Szia Csaladom!

This week has been a good week! We have gotten a lot of new investigators which has been great! We have had some really awesome programs this week....the problems is that none of the investigators have been living in our area so we have had to switch them to other missionaries!!!! We got 6 new investigators this week that were really interested in the church and actually kept their commitments and they ALL lived in Pest!!! That was kind of a bummer but at least some of our streeting is being a success :) 2 of the investigators are twins that are 16 and I was really sad we couldn't teach them anymore! They had a really hard time switching over to the Pest sisters! But we still get to see them at english class and we will still see them a lot. They have called us and talked to us too so hopefully they will keep meeting with the missionaries!

One of the investigators was from English class and he is awesome!!! We met with him on a friday and he told us straight out that he woulnt pray about the BOM until he read it. Usually when people say that they never read the BOM. But we met with him again on Tuesday and he had read almost all the way through 2 nephi! It was awesome! He had a lot of questions for us and has been super interested! We have had some really good programs this week with him and he has really liked what we are teaching him. The first time he came in to meet with us he was wearing a yankees hat and so Sister Kennedy asked him if he liked the yankees. Im not really sure what he said after that but then he asked us if we liked baseball. I told him that I didnt like the yankees but I did like the red soxs (the only reason i like them is because of Megan...I really dont know anything about baseball haha). So the next day at anagalora (english class) he had went out and bought himself a brand new boston red soxs hat! it was great! he was so excited to show me his new hat! It was really funny! But even better was the next day we met with him and he was wearing his yankee hat again! I asked him about it and he told me in the greatest english: "dont worry about it. I have red soxs. I am true fan!" He then showed me his awesome red soxs baseball socks that he went and bought! I could not stop laughing! It was so funny! I have no idea what he tells me about baseball because he tells me about it in Hungarian but I am glad that he is a Boston Red Soxs fan! haha! But he lives in Pest so we wont be able to meet with him anymore....we havent told him yet though so we'll see how he takes it. He really likes meeting with us.

I also found out we have a Danish Elder serving here and I met him last week. He said he had seen the town Falslev and that it was really small. I asked him to pronounce falslev and it is nothing even close to how we pronounce it in English! I am going to try and record him saying it and then send it home.

The highlight of our week was on Friday. We had the greatest day planned out. We had 4 programs planned out. One was with the Boston Red Soxs fan and one was with another girl we had an amazing lesson with a couple weeks ago! The other 2 were with people we had met before so we were really excited that people were meeting with us again! But as the day went on, we ended up only having one lesson with the boston red soxs fan. We were excited we at least got one! We went out streeting and we were having absolutely no success....the only people that would talk to us were the homeless people that are usually drunk in the square. No one else wants to talk to us if we are talking to them. So we decided to go somewhere else. We hurried and jumped on a villamost and got off at this random spot. It was getting later at night and the stop we got off there wasn't really anyone there. So we got back on the villamost and we were just going to go home a little early and call some of the people we had streeted during the past couple days and get some of the area book work done. But then we decided to just get off at another random spot and walk home and see if we could street anyone else. We got off and there was absolutely no one around on the street. So we started walking home and then we see this girl a little ways down the street and she is yelling and screaming and she threw her purse on the ground. I wasn't very excited about it because I thought she was going to be drunk and we were going to need to hurry to make it home on time. But then as we got closer we could see that she was just really upset not drunk. We asked her if we could help her and she just started yelling and crying in Hungarian. We had no idea what she was saying. Then she realized we were American and was kind enough to switch to English. She was having a hard time with everything...she didnt feel like she was good and she felt like God had forsaken her. She felt so alone! Her grandparents had just died, her parents were gone, she was doing drugs and she knew it wasn't good for her - she was just doing it so she could have friends and even her friends wouldn't stay by her. It was so sad! I have never loved someone so much when I just met them on the street! We just asked her if we could give her a hug and talk with her and she was so grateful. She couldn't believe how kind people could be when we had just met her. She was still very upset but we asked her to sit down and told her we wanted to share something with her. We got her to sit down on a bench (she was still pretty upset at this point) and then my companion pulled out a BOM from her backpack. It was the coolest experience to see - as soon as she pulled the BOM out of her backpack and showed it to her, she IMMEDIATELY calmed down. And we just told her that God was there and that he loved her. You could literally see a little hope come back into her face. Then we told her the book was for her, it was our gift to her, and she was shocked that someone would care about her enough to give her a book. We kept talking to her and we found out that she had come to this place to commit suicide. It didnt have very many people at that time and she just did not want to live anymore. Then she had met us. She thanked us so many times for coming and for saving her life. She did not want to let us go but we had to to get home. By the time we left she was so calm and you could see that hope replaced the despair she was feeling. She told us that she had prayed that morning if there really was a God and she had gotten her answer that night. She was so grateful for us! It was an amazing experience! Unfortunately we haven't been able to talk to her....we got a hold of her once but then our phone dropped the call. We are hoping to meet with her soon though! It was a really neat experience for me!

