Wszytkich Swiętych

Whoa, this week was crazy... there was a lot I will try to remember it all...

First off, we had an exchange. Sister King went to Krakow and I stayed here in Kato with Sister Petersen. We had a goal to see many cats during our exchange, but unfortunately we didn't end up seeing any! Even the 6 cats that live in the crazy cat jungle gym across from the chapel were all hiding! That was very disappointing. But, inspite of that, we still had a great exchange. Sister Petersen is a lot of fun.

We taught dzieci angelski (english for children) on Tuesday, during the exchange. It was a lot of fun. Our dzieci English class is hilarious. We have three students, and their mom. We've only had a couple of classes with them, but it is always a lot of fun. They are totally crazy, and frequently forget to speak in English to us, it's really entertaining. This week we wanted to teach them colours and numbers, but they already had them down pretty well, so we ended up just testing them on colours and numbers with a game of bingo. It was tons of fun. The first round their mom played too, and she won. Every time we called out a number that she had the kids would shout "Mamo!" dramatically, and she would just laugh.

 On Wednesday we tried to go out to visit a member, Helena, but it turned into a bit of a fiasco. First we couldn't find the bus stop we needed to leave from, thankfully we had Kaja there to help us. She lead us all around Kato looking for the Bus stop we needed and even talked to Helena on the phone for us. Eventually we found the right bus, and got to the city Helena lives in, but then we needed to take another bus. Unfortunately, when we found that bus, we took it two stops in the wrong direction. We ended up having to cancel our meeting, which was a bummer, and we had gotten a little lost. Luckily, I have a good sense of direction, so I got us back to the bus stop, but we did have to walk though an extremely sketchy part of town to get there...

On Thursday we had a lesson with a referral from Lara, one of our investigators. She wanted us to meet her "leader" or boss (she kept saying leader though which unnerved me...) to talk to her about the gospel, because she is Evangelist. It went really well. We had a great conversation with her, and she loved the Book of Mormon. She kept picking out verses here and there and commenting on how beautiful they were. It was also pretty cool because Lara acted almost like a member on the lesson, bearing testimony with us and talking about how much peace she's found in the church.

Friday was Halloween! Which isn't really a big thing here. We were told by several people that kids don't really go trick or treating. Mostly people just dress up if they are going to a party. However, we actually got one group of trick or treaters! A boy and a girl, with three older boys who were clearly their chaperones. We hadn't bought anything to give to trick or treaters, because we really weren' expecting any, but luckily I had a bag of Life Savers and a bag of Jolly Ranchers, so I gave them handfuls of each. When I brought them out the little boy saw them and looked absolutely shocked. It was really funny.

Sister King and I made an attempt to dress up as well. We switched badges for the day, so I was Sister King and she was Sister Lillywhite. We didn't really do a whole lot to celebrate the day though. Prezydent and Sister Edgren stopped by Kato on their way to Krakow, so we got lunch with them at Pizza Hut. And then later that day we went to a graveyard to see if we could help anyone spruce up their graves for All Hallows. That's how people celebrate here. They clean their relatives' graves, and put lanterns on them, then on Wszytkich Swiętych (All Hallows) they light the lanterns. We were only able to find one person who let us help her clean her grave, it was really fun though and though her decorations were simple it looked lovely!

On Saturday we visited Lara and her daughter Sara and went to see the graves all lit up. When it got really dark the cemetery looked like an ocean of lights, Sister King and I couldn't help but think of Tangled.

Yesterday I hacked the church's computer :)

There are two administrator accounts on the branch computer and no one could remember the password to either. Not just in Kato, in all of Poland... so, I downloaded some software, learned a lot about password cracking, in a short amount of time, and hacked into one of the accounts. So now we finally know the password to that one and we can install things on the computer again, and use Skype for institute and it's wonderful! I still need to see if I can get into the other account though, that one will be harder to crack. I didn't really expect that I would learn how to hack on my mission, but I did.

Well that's pretty much it for last week. It was crazy busy, but tons of fun.

I'll just leave y'all with a funny story from today. This morning Sister King and I were out to run to the store and get groceries. So we were in our regular workout clothes, I was wearing my David Bowie shirt that is completely ridiculous and has a massive picture of Bowie's head on it. As we were walking back to the apartment we passed a woman who was staring at my chest with the funniest look of confusion on her face. This is not at all a strange sight, and my first thought was "ah! She's seen my badge" Then I realized, I wasn't wearing my badge and that look was because of David Bowie's massive face on my chest! It was a very funny moment, and I couldn't help but bust out laughing, like right in front of her. It's a good thing I wasn't wearing my badge, she must have thought I was very strange.

Kocham was!