claim that it had to happen. The good news is, she's still really really happy to meet with us, and we brighten her day every time, but she is just scared of new doctrine. It's completely understandable, if I were confronted with the idea that what I believe isn't founded upon scripture and the teachings of Christ, I would be a little bit disgruntled as well to say the least. We'll continue to work with her, and she's agreed to study and make sure she does her part to know God's will. K. is totally progressing too, he's so fun, he has a totally different attitude. He's a little Deist from Turkey, and his attitude towards the gospel is that it agrees with and adds to everything he already believes. It is so refreshing, he commits himself to do everything before we even ask, and then he keeps commitments like nobody's business. W. had her interview today as well, which she didn't pass, but we'll keep working to make 100% sure she's prepared.

Sobota (Saturday): We had a sort of scattered day today. Highlights: Ping-pong with A., he's a Ukrainian beast at the game. T.R. was apparently so impressed with me last time that he brought two dictionaries of Music and Musical Terms for me today, he's a really sweet guy. And we met another Turkish guy named M.A. Super sick, he's a real Muslim, you know, not the terrorist type lots of people THINK are Muslims. He's also really open to new ideas.

Nedela (Sunday): Finally had dinner at the D. family. They are an amazing family of Russian Angels here in Blava. Both parents have served missions, and they have 3 beautiful adorable kids. I really hope that some of the people that I've helped here turn out in a similar way as them, they are seriously just the coolest. Later, we finally got to meet with W., and gosh, she was sad to not be able to be baptized on the 7th, but she is very very ready to work hard and get a new date fixed. I'm so grateful to be working with her.

I love you guys so much. CONGRATULATIONS ALEXIS!!! I'm really grateful to be here serving, even though I can't see awesome things like Maddie performing, or Steve stuffing people, or Sarah dancing, or friends getting engaged.

S Laskou,

Elder Brousseau

Happy birthday, Elder Brousseau!

Beautiful hike in Slovakia

Ahojte!

Hey so first off, it's my B~Day tomorrow! Jééééj...Lol. I don't think it's very fair considering I've pretty much forgotten everyone else's birthdays while I've been gone, so I'm working to make sure we don't celebrate at all, because basically the Sisters haven't been able to get out of me when my birthday actually IS, and I just got a new companion, so that's no prob. I'll celebrate on a day when we're not working. Beyond that, big news. So on Monday last week, we didn't really do anything, but TUESDAY... Haha, that was the Sister's year mark, and boy did we celebrate. We went to the Hotel Alžbeta for district luch, and I spent 30 Euros on my plate!!! We saved up for it all transfer so that it wouldn't mess with our weekly shopping, and haha, I'm so grateful that we did, because afterwards we were able to have a really successful day, and that was just the icing on the cake.

Sr. Missionaries in Trencin, Slovakia

The Kebab man

Wednesday: We went on a vylet with a guy who works at my favorite Kebab stand. He took us to a couple of castles where we learned about the lady who has the world records as the biggest serial killer of all time, it was nuts, but the important part is that we were able to really just talk with him, and he's such a cool guy. He's been all over the world, places like Nepal and New Zealand, and basically the philosophies he's gained from staying in tiny villages and just working with people his whole life are basic doctrines of our church, for example: don't push anyone into anything they don't want to do, all you can do is invite, everyone has their agency. On top of that, he invited his friend to come and meet with us afterwards, which went great, and she is VERY friendly, oh my goodness. Within 5 seconds of meeting me, she kissed me, I was NOT expecting that and I almost flipped out, but I just held it and said that she shouldn't do that because I'm a missionary. Anyway, that's my surprising announcement of the week, on a better note, I'm getting a haircut from her tomorrow, and I'm hoping she'll become a new investigator.

A sister teaching wreath weaving

Thursday we went up to a member sister's house, the one who's teaching us how to make the baskets out of newspapers. She lives in the Czech republic, it was really cool, and she has such a strong testimony, I can hardly describe it, suffice it to say, she doesn't have a lot of money, but she bought an old car, and drives about a half hour to church every Sunday, crossing the border between the countries. Awesome lady.

Acting Branch President Brousseau

Friday We got ready for general conference. No, I haven't seen it yet, we'll be watching it this week because it's not translated into Slovak yet. I heard there was supposed to be some big announcement that happened. Suffice it to say, they no longer send us DVD's so I'm in charge of making the dvd's for conference for our branch. Other big news, for about 2 weeks, I'm serving as Branch President in Trencin, how weird is that?

My new companion from Cedar City

Saturday was transfers. My former companion is now serving in Kosice, and I have a new companion who came just a few hours ago. He's from Cedar City, and he's pretty cool. I'm excited to serve with him. That's everything I can think of right now. One of the sisters in the branch confessed to us yesterday that she now feels ready to start working on her testimony again, and honestly, I'm so grateful and excited for her, she really is a saint. We're going to continue working with our investigators, and I would be surprised genuinely if we saw less than 2 baptisms this transfer, we are in a wonderful position with our investigators.

I love you all, thank you for the Birthday wishes, they mean the world to me!

Elder Chris Brousseau

Troubled Times, but Good Times

Ahojte!