The ward members here are the greatest people ever! They are all so nice! They are so patient with me learning the language...I honestly really suck at the language...but I just tell them that and they love me for it! Yesterday I tried really hard to try and understand everything we were learning in church and it was so hard! People were asking me more questions because they know who I am now and I couldn't not understand a word they were saying! So hard!!!!! But they have been giving us a lot of referrals anyways....members really are so vital to missionary work! It was so funny yesterday after church we were walking down the stairs to go to choir practice (the choir is pretty much all the missionaries) and this little boy that was like 10 or 11 came and gave me the biggest hug after I just said hi to him! I had never seen him before and I guess he never really does that...he is pretty shy! But it just goes to show you that people can love you if you just say hi to them!

Well that's about all that I can remember that has happened this week. My companions are awesome! I love the ward I am in....today we are going with some of the members from the ward. They are going to take us on a tour of Buda Castle and show us all the 'cool' places to go. I am really excited! Hope everything is going good back home!

Falslev Nővér

1st Baptism!

It has been such a crazy week!!! We had hivatal - orientation- today with some of the people from my MTC group and that was pretty fun to see them again. I am glad they are all doing really good. While I was in orientation my comps went hiking without me!!! But hopefully we will get to go do something fun sometime. We haven't really gotten to go do much. We haven't had time.

This past week we did get to go see Buda Castle and Mathews church. We were meeting with a guy and he wanted to show us something so we were a little concerned where he was taking us to at first but he took us to this really pretty spot where we could see all over Buda. It was the prettiest thing i have ever seen! It was cool to see Buda lit up at night. I will send some pics but they didn't turn out too well...pictures just don't do it justice and I couldn't figure out how to do night pictures. It was even cooler to do the restoration lesson up there! It went really good....I'm not sure if we will be meeting with him again but we will see.

The best part of my week was this girl was baptized! She is the most amazing member and the nicest person ever! She found out about the church from a persons blog that lived in Salt Lake. She was a photographer and a really good writer so she writes about her family and stuff on her blog. This girl accidentally found her blog (clear over on the other side of the world) and she felt like she really wanted to know more about the church that these people belonged to. So she called them and asked them about it. They gave her the number for the missionaries and she was baptized on Saturday! The people who's blog it was came to her baptism! They are awesome! They took some pictures and said they would send you them so hopefully they do. They were really nice. It was a great baptism and a lot of people showed up!! The girl has already been doing missionary work and is so strong! She wants us to start meeting with her mom.  So hopefully that goes good. Her mom has been to church and was really supportive of her getting baptized. It was a really great experience.

