Ah! This week was crazy! and hilarious! Siostra Whiteley's brain broke a little this week, but it's ok, I helped her get everything sorted out. She's just freaking out a little because she goes home in October and, quote "I don't know what I'm doing with my life!" Lol, it sounds kinda bad because you can't here the way she says it, but it's actually hilarious. She started freaking out at the beginning of the week when she got really impatient with the Elders and kind of snapped at them. It wasn't anywhere near as bad as she thought but it worried her a little. She's scared she will return from her mission as the same person she was when she started and as she puts it "I was a BRAT!" So the focus this week has been Christlike attributes! At the start of the week she was seriously stressing because she claimed she didn't have any of them and she found it really really hard to work on the others... so she made up a new one - good posture. She felt like that was one she could work on. I've been doing it with her, it's really good. Occasionally we'll both be in a meeting or something, sprawled out in our chairs, then we lock eyes, and at the same time adjust our positions so we are sitting up straight. To make it official I even made an entry in Preach My Gospel under the Christlike attributes chapter, I'm going to try and send you a picture of that today.
The attribute she's been focusing on the most... besides good posture, is patience/temperance. Occasionally when she's doing something that is frustrating her, like when her hair is in her face or something equally ridiculous, she'll suddenly shout "I"M TEMPERATE!!!!" However, after just a week of trying to be more patient she is actually seeing results. Yesterday when we were singing at the rynek there was a woman who came up to our free table, so Siostra Whiteley went to talk to her, next thing we know the woman was like freaking out, yelling at her and stuff and shouting that the book of Mormon isn't true and whatnot. But, because Siostra Whiteley has been working of patience she was able to just calmly bear testimony and respond calmly and kindly without feeling like she needed to "throw down". The woman didn't take a book of Mormon, but she did take a restoration pamphlet and she got Siostra Whiteley's email so she could contact her and ask questions. Siostra Whiteley said it actually ended up being pretty good. So yeah, right there is an example of how if you really want to overcome a weakness, even if you really don't think you are capable of it (because Siostra Whiteley told me numerous times at the start of the week "I can't be patient! I just can't!") If you have a desire to change, put forth the effort you can, and ask god for help, you can absolutely overcome that weakness.
I can't quite remember how it happened, but at some point this week we started quoting SNL a lot, specifically the Chris Farley quote "livin' in a van down by the river!" Whenever we talk about how we are losing our minds, which comes up a lot, we'll say something like "if I keep doing this I'm going to end up livin' in a van down by the river!" The day it started we had been talking about that Chris Farley skit and later in the day Siostra Whiteley was trying to explain the difference between different types of crazy, and she said something like "there's fun crazy, and then there's literally insane... like living in a van down by the river" And it's just exploded after that. We use it with the Elders a bunch but Stumpf doesn't know SNL so he thinks we're "livin' in a van down by the river!"
Oh my gosh!!!! I just remembered, Laney will love this! So, Siostra Whiteley totally watches Portlandia, which was like my favorite show before I left, second only to the walking dead. Anyway, this week we had a lesson with Ola (a member, I have mentioned her before, she is who Olek is based off of) and she took us for ice cream, which was amazing, but it was the only thing we had eaten so far that day. So after Siostra Whiteley and I agreed we needed to get real food after, so we decided to go to a nearby restaurant that has burgers, including really good veggie burgers... if you're into that kind of thing, which my companion is, so yeah. We were there for a really long time because seriously the waitresses there need to get their crap together. So we were looking around at the place. It was outside, all the tables were different, some were basically futons, none of the chairs matched, some people were drinking out of jam jars, and none of the waitresses had on anything even close to a uniform. The whole place looked really familiar and suddenly it hit us, this was the most hipster restaurant either of us had ever been to! So hipster in fact that it looked like it had been taken straight out of Portlandia! It was so funny!
This week we decided that our flyers for English class are bardzo sketchy. They are printed on crappy paper and super ghetto, they aren't even cut in straight lines! So we decided to re-do them. When we told Fotu (our district leader) and Stumpf, about this Siostra Whiteley joked about focusing on the fact that we are Americans... except for Stumpf. Fotu did not think this would be a good thing, he sometimes struggles to understand when Siostra Whiteley is joking. But because he told us not to do that we of course had to do that. We of course made real flyers, but we also made fake ones that are hilarious. I have a picture so I'm going to send it to you all. It's in Polish, but you don't really need to understand all of it to get the joke, except the last line. It says "Come practice English with Amurkins!... and one German".
We had a lesson with Anya this week. It went awesome, and I was actually able to understand a good amount of it. I found out later that during the lesson Siostra Whiteley was really unsure if she should extend the baptismal invitation. So, while someone else was talking, possibly me or our member Siostra Kuchno, she said a quick little prayer in her head, and the words came into her mind "Follow thou me". So she extended the commitment, and Anya said she would. We weren't able to set up a date though cuz she lives like an hour outside of Wrocław and she needs to figure out her financial/living situation first, but still, AH!!! I'm so excited!
Well, that was basically it for the week. It was crazy, and so much fun! I'm sad though because time is flying by, I'm over halfway through the transfer and I really don't want it to end!
Welp, Kocham Cię!
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