Chris and his companion

So sorry about last week, I really had like nothing as far as time goes, which is an overstatement unfortunately, so I'll do my best to remember all of the amazing occurrences which took place. First off, I'm completely ok, but we're getting more and more people fleeing from Ukraine to places like here and other parts of Slovakia, and I'm getting kind of antsy not completely knowing what's going on. I DO know from one of our less-actives about whom I'll talk some more in a minute, that there is an actual war going on in Ukraine right now, despite what the news is saying. Russia is asserting their dominance and taking back that strategic peninsula right above the Black Sea. I hope that everything gets figured out soon, and that our mission continues to remain untouched by this. Keep us in your prayers, there are a lot of new refugees here in Trenčín.

Trenčin, Slovakia

On a much brighter note, I can't believe that I wasn't able to write last week about this, I fulfilled one of my ultimate missionary dreams! We went tabling, an idea my trainer and I were working on when I got transferred, and I pushed it through the Metsky Urad here and made it happen! It was like 40X better than I expected it to be. I was out of my mind surprised when we had been doing it for like 2 minutes and a lady just WALKED UP TO ME and started talking to me about the class... For those of you who don't understand already, missionaries almost NEVER have anyone come up to them, we always go up to the people, to have somebody walk up to me is absolutely monumental! I was just floored and almost didn't know what to say to her. The other part, which kind of scared me, but is really memorable was about 5 minutes into it, we had just started to get some names and #'s for our class, when the police pulled up in a big van and one of them got out and walked up to me and I was SO grateful that we had remembered to bring our paper we got from the Metsky Urad saying that we were allowed to have a table on the nam there, there's no way that we would have gotten out of that one without a fine, even though we WERE legal if we hadn't had the papers. So that was one of my dreams fulfilled this week...

Chris' new tee-shirt from the pro bball team in Banska

Should have kept his elbow in... :) 

The next one happened on Thursday of last week, when we had our exchange. It was really strange for me to be on this side of the exchange, I'm used to being left by my companion, not having to accept 2 new people into my apartment and expect to feed them 2-3 meals and let them use my wonderful shower and everything like that. It was way weird for me. The amazing thing was getting to be companions with my trainer again for a day, that was SO cool! This is the city where he was trained, actually by that teacher in the MTC who knows a family in a stake. So what we did, which I am terribly looking forward to when I'm about to go home, is we looked up some people that he found and taught, who had been dropped, and we went and gave them a teaching again, and I have some amazing news. 2 of them are actually restarting to investigate the church! This gives me hope for all of the people who I have found who have lost interest, especially the ones who were doing so well. One of the people we are starting to re-teach has SIX pages all to himself in our area book, which total a crazy 64 lessons. He's been taught everything twice and refused it because he wasn't [ready yet]. When we went and visited him, he had lost 45 pounds, he now has an amazing job, and he's a go-getter ready for life, and he's looking for true repentance so that he can go forward without having any regrets from his past life, and seriously, he is going to be the coolest member ever. Another lady by the way is still on the road to baptism, I'm trying to push it to happen while I'm still here in Trencin, but if that's not God's will, so be it.

So then later in the week, we had a practice for our concert which will be happening on the 18th, in which I'm arranging 4 different songs, 2 of which I hate, but I guess I get to change them into stuff l like, which is good. I'm constantly surprised at the musical ability of this mission. A member here asked my companion and I in a meeting we had last week if it was a rule for missionaries that you weren't allowed to come unless you were good looking, and could sing and play at least one instrument. I laughed because he hasn't met another elder yet, haha. Anyway, I'm not having any trouble increasing all of my talents out here, despite the fact that I thought I wouldn't be able to.

He's still a cute boy...

On Saturday the President came to Trencin because we had a big conference on Sunday. I'm not sure what the conference actually is for, because I can't understand the word for it (They don't have a word for it in Slovak or Czech, and my Russian isn't very good yet). But on Saturday I got to teach a lesson with our mission president to an inactive member I referred to earlier. She has both of her sons staying with her right now, because they were fleeing from Ukraine, and oh my goodness, she is an absolute Saint. I just adore her, and President agrees with me that she will definitely be coming back to the church soon, there's no doubt about it, we just have to give her some time, because she knows everything is true and loves the members here and everything else, she's just wonderful. She has the best English of any Slovak I've ever met, and in fact, Mom, I offered her your email if she has any questions about it, is that ok? Because her questions are really hard to answer because her English is so good. She absolutely loves missionaries, and she can make the best tea in all of Slovakia, my goodness. I never had any idea how good fruit tea was before I came here, but I think I'm hooked, it's wonderful stuff, haha. The point of talking about her though, is that just the spirit we all felt being there with her and with president was tangible, I was amazed at her testimony, despite not having been to church in almost half a year, and I can't wait to see her back in our congregation. We also got some first hand news about what's going on in Ukraine, about people getting shot in the streets and other really scary stuff, so just keep the Ukrainian, Russian, and Slovakian missions in your prayers, I don't want to test how far the Lord will actually go to protect his servants.

Milújem ťa,

Starší Chris Brousseau