This week has been great but its also been pretty hard. We did have 2 baptisimal dates but it didn't work out and we aren't meeting with them anymore. We had a lot of our programs fall through which has been pretty discouraging but we are getting much better at street contacting! Yesterday we had a really great day...I learned a lot about myself and how hard missionary work is. So we had about 4 programs planned for after church and only one of them showed up. It was an interesting lesson-he speaks fluent english and asked a lot of really hard questions. Then the rest of the 3 programs canceled so we decided to go to the park and talk to people. It was a gorgeous day so lots of people were there! EVERY single person we talked to was not very nice. A lot of people in Buda know who we are and so when we go up to talk to them they are sometimes not so nice. Most people are but yesterday we didn't meet a lot of nice people. We had been doing this for about 4.5 hours and we decided to go back for dinner and decide what we else we could do that could be more effective. I'm not going to lie...we were pretty discouraged because we were working so hard but no one would even give us a chance! While walking home, I saw this cute little family so I decided to talk to them. Well come to find out he was a pastor from another church and it was really hard! He could speak English so I could actually understand everything he was saying. He started yelling at us with his little children watching. He was yelling at as for about 10 minutes when one of my great companions just bore her testimony very strongly that she knew the church was true and that she knew that Christ lived. It didnt really do anything for him but it changed my view on missionary work. Missionary work is the hardest thing I have ever done. I cant speak the language. People wont talk to us. People tell us how evil we are without even getting to know us. But the hardest thing about missionary work is seeing so many people so unhappy and see them reject the Savior. As hard as it is and as many times as people wont listen to us, it makes you stronger. As the preacher yelled at us, I realized who I really was and that I really did know that the Savior lives. The Book of Mormon is not just some book that Joseph Smith made up. I know it, because I have read it. Every day as I read it, I feel the power of the Book of Mormon. I know that people are being prepared here-just like the girl who was baptized this week. The church really is growing over here and it is a wonderful time to be a missionary! Every one in our ward is so nice and so kind and so patient! A lot of the members of the ward have gone through so much in their lives....a lot of them have had to fight for their freedom. The Hungarians really are such a strong people! Its amazing to be here and to serve them!

Anyways, everything else has been going good. My companions are awesome! We get along really well. The language is still trying to come. It is so hard but people are just impressed that I am trying to learn it haha! They tell me they were never try to learn Hungarian if they were from America.

Anyways, I hope you are all doing well! Love you lots! Hope everything is going well!

Falslev Nővér

We went out singing one night. A lot of people liked to listen to the music. My comp is really good at playing the ukeléli.

This is on a hill overlooking parliment. it is beautiful there!

This is a way cute street.

This is Matthews church. So beautiful!

Another church by Buda castle. There are churches everywhere over here.

Time warp!

