We had another great Dzieci English
class this week. Those Dziecis are becoming the highlight of my week. I talked
about last time how we played bingo with them. This week we taught them
families and animals. I drew animals on the board and wrote their names above
them and Sister King had them say the name of the animal and make the sound. So
of course I drew a couple of animals that make weird sounds, like a zebra, just
to throw them off :). Later, when Sister King was testing them on the animals
they forgot what a Whale was called, but they remembered the spout sound, so
they spend a few minutes pretending to be whales and just going
"bwoosh!" Sister King and I were just laughing our heads off, those
kids are so funny. At one point I got a little crazy with the drawing and drew
a huge dragon on the lower half of the board. When the kids realised what I was
drawing I heard them start whispering "Smok" When Sister King asked
them what it was the oldest one shouted "Dragon!" they were super
excited, it was great.
We had a really interesting
experience this week as well. We have an investigator named Kaja, she is super
cool. She found out about Mormons through BYU Vocal Point, then later she saw
Elders Gibby and Remy on a bus, she recognised them as Mormon missionaries and
introduced herself. I think I mentioned her a few times, before, but I didn't
really say anything about her. She's going to university just outside Kato
right now and has an English conversation class, she had a presentation for
this class, and so, she invited us to come be her presentation. Basically she
taught the class for the entire, hour and a half or so. She started by asking
about stereotypes and having the class name off some about various races.
Eventually it moved to American stereotypes, and then to Mormons. Then she had
us get up and talk about the church. It was really cool. We bore testimony,
talked about our beliefs and the Book of Mormon. Talked about what we do as
missionaries and our purpose here, answered a ton of questions, cleared up some
misconceptions. And even had some cool connections with some of the students.
In particular, there was a boy and a girl who were both Pentecostals. They were
super interested in what we do and what we believe in. They had both served
missions in their faith, and were both really cool, we agreed on a lot of
doctrinal things too. It was pretty hard not to get into deep doctrine though,
we had to be careful where the conversation was heading at a number of points.
On Friday we spoke only in Polish,
the entire day. It was pretty hard for me, because my vocabulary is really
limited, but I got along alright and it made it easier to continue talking
during our lessons that night with Barbara and Helena. Barbara is a recent
convert and Helena is the member who we tried to visit last week, but got lost
on the way. We found our way there though this time, and had a great time with
them. Helena gave us głąbki which is basically like meatloaf stuffed in a
cabbage leaf and boiled, it's really good! Apparently it means pigeon though,
and one of the guys in Kaja's class told us that when he was little and first
had głąbk, he ate one, and then his parents told him he's just eaten an actual
pigeon, and he cried, ha! I can understand how he could believe them though,
they do kind of look like pigeons.
We had a funny moment that night,
too. We were still speaking only Polish, and we got Elder Richens doing it too,
so we were texting only in Polish too for a while. I can't remember what we
were talking about but at some point we said we had forgotten to do something,
or something like that and Elder Richens writes back "Jezus wybacza
zawsze!" (Jesus forgives always) and sister King wrote back "ha ha,
to śmiecze!" (ha ha, that's rubbish!) She meant to write "to śmieszne"
(that's funny) but the phone autocorrected, haha! It was great though.
This week I also finally found Harry
Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in Polish! I've been looking for a while
now, but I could only ever find the other books, which I want also, but I'm not
sure I want to get them right now, because if I get all of them that's like 20
pounds of books to cart around Poland for the next year. It's really cool
though because my reading comprehension is good enough now that I can flip open
to any random page, read a few sentences, understand what it's saying, and know
exactly what part it is. Of course, part of that is because I know that book
like the back of my hand, but I can do that with the Book of Mormon too and
understand pretty well. It's a bummer that I can't just sit down and read it
cover to cover though, but just from flipping through it a little I already
learned a few new words!
So that's pretty much this week. We
had a lot of fun, and were super busy, so busy that it's all kind of run
together and I can't remember everything we did. We had some really cool
lessons and my language skills are getting a lot better. We also spoke only
Polish Saturday and Sunday, and we are going to continue it until Friday, but
we are taking a break until 18:00 tonight, cuz it's P-day. I think it will be a
really good exercise though.
Kocham was, keelah selai, i tak
dalej.
forgot
something!
Oh, I forgot something funny from
this week!
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