Tomas Update

Bryce here. I realize it’s been a while since Tomas had a chance to send out an email, so I thought I’d step in and fill you all in on the details in a brief post. The short report is that he’s still doing great, just really busy.

Last week, he was transferred to the Czech Republic. (Sorry. I’m still not going to call it Czechia. I just can’t bring myself to do it.) He’s now in Plzen (Pilsen), home to world-famous beer and about 180,000 people, give or take. It’s in the far western part of the Czech Republic. Interestingly enough, his area’s borders go right up to Germany, and in fact when I was in my first city in Germany as a missionary (Schwarzenberg), I went to the Czech border and looked across it one day. It turns out when I looked across it, I was looking at Tomas’s new area. Go figure.

He’s not a district leader for now, though he’s still learning Ukrainian, since his company is another missionary called to speak that language. This means that neither one of them speaks Czech, since Tomas is brand new there. The good news is that his Slovak is good enough that he’s communicating with no real troubles, and everyone he meets just assumes he’s Slovak. (He was already getting that from some of the people in Slovakia, but now that he’s in a foreign country, they can’t tell the accent apart at all.)

It was a quick transfer. He found out Tuesday and was gone . . . Thursday? Something like that. Thankfully, he had enough time to say goodbye to everyone in Trenčin, but I think it was still hard to really leave the place, especially since he was also leaving behind family. (Though the good news is that he’ll be coming back for sure after his mission, because family.)

His new area technically has a ward, which in Latter-day Saint terms should mean it’s got a lot of members. (100+, typically.) However, only 20 people actually come to Sunday meetings, so . . . something’s really odd there. My guess is they used to have more, and things have really struggled for the last while, though I don’t know for sure.

In Trenčin, the work was going very well. They had a lot of people they were teaching, and they’d really built that up from almost nothing. In Plzen, it sounds like he’s back to the building phase. Not too many people they’re teaching, so he’s going to be working on finding people.

Anyway. Those are the basics. I do think he’s planning on writing again. Just don’t know when he’ll actually have time.