WEEK 36: Future Fathers of England

Left to right:  Elder Armstrong, Elder Rhea, Elder Peck, Elder Pace, Elder Buchoff, and Elder Poggemann

Well, where to start. I am leaving Rotherham after a brilliant 6 months! But that's not all, I am going to train one of the new Slovak elders! I don't know which one it is, but it will either be Elder Eberhard or Elder Campbell. I find out tomorrow when I meet him, and I am so excited. I will finally end my phase as a mission "son". I can't wait, but I am a bit nervous. This isn't the only change. On Thursday we had a meeting with President Turvey to discuss the possibilities of Slovak work spreading out. Everything he talked about happened this transfer call.

Elder Rhea and Elder Buckhoff are now Zone Leaders in Leeds.  Elder Peck is helping Elder Larsen learn Slovak up in Middlesborough which is on the opposite end of the mission, Elder Poggemann is helping another lad learn Slovak here in Sheffield and Elder Armstrong is training the other new Elder. The best part of the meeting was when we saw Elder Buckhoff and Elder Rhea and Elder Klinger here! I miss those guys all the time so it was awesome to see them. Anyways, I am going to miss Elder Peck so much. He was with me from the beginning and they are going to take him to the North where I will never see him. I remember when we got separated the first day after the MTC and it just wrecked me. I feel like it will wreck me even more when he is taken further. I'll send some pictures from the meeting

That was really all that was important this week.

Love you all,
Elder Pace

P.S.  I found out he will be "in Sheffield in the Darnell and Tinsley area.  Nowhere crazy, just new to me".

WEEK 35: A "Proper Good Week"!

(Great letter with NO PICTURES--again!  I'm beginning to wonder if he's really my child?!  Read the first paragraph out loud--it will make more sense! :)

I have decided to start using more of my English vocab so if I say proper or right a ton, you'll just have to take it on the chin.

Well, as the subject line tells us, this was a proper good week. We 'ad so many fings just go right and we didn't 'af to do owt. While we were cruisin' fru streets of Rovrum, we met some bloke named Ernest, raver we met 'is wife. She were on 'er way to store and we asked if she could cook us some Slovak food. She politely declined, but invited us over anyway. We went on over and 'ad a good long chat wif Ernest. Me companion and I found out that 'ee knew Elder Poho, 'oos me mission grandad. 'Ees mostly blind, but 'ees a good geezer, 'im. 'Ee even wanted to come to church wif us this week, which 'ee did. We are reyt excited for 'im and we 'ope 'ee keeps up good work. 

To be honest, that is about all I can type out. It is right hard to think about typing stuff out like that. If you just read it out loud, it all makes sense and that is a pretty accurate description of some people's accent here in Rotherham. Anyways, Ernest is a good guy and we are excited.

We also met some old friends of Elder Syndilek who is my mission great grandad. He is another Czech guy like Elder Poho and we really like him. The people we met that know him are pretty cool as well. It is a family that lives pretty far from the rest of the people we teach and they don't live by other Slovaks. The walk is worth it though. The mom, Kristina is a single mom with three kids, Ramona, Dominika, and Dominik. They are all super nice and they made us this strange Slovak food. I don't know exactly what it was. It looked like a roll, but it was denser and had a tiny line of jelly-like stuff injected. it was topped with oil and we think poppyseed and some brown paste. It was an iteresting flavor combo, although Elder Armstrong is not a fan and I am mostly indifferent. The first few bites I didn't enjoy, but the last few were pretty decent. So I was always confused on whether I liked it or not after eating one.

We were able to see Julia enter into the waters of baptism this week and that was special. (When I complained about lack of pictures, he finally sent these!)  I did the baptizing and it was a fun night all around. She invited a few of her friends that we had never met and they were pretty cool. A few of them had grown up in Canada despite being originally Czech and therefore spoke English fluently and had an accent really similar to ours. It was strange to hear since any Slovak that speaks English here usually has a proper British accent.

All is going well in Rotherham, miss you all, love you all, and hope you have a great week.

