Tomas Update: Week 14 in Žilina

Ahojte všetci! Back at it again with another crazy week in žilina. I feel like I say that every time but life as a missionary really is just so different. Anyways, here’s all the stuff we did this week:

Tuesday we spent a while recording a music video for Elder Noftle, so if you want to see that you can find it on his Facebook. Things went a lot faster when we realized that we could just cut together all the good parts and hide it by changing angles, so in the future we will be a lot faster. Glad my video editing skills helped too.

Wednesday was zone conference (all the missionaries in our “zone” (which is Slovakia) gather in Trenčín and we have trainings and stuff and learn how to do things). This time around we had a special training as we are doing a survey of the people here to get a general view of what people believe and as such we are going out without ties or tags since we can’t be biasing the data. Learned a lot and hopefully will be able to apply it. 

Back to regular Thursday, we visited one of our members who can’t make it to church like we do pretty much every Thursday. Always wonderful to be there, she’s just so thankful that we visit and it’s great Slovak practice because I translate for the senior missionaries here. Overall just always a great hour or so and I always look forward to it.

Friday we met with one of the members on our branch over missionary work, and then went through a list of old contacts to see who we could visit. We lost touch with a lot of members here over covid so the list is a lot bigger than the actual amount of people who come to church. We got lunch at the vegan bistro beneath our apartment (really good food) and then got to work on that survey. Felt soooo weird to be out without a tag or tie but we can’t be having biased information can we. Anyways we didn’t actually get any surveys done that day (turns out it’s kinda scary) but I did find a hidden geocache on the back of a bus ticket dispenser which was pretty cool.

Saturday was pretty legendary, we went back out to Blava (classic 18€ round trip) so that we could go to a baptism. Tham being baptized (coincidentally also named Tomáš) was actually at the last baptism we went to, where we met him, and it was super cool to see his progress and how much he loves the gospel. He was so happy and already has wonderful relationships with the members there. Then I sat down and had a good discussion with one of the missionaries friends from Banská Bystrica, who also made he trip out, and he talked about how his dream job would be to be Jesus and help people all the time. Cool guy. We missed the first car meet of the season (prezident told us to go to some to find people) so that we could make it out, but on our way back on the streets of Blava a Ferrari drove by us so I’m glad God appreciated us being there. I’d make a joke and say we are even but I’m pretty sure I’ll always be in His debt. Cool though.

Okay then a pretty regular Sunday, except it was fast Sunday so we didn’t have breakfast or lunch but that was all good. We combined some of the skipped meal time into a longer dinner and CRANKED out some halušky for dinner which tasted super good after not eating. Bryndza (like a traditional sheep cheese topping on halušky) is growing on me.

Okay, that brings us to today, we headed out this morning to Trenčín and went and visited babka which was pretty cool. First though we had to get the boot taken off the car because the Zls parked it in the wrong spot (again) and the cops think we’re just silly Americans (which we are). Anyways, Babka made us super good food (potato dumplings with sausage inside and red cabbage on the side) and then we helped her move some roof tiles so she could hang her laundry again. Then we dressed up in some medieval clothing and got pictures. It was cool to go back to her house and I was soooo appreciative of the fact that I could like basically 100% understand her and for real respond. That was really cool. And it was just good to see her again, what a crazy opportunity I have here to be in the same country and stop by sometimes. Also I mentioned to mom that I wanted to get a knife sharpener or me thing since all of our knifes are dull in the apartment, and I actually got my grandfather’s old whetstone today which is super cool. We will see how this goes.

Anyways, that’s about it for this week. Hopefully yall are doing good out there, congrats to the Nordic team back home and everyone going to Easterns and/or Junior nationals. I’m just chilling on the train ride back to žilina and then we will go shopping for the week.

As always, here’s the photos link https://photos.app.goo.gl/qYoYaKPmkqFZHoVM7

S láskou, 

Starší Cundick