Im pretty sure there is some sort of time warp that you go through when you go on a mission. Time goes by SO FAST! Which can be a blessing and a curse at the same time. This week has been super awesome! We have been working really hard! We have 4 new investigators, 2 people on baptism date, and we made the high record of getting 21 people contacted that we met throughout the week. Typically missionaries only get about 10. The 2 people we have on baptism date are going through super hard times! So hopefully they will pull through it and make it to their baptism date! We have a couple other investigators and we are not sure how they will go this week. One of them is a 16 year old kid that has researched TONS about churches. He just walked into the church one day and said he wanted to know more. He had heard all these rumors about the church and he found out that none of them were true. He speaks perfect english and knows the bible way good. He keeps calling and asking us all these questions so we'll see how things turn out there.
The highlight of my week though was meeting with one of our investigators. The last sisters met her when they went to go look up a less active member. No one was home so they left a pass along card and a day later they received a phone call from her saying she wanted to know more. She is awesome! They met with her and she was going to get baptized in January but for some reason she couldn't do it at the last minute. We didn't really know what to talk with her about, she hadn't met with the missionaries for a while. When we showed up to her house, I thought the lesson was going to be a disaster. She thought different missionaries were going to be coming and she didn't really want to meet with us. Then she found out that there were 3 sisters instead of just 2 and we also brought a member from the ward so she had a lot more people coming than she was planning on. She hurried to make some more to eat and anyways...it was just not very good at the beginning. But the lesson turned out awesome! The Lord really knew who she was! We had made plans to teach her the restoration and start over with her but just before we got to her house we decided we needed to read Alma 36 with her. We weren't sure why but we did anyways. So we started reading Alma 36 with her and it was amazing! We talked about how Alma the younger had persecuted the church and how he was able to experience the wonderful gift of the atonement. Our investigator felt the spirit so strong and couldn't make it through reading the whole chapter. It was amazing for me to see the joy in someones life when they first experience the joy and peace of the atonement. It was an awesome lesson and she was so thankful that we could come. She just thanked us for taking the time to come and speak to her even when we cant speak the language. That is what missionary work is all about...letting people experience the love of the Savior! It makes missionary work totally worth it!
General conference was amazing! I didnt get to see the last session on Sunday but all the other sessions were way good! We had a few investigators come and they loved it! One of the things I learned is: even the prophet has a hard time speaking Hungarian! haha! When he said the name debrecsen we all started to laugh because he said it how people from america would say it. It was really cool he talked about Hungary though...the Hungarians thought it was way cool and were so happy!
Not much else has really happened....we have been teaching a lot of people but usually they arent interested past the first lesson. The Hungarian is REALLY hard! All the ward members are awesome and are so good at teaching me! I try to ask them a question and they just smile and pretend like they understood what I was saying haha! Its really funny but discouraging at the same time. It has been a benefit though not being able to speak the language....my companion goes up to random people and ask if they will practice speaking Hungarian to 'her friend' (aka ME). Its super awkward but we have gotten a couple BOMs out doing that. Everyone is super patient and understands though...they are all trying to learn english. That is something we have ot be really careful about because a lot of people meet with us just to try to practice their english.
Well that is about it. Being in Hungary is the greatest! The people here are so great and are so kind! I love being a missionary even though it is definitely hard! I hope you are all doing well! Love ya lots!

Falslev Nővér

Finally in Hungary!

szervuzs csaladom

I made it to Hungary! It is so different here but I am getting used to it! Just a warning...the keyboards here are really weird so if i type anything weird its because of the keyboard. So it has been the craziest week ever! I cant believe it has almost been a week...it feels like a day. Unfortunately I got sick on the plane. Really sick! 5 minutes after we left Dallas I started throwing up and threw up fairly consistently til we landed in London. Then the 2 hour flight from London to Budapest is when I got REALLY sick! I pretty much stayed in the bathroom the whole time and my sweet companions were helping me. It was a long flight. I don't think I am ever going to leave Hungary because I am not getting back on a plane again. Some of the people in our group didn't get their luggage so we had a while to wait for their luggage to come. Just before we met the mission president and his wife I started to feel better. Then, knowing my luck, I threw up as soon as I am about to shake the mission presidents hand. It was so embarrassing. They were super nice about it though and took really good care of me. I was pretty exhausted that night so I just slept straight until the next morning so I missed a lot of the orientation but my companions got me all caught up!

I am in Buda which is a HUGE blessing! I was worried I would have to travel and get sick again. But i didn't have to. Since we have so many sisters, we are all in a tri companionship. My companionship is with Sister Kennedy and Sister Larsen. I knew sister Larsen from the MTC, she was in the group right before me and she is great! We get along really well. Our trainer sister kennedy has only been out for 9 months which is super early to be training! She is an awesome trainer though! She has only been in Buda for less than one transfer so we are still trying to figure our way around but it has been a fun adventure!

My first day here we taught 3 lessons and it was great! Every day since then we have had anywhere from 3 to 7 lessons planned but everyday EVERYONE "Dogs" or drops us. It has been super frustrating. We even had 2 people on date for baptism and they keep not showing up. hopefully we can meet with them though! We did have one lesson yesterday with a guy who lost his son a year ago. We met him street contacting. It was a good lesson. We taught him all about the restoration and everything was going really well...then at the end of the lesson he told us that he had seen a vision just like Joseph Smith and so he was wondering if he was a prophet. He still wants to meet but we will see where it goes.