Elder Pace

Some extra tidbits I learned from him this week:

1.  His suits are serving him well and he has no complaints.

2.  He is learning how to set boundaries for himself with technology.  One of his favorite guys over there, Alex, didn't set foot outside his house for an entire year since he literally played games all day unless he was eating (he was out of school so he wasn't even going there).  Tyson said they destroy him and sucks away his life which is sad to see.  He does not want technology to take over his life when he returns home (now THAT'S my boy! )

3.  He has become "quite a stickler for cleaning the flat and I do a fair amount of cleaning in the free time we have during the week".  He said one of his greatest wishes at the moment is to have "a nice quality vacuum, which is going to be granted soon I hope". 

4.  I asked what he does to handle mission stress and he told me cleaning has helped him and some exercise and reading his patriarchal blessing and then saying a prayer afterwards focusing on the things he is grateful for and writing at night in his journal but then said "I am not a very stressed person most of the time, so I don't need to get over stress very much."  (Pheww....that's always good to hear)

5.  The new elders arrive March 14th and they will find out March 12th what the new arrangements will be. 

6.  I asked him to explain his last email a little further on what has been difficult for him to accept with the Slovak culture.  He went into more detail but in a nutshell he said it's the "laziness and the dishonesty and the animosity (between each other)".  Those qualities are opposite of Tyson so I'm sure that has been an adjustment and why he was sent there!  It's easy to love those that are the same as you.  A lot more Christ-like and a lot more difficult to love those that aren't!  And every missionary seems to be sent where they will be tested!

He sent these after I complained of no pictures....not exactly what I had in mind...he is not in sight at all!  But this is Alex (the guy that lives by videos) giving his companion, Elder Armstrong a haircut and "their fearless Zone leader, Elder Stirling" :)

And thanks to Facebook here is a picture of I'm assuming their zone and I think Tyson is on back row next to red haired Elder Peck?

Compliments of Elder Peck's letter today! :)

WEEK 34: Uneventful Riot

This was a pretty nice week. I translated at church again. This sacrament I also spoke which means Elder Peck helped me translating.  He did great and we talked about humility. I shared the scripture story about the apostles saying "Lord, is it I?" It was a good lesson for me as well to remember that we need to look inwardly. That is a problem I have had with the Slovak people here. I always choose to see their mistakes and shortcomings and it is pretty hard for me to see the good in them. It is hard for me to get past their culture which is very different than ours. It is been something that has held me back from helping them. It's something I have been working on for a while, but I haven't been too successful. This week I was praying really hard to be able to get over this. As I read from the Book of Enos in the Book of Mormon, I was inspired by his dedication and earnestness in prayer for those people who hated him. I decided to keep going in my prayers. After a while I felt like no one was listening and nothing would happen. But later that day, I realized how my attitude and thoughts had slowly been changing that week and I realized that God had helped me so much in little ways over time and I just hadn't see it. I think I needed to hear about humility this week as well to help me see what He has done for me.

Other than that, our week was pretty uneventful. We did have a riot against the European immigrants. The Slovak have been warning us for weeks since it is supposed to be pretty big. We were severely disappointed in the riot. There was a total of about 15-20 people and only one bloke raised his sign. On top of that they stood in one part of the center and were surrounded by a solid 30+ cops. Nothing went down.

Julia is still doing well and seems excited for baptism. She wasn't at church because her son was sick. We are hoping things go well.

I had a good long talk with Dezider and I found out more about his life story. He used to train dogs for the police, he also used to be a welder with the highest level of certification available in Slovakia.  He said he would have welded here if England recognized his license.  He also was a metal worker and made very specifically sized gears for machines heat had to be within 0.002mm of precision. He made some really nice money doing these jobs. He also used to own a little mini-market with foodstuffs. It was quite interesting to hear all of this. It took a while for him to explain what all the words meant so that I could understand because here are pretty scattered topics.

Love you all, I know that this gospel changes lives and that it will lift us up in our trials.

Elder Pace

P.S.  He sent a recording of 1 Nephi 3:7 that he sung in Slovak to the tune of Called to Serve.  It was pretty impressive!  BUT, no pictures!