June 27, 2016



Elder Chingas and I taught our last Advanced English Course for this session. At first we were just having conversations, but they said they wanted to write essays instead! So we started giving them a lot more timed essays and quizzes, and we gave them a really hard final at the end. I would have got maybe a 70% on it. They were pretty mad about their 50% scores regardless though!

On Wednesday we traveled down to Tirana for mission conference. And we of course stopped by KFC on the way back. All the people in Europe have been going crazy over the Euro Cup for soccer. When we stayed the night in Pristina a few weeks ago, Albania was playing, and all the people were making so much noise the whole game. So at the mall where we got the KFC, they had a massive screen set up showing Portugal and Hungary play. 

THE BIG 20.  The day of mission conference was my 20th BIRTHDAY. I woke up feeling like a whole new person that day :) I think more people told me happy birthday that day than all the other birthdays in my life put together. President and Sister Weidmann always recognize birthdays, and since my birthday was on that day, I got called up first and everyone sang happy birthday to just me, and then again with all the other nearby birthdays! All the Macedonia Elders were going in style with some bedazzled ties that someone gave us as gifts. I also gave my dying testimony along with 16 other missionaries. There's only 6 missionaries coming in, so we're going to be shrinking a lot as a mission, being under 50 missionaries total! During those testimonies we all talked about all that we've learned from the mission. I don't think there will ever be another time of such accelerated learning in my life as I have had in the mission. It is and has been a memory I will treasure forever.

President and Sister Weidmann came down for the weekend to Skopje after. They came to our district meeting on Saturday, which ended up being about double the time as usual with all the help and feedback from the Weidmanns. But it was still a good meeting! We invited them to come out to lunch with us after, and they decided for it. We got to the Ramstore Mall cafeteria, and SURPRISE! We saw another big ol' screen. This time it was showing the Switzerland Poland soccer game. And the Weidmanns are from Switzerland! It was the coincidence of coincidences. Sister Weidmann is usually a very calm and elegant person, but she was not for that lunch, going absolutely crazy about the game! It was hilarious. President Weidmann was trying to set a good example for us, sitting with his back towards the game and trying to ignore it.

1 Month left exactly.
Elder Rigby