Birds, Cauldrons and Impatient Trains

First of all, Happy Birthday Dad! I hope you enjoy the big day, it sounds like you have good plans.

So my new companion is Elder Gonzalez, he is awesome. Cuban dad, Hungarian mom, lived in Canada, so knows English, Spanish, Hungarian, and French. It's been good to have a fluent speaker out here, the ward loves him. We got off to a good start on our first day, when our train got back to Tatabánya I had trouble opening the doors (I accidentally opened the wrong side at first), and the train was running late so right after when I opened the right door the train started moving. Luckily we were able to jump off quickly while it was still going pretty slow, and avoided a 2 hour trip out to Györ.

This week was hard, I had to call everyone to set up appointments because Elder Gonzalez doesn't know them, which was a little difficult. We didn't end up having a lot of programs, a lot of people canceled or didn't show. We had a couple good ones though, and this next week is looking a lot better.

We did have a really good branch activity on Saturday. We hiked up to the Turul, the big bird statue, and cooked up a big cauldron of paprikas krumpli. It was super good and we had 3 investigators show up and interact a lot with our branch members. Elder Gonzalez also brought a chess set, I never knew how much Hungarians loved chess, that was a lot of fun.

We had a good district meeting yesterday on the importance of commitments, how we should be setting up the commitment before the lesson and planning the lesson to help them keep that commitment. I think that is something we could work on a lot, hopefully it will help our investigators progress better. I have to keep remembering that this is a big change and so I need to be patient with them. I have been getting better at being bold though, straight up telling them the truth, not trying to hide the hard stuff or avoid the difficult questions. It really makes things easier, here's the truth, if you read this book and pray you can know it too. It always comes back to the Book of Mormon and prayer.

Sorry no pictures this week, the computers here are very on and off on whether or not they accept my camera. Maybe next week.

Love you all!

Parkinson Elder

First Transfer Down

So I'll be staying it Tatabánya for another 9 weeks! Elder Spedding is leaving for Budapest and I will be getting Elder Gonzalez, I'll meet him tomorrow but he sounds awesome. He grew up in Canada but his mom is Hungarian so he speaks Hungarian and English fluently. That should help with the language a lot. He is also only 2 months older then me in the mission, so we'll have 6 months of experience between us. I'm excited for this next transfer.

We ended this transfer on a good note though, we had 6 investigators at church, 4 of them for the first time. One we had just met the night before, she was friends of another investigator. That went super cool, only problem is we had to do the sacrament so couldn't sit by them for the first part, our members are super good at fellowshipping though, they are all awesome.

The new investigators we have are awesome, 2 from English class, one we met on the street and her friend. They have lots of questions, which I really like. It reminds me of what Tom said about Elder Bednar and how he did a question and answer session to teach. Our lessons go really well, hopefully they all continue to progress.

One fun finding story, we tracted  into 2 men the other day, both young 30's probably. We talked a bit and then one said, "do you smell that, we're having a BBQ", he invited us in and showed us everything (I guess we're BBQ pros because we're American). After we repeatedly turned down his beer he decided to give us some BBQ instead, my meat was completely black, but the roll was good. Both very interesting, one had some pretty interesting beliefs about positive and negative energy, Jesus tattooed on one arm and Satan on the other. Anyway, hard to describe but is was a super interesting experience, they did accept a Book of Mormon though so we'll see if that goes anywhere.

That's about it. Love you all, find some referrals for your local missionaries!

Sok Szeretettel,

Parkinson Elder

​The bat from a few weeks ago up in the top left corner.

​Lecso and bread, my favorite meal. After my first few weeks I learned that white shirts and tomato sauce don't go well together, hence the stylish bib

​A little lake by our apartment.

The Lord's Way

Family and Friends!

This week went well again, but was a little frustrating. Hungarians are super hard to set up with, they aren't good at answering there phones and then people cancel on us too, so we did a lot of finding this week. There were some cool things though.