Hungarian language is SO CRAZY!!!!!!!!!!!!!! People talk so fast here and they mumble a lot so its really hard to understand. The people in the ward here though are THE NICEST people I have ever met. Church was really different than I am used to...but it was great! A funny thing about here is EVERYONE is superstitious  One of their superstitions is that you can't leave your bags on the floor or else you will lose all your money. So all the chairs in church are filled with bags because no one will put them on the floor.  A lot of the people in Buda speak English and so everyone is the ward is really excited to teach me Hungarian. They really are the sweetest people! There is probably about thirty people or so who came to church...we have a lot of inactive members here so we are doing a lot of reactivating. One thing that is hard that we have to be careful about is people want to learn English. If they can learn English they are more likely to get a job. So a lot of people only meet so they can learn some English  We try not to use to much English but I guess that is one of the huge things that draw people to be interested in the church. Our companionship will teach English class on Thursday nights and i guess they get a HUGE turnout for that. We teach English for the first half and then teach the gospel the second half in Hungarian  So hopefully that will go good...our companionship doesn't really know what we are going to teach yet.

One of the greatest things about Hungary is the food....it is so yummy and definitely greasy! I don't think they have ever really heard of vegetables here but they sure know how to make good stuff. They have this stuff called túró and its this white stuff that kinda looks like cottage cheese but doesn't taste like it. They put it in everything and it is super delicious! They drink tons of tea here. There milk is the best...its not like the milk in America but it is delicious! They also eat sausage (aka grease) with EVERYTHING! It is so good but my body hasn't adjusted to so much grease. Their chocolate is the best. I will have to send some home. My favorite thing I have had so far is gűró - its chocolate with tűró and caramel in it. It is the best thing I have ever had! It has to be refrigerated though so I can't send it home.

All the missionaries here are way cool. We are the only sisters in Buda and we have 8 elders. They are all really nice. We have spent pretty much the whole week moving into a new apartment across the street and luckily the elders helped us move all the heavy stuff. We have been cleaning and getting things ready a lot this week so hopefully this next week we can actually teach people. I have been sick again too so hopefully I start feeling better. My companions are great and are so nice! We have really been put out of our comfort zone but that is the great thing about missionary work. I'm trying to work hard on learning the language but I don't have much time to study....we haven't had study time because we have been moving apartments. so hopefully i will get a little better at the language by next week!

Being on a mission is a lot different than I thought it would be - I know everyone says that but now I am actually experiencing it. It is definitely going to be so hard but I am glad it is that way because it makes me become stronger. This week I was studying about weaknesses in the scriptures and I am so glad that I have them! The Lord helps us become strong through our weaknesses. When we are weak we are strong because we rely on the Lord. I am so excited to be a missionary and to have these experiences to make me stronger. It definitely is the hardest and most exhausting thing I have ever done but it is a great experience! I love being in Hungary - the missionaries here are awesome and the ward is the coolest ward I have ever been in! The people here have such big hearts and are so willing to help anyone and everyone! I hope you are all doing well! Love you all and hope everything is going great!

Szeretettel

Falslev Nővér

Sister Larsen and I on a bridge close to the Parliament building. It has been really bad weather since we have got here. It is SO COLD!!!! I think that is why I am still sick - or according to Hungarian people - I wasn't wearing boots and a scarf so I got sick. The Parliament building is beautiful! And so big!

Sister Larsen and Sister Kennedy on one of the escalators. They are forever long. We go on them every time we take the metro somewhere. I heard they were the longest escalators in the world but I'm not sure if that is the truth or someone just saying that. they are pretty cool though!

Sisters Kennedy, Falslev, and Larsen

This is our shower. If you notice it does not have a shower curtain. People don't use shower curtains here. You have to have quite a bit of skill to take a shower - i am still working on that! 

This is the lever you use to flush the toilet. And all the ceilings in our apartment are super tall! We have the nicest apartment probably of all the missionaries! The toilet room is really small and is in a separate room from the sink. 

The mission home. The first level is the chapel. Second classrooms. Third mission home office.