Cooking Competition, Poetry and lots of Investigators!

This week has been fun. We have been working a lot with less actives.
We had 4 come to church this week which was fantastic! D and her
son L came to church last week, and asked us to come to their house
and begin reteaching them. We have been to their house twice so far.
They are a blast. I love going there. They also came to church this
week. L is 10, and she really wants to raise him well. She is a
single mom. Another less active we have worked with a lot this week is
names G. He is super inactive. He owns a little alcohol and
cigarette booth close to the center. We see him every day. This week
we got pretty up in his face, and he ended up meeting with us...
awesome! On top of that he came to sacrament meeting this week. He
knows it is true, but now we may just have to help him make some
changes in his life. I have super high hopes for him. He is the nicest
guy! A is the last one we have been working with. She got baptized
earlier this year, but hasn't been coming to church. She came this
week though.

One really fun appointment we had this week was with the Ag.
family. They have been members since the 90's so they are some of the
oldest members in Albania..crazy. They are a great family. B
teaches our second hour class for investigators. She is about 28, and
is a great teacher. Sister Ag. is awesome. She made us a great
dinner, and gave a great family home evening lesson. She talked all
about less active work, and about missionary work. She is very
passionate about missionary work. She has a strong testimony. She is a
great support. They both talk about the gospel with people all of the
time. Brother Ag. isn't a member. Brother Ag. Jr is on the
High council. He is 33 I think. At the end of it all we had a cake
that was very good. We asked for the recipe, and they gave it to us.

As a result we have made 3 cakes this week. The first two were the
regular cake to figure it out. The third one was chocolate cake. We
are going to play around with it some more, and make a lot more cakes.
It should be good. We have brainstormed some pretty wild ideas.

This week we had another ward party. It was a blast. it was a master
chef competition. We heard from D that people would cook things,
and we decided to go for it. So we showed up, and apparently only the
relief society was cooking things. Anyway it turned out to be a bunch
of desserts made by the relief society... and then our cake. It was
super awkward, but pretty awesome. Everyone got a good kick out of it.
You can see a few plates of competition. We had to present our dish.
We stood up in front of everyone, and told them that we would try to
be as humble as possible, but that we wouldn't be surprised if they
all loved it. It was pretty great that the recipe was from the Ag.
family. We told them the main ingredient was love, and that we had
spent a week and a half putting it together. We won for the longest
time putting it together ;) There weren't actually any prizes, but it
was really fun. Albanians are pretty good cooks.

So we have been receiving a lot of poetry. We have received poetry
from three different people now. I guess you could say we are just
inspiring. It all started off when a less active man gave us a book of
poetry that he had written. Next we had an investigator who wrote us a
ton of poetry about Mormon missionaries. It was all really good. He is
a super nice guy. At the ward activity An. gave us a poem as well.
Poetry is a pretty big thing here, but I had never received any up
until this transfer. It is really fun to read! Albanian is quite
poetic.

A has been without cigs for over 2 weeks now. A big baptism is
around the corner here right away.. for real this time. We should get
a date set here right away. It was pretty interesting because this
week for fifth Sunday we had a members as missionaries thing put on by
the bishop. A participated super well. He is officially what we
like to call a dry member.

We got to An. house this week We have a lot of faith that he will
accept baptism. We are pushing really hard for three baptisms. We have
a lot of faith, and we aren't afraid to work really hard for it!

Elder Rasband and I have had a pretty good time. As you can see from a
lot of the pics we have gotten pretty big into trying our hand at
cooking. Often we are in the kitchen right before bed trying to throw
something together. This morning we made p-day pancakes. We made them
from scratch without a recipe, and they weren't half bad! Check out my
butterfly!

Thats about it! Good luck with school! Walk Buddy!

Love Elder Stewart

A plate from the Master Chef competition.

Their cake from the competition.

Pancake batter from scratch

Nice selfie Elder Stewart

ES for Elder Stewart and the butterfly referred to in his letter

I wonder if it's as good as Taber corn?

Looks good though!

Suflage bought on the street. Tasty!