We had a great Zone Conference this week. President Smith came, he talked about Luke 5:1-10 and compared it to missionary work, we need to be doing it the Lord's way. That's something I want to work on, he's the one that knows what needs to happen. It all comes down to being obedient and being willing to follow the small promptings of the Spirit. Those are things I've been trying to work on. I also finally got my mail, thanks to everyone that sent letters! We then met a couple from Arizona on the train back, Mom got a picture from them. Cool to see some Americans.

We have an awesome new investigator that we met in English class, Detti. She is curious but has super hard questions. Luckily she accepts when I say I don't know. A few example questions she asked - polygamy, why no women witnesses to Book of Mormon or women prophets, weren't there multiple languages before the Tower of Babel, how did the Urim and Thummin work (whose breastplate was it), etc. Also, awkward Hungarian mistranslation, in the Joseph Smith Testimony where Joseph Smith said he could see Moroni's bosom, the word they chose in Hungarian really means breast. Investigator quote - "only women have that". Yeah. She seems genuinely curious though, said she'd keep reading the Book of Mormon.

We did splits again this week, I worked with Elder Ehardt again. It is really cool to see how well we can speak when we don't have older missionaries to lean on. We had a super good day tracting, a lot of people told us to come back. We were working in their area though so I won't see them again, hopefully the other Elder's can find come success with them.

Great finding story - Apparently a long time ago an Elder put an English class flier somewhere in the place where we email. A few weeks ago this old man found it and had a strong spiritual prompting to go to English Class. Yes, he already understands the Spirit better then most of us do, and no, he doesn't really want to learn English. Now the other Elder's are teaching him and say he is incredible. Super smart but super spiritual despite no religious backround. People can come from anywhere.

Also, transfers are next week (the real one, not just a mini), so my next email will be on Tuesday.

Love you all!

Parkinson Elder

Photo sent by a kind woman who was traveling in Hungary.  She texted all 4 moms right after seeing the missionaries.

Testimonies

The best part of this week was easily yesterday in fast and testimony meeting. We don't have a lot of people in church so last month we had a lot of empty time, but this month the Branch President had trouble ending the meeting, and we went almost 10 minutes over. The Spirit was super strong too, and I could understand at least the general ideas of what people were saying which helped. Our 12 year old new convert of just 2 weeks bore a super good testimony, as did her half sister who is now investigating, and another one of our investigators. The other Elders here had a couple of miracles there too, a man that they had just met at English class Thursday came to church and went up to bear his testimony as well. He loved church. Also, there is one lady that they had taught for a few times and loved everything, but then sent then a text one day saying not to look for her anymore a few weeks ago. She came to church again and loved it, stayed the entire time. All in all super good church, hard to put in words but it was awesome.

As far as teaching this last week was pretty rough, we had a lot of people cancel on us, I've gotten pretty lucky with that so far in my mission. We had some good lessons though, one lady we met from English Class has lots of questions about the Plan of Salvation, we gave her a pamphlet and she read the whole thing. She has had a hard life so hopefully we can help her.

Speaking of English class, we had 16 people in our class last time, about 10 more than usual. That was fun, hopefully the members spiritual thoughts and the end will peak some of their interests. Luckily we have awesome members.

Fun story of the week - Sunday at about 5 in the morning I woke up to my companion running out of the room yelling that we had a bat in the room. Not quite sure how it got in, it was just flying around the room in figure eights. It was hard to get a good picture but I got a decent one before opening the window to let it out. Other wildlife note, we ran into a dog tracting the other day that I think was Sirius Black reincarnated. It reminded me of Splash, I love the dogs out here when we go tracting, it cheers me up when people aren't answering the doors.

That's all I can think of. Love you all!

Parkinson Elder

Tatabánya: Hol az álomban jártam..

This week was great, we had some really awesome new people that we met with, which was good because we have had to drop quite a few old investigators. We have a lot of people that love meeting with us, but just aren't very interested in the gospel.

We had one lady that we taught the first time and were planning to do mainly just a get to know her/introduce the Book of Mormon lesson but she was super interested and so we taught her all of the 2nd and 3rd lessons as well. We had one man we met tabling who said he had met with the missionaries before, he has had a lot of drug problems and is really trying to turn his life around.

Fun story from English class this week, my companion and I teach the more advanced class, so our main goal is just to get them talking in English. We start off every class with some questions we discuss in English, one of them this week was if you could be PM for a day what would you do. I thought it would be a fun little question, but it ended up going super political, we had trouble getting them to a different topic. We then tried to teach the how to use like as a filler word, they were all really interested but it is super hard to explain, because we usually don't even know when we do it.

We had a fun experience with the Humanitarian Missionaries on Wednesday. We went with them to translate while they donated some dining carts to an old folks home. Apparently they lives in Grandma and Grandpa Beckhams ward for a while, and moved to Aunt Ann's ward right before coming out here. Small world.

 That's about it, not a ton happened this week. It's been starting to get rainy more, but it has been a very cool August so that makes up for it.

Love

Parkinson Elder

Erik and companion -- Picture taken by Stan and Sharon Miller, humanitarian missionaries

Baptism in the Rain

We had transfers this week which is why I'm writing today, everyone in Tatabánya is staying, so we'll have at least 4 more weeks together. Transfers are usually every 9 weeks but the group going home had to leave early so they could start school.

The big news of the week is that we had a baptism yesterday, Ingrid, the daughter of Monika who was baptized a few weeks ago. That was really cool. They had a hard week before the baptism but they have a ton of faith, especially Monika, so got through it. They are an incredible family, I'm pretty sure Monika talks to more people about the church then we do, it changed her life a ton, so told us she just tells everyone they need to be baptized. And they have 6 year old boy who in sacrament meeting just walks around giving people hugs. Coolest family ever.
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Only bad thing about the baptism was the beforehand I intelligently decided it probably wouldn't rain so my umbrella was not necessary. It rained. I got pretty wet on the long walk home but luckily my suit survived. And now it's cleaner.

The 20th was apparently a huge holiday but not much really happened. No one was outside. We had a branch activity in the morning where we went to an outdoor museum and then we played basketball a little with the other Elders.

We went on splits twice this week, once with the zone leaders in Győr and once with the other Elders here. That was fun, especially when I went with Ehardt Elder, he's only one group ahead of me. We when tracting for a few hours, it was really good for our confidence because we had to speak which helped us realize that we could. It's still hard but it works.

Other things - what are you supposed to say when the cops knock on your door at night and you don't speak their language? Also, Parkinson is a disease in Hungarian too, but whereas no one makes the connection in America plenty of Hungarians do. That's fun.

Two pictures I forgot last week, on P-day I visited my first castle and got a sweet Hungarian whip.

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Life here is great, love you all!

Parkinson Elder

This week

This week we didn't have as many lessons as usual, so we did a lot of finding. It went well, but not super successful. The problem with tracting in Hungary is that we find a lot of nice old people that are willing to let us in and chat but are not interested in changing. That's why we really promote English class here as a finding tool because it helps us find younger people and everyone wants to learn English. I also tracted into my first speedo bácsi the other day (In Hungary all the old ladies are nénnis and the old men are bácsis). Very different from America.

We had our first zone training on Thursday so I got to go out to Györ. We have about 20 missionaries in our zone and I got to meet some of the senior couples as well, they are all great.

We finally got to meet with the man that we met on the street my first day here. He is super interested, doesn't have a religious backround but has seen that religion can bring lots of joy to our lives and wants to know more. The only problem is he moves to Japan in a few months. It was cool to think that I have missionary friends all over the world, including Japan, he can find people to teach him anywhere.

This Wednesday is a huge holiday in Hungary so it will be our P-day, we are just emailing today. It celebrates the foundation of Hungary and the crowning of King Stephen (fun fact for Dad - I'm pretty sure you're descended from him, I saw him on family search once, forget to mention that earlier).

We have another baptism coming up on Saturday, the daughter of the woman baptized my first week here. They are an awesome family.

Our members here are awesome, we have about 15-20 members in the branch and got about 8 referrals last week. So those Boise missionaries should be getting about 100 this week. I never really appreciated referrals until I went finding on my mission. Much more effective.

Also, I gave my first church talk on Sunday, the topic was why I decided to come on a mission and how I prepared. It went well, luckily I was familiar with the vocab related to my topic so it wasn't too bad.

That's about it, good luck with school starting!

Love,

Parkinson Elder