Brough Family Update 2024
NOTE/WARNING: The main reason for this update is for journal purposes because we are not journal writers! Therefore, it is full of details no one but us would be interested in.
If anyone even took the time to read this update you will know that we didn’t get a Christmas card sent out in 2024 due to the fact that we weren’t able to even have a family photo shoot until four days before Christmas, when everyone was able to be here for Christmas. The plan was to get the photos back in January and we were going to send out a New Year’s card with the family photo. Well, the photographer didn’t get the photos back to us until late January and then it ended up being longer than we thought to get ourselves settled back into life back home and got sidetracked with things and well…we ended up not even sending out our card until September of 2025! Better late than never, right? Even though we didn’t send it out until September of 2025 this update is still just going to be through the end of 2024. So here goes…
…well, actually, before I start the 2024 update I need to include the end of 2023 since our update for 2023 only went into a little bit of December of 2023 and I want to tell about what Christmas is like in Albania. And actually, Christmas, as we celebrate it, is not the same in Albania. They put up beautifully decorated Christmas trees in their restaurants, stores and hotels and they love the Santa part of Christmas. You will see shops everywhere that sell Santa outfits for all ages. However, the Christ part of Christmas is not emphasized hardly at all, mainly because it’s a Muslim country. We did see ONE Nativity scene in front of an Orthodox Christian cathedral in Korçë because Korçë is a more Christian city than other Albanian cities, maybe because it is so close to Greece. Christmas Day isn’t even actually that big of a deal in Albania. They are all about getting ready for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. All through November and December you see live turkeys for sell all over at the markets. You see people buying them and walking around with them all over during December. We actually witnessed from our balcony, someone slaughtering one in the vacant lot in our neighborhood! They are for New Year’s meals, not Christmas. All the grocery stores have whole aisles dedicated to all different brands and types of panettone. I had only ever seen one kind in the US at Costco but here there are tons! Don doesn’t care for it but I love it. Our branch president gave us one for Christmas and I pretty much ate the whole thing. You also see all the stores selling big pans of baklava and the sisters in the branch all make baklava during December. Our branch had a Christmas party and when we sat down with our branch president to plan it he was on board with our plan to make it more Christ centered. Don and I went with our branch president’s mom and sister to a fabric store so I could get some fabric to make some easy nativity costumes and we had the branch members do a nativity re-enactment and it was so sweet. We also showed the Christ Child video. We invited the whole neighborhood and several people showed up. We served some delicious focaccia sandwiches from a bakery and the plan was for this gathering to just be Christ centered and not the typical “party” and then we were going to have a more fun, typical party for our New Year’s gathering. Well, you can’t get Albanians together and not have dancing so of course we ended up doing the valle (traditional Albanian dance). The Sunday before Christmas, instead of making a Christmas dinner for the elders I just made our traditional Christmas breakfast of breakfast casserole and blueberry muffins. For our mission Christmas conference they decided to have it starting on Christmas Eve night through to the day after Christmas in Elbasan (where one of our two actual meetinghouses are). So, after sacrament meeting on Christmas Eve morning we had the elders stop by and we gave them each a stocking with a few little gifts. They seemed very appreciative and are just so sweet. We love them so much! Then we loaded up some rolls and cookies and headed to Elbasan for the conference. It was a nice conference with some service projects that the Ellsworths put together. We tied fleece blankets and made cards for an orphanage in Sarandë. There was a Christmas program. The young missionaries received packages that were sent from home, distributed by Santa (Sister Auras, the mission president’s wife) as well as some other gifts from them. We had some delicious meals, there were lots of games and activities out on the grass and in the parking lot and on Christmas Day night we all went to a movie theater to see Disney’s “A Christmas Carol”, complete with popcorn, soda and candy. After the conference before going back to Berat we went to Pogradec so I could get my hair cut, for the first and only time while on our mission by a sweet member of the Pogradec branch. We also picked up a sweet wooden “holy family” I had ordered, made by an amazing artist that carves all kinds of intricate things. At the end of the month (December 30th) we had another branch gathering to celebrate New Year’s. We also went to lunch with our branch president, his mom and sister for his mom’s birthday. Then…there was New Year’s Eve! Holy Moly! New Year’s Eve in Albania is CRAZY! Everyone goes nuts with fireworks, the kind you buy and shoot off yourself! (But it’s crazy because we could never see anywhere that was actually selling fireworks…) We watched the spectacle from our balcony and it lived up to everything everyone said it would be! We have a video of it and you can hear me screaming (because some seemed so close) and cackling throughout the whole thing! Earlier in the month we celebrated Nancy’s 65th birthday with our branch president and his mom and sister and our elders at a very nice restaurant.
So back to 2024…
Our regular ongoing missionary life included our calling as Member Leader Support missionaries and Don as the first counselor in our sweet Berat Branch. Every week we have English course, Book of Mormon read, branch night and our Sunday meetings. We go on visits to branch members with the young missionaries. We feed dinner to the missionaries serving in Berat every Sunday night. Every Tuesday we have a district council meeting with the young missionaries serving in Elbasan, Lushnjë and Berat and we rotate every week having it in all these locations. Every once in awhile when it was in Berat, we would have the meeting in our apartment and then I would feed them lunch afterwards. Approximately, every six weeks or so we have a zone conference for all the missionaries in Albania in Elbasan and sometimes a whole mission conference with the addition of the missionaries from Kosovo and North Macedonia. Every Friday we teach Institute in Vlorë, a beautiful coastal city on the Adriatic Sea which is a three hour round trip drive. I always make cookies or some kind of treat every week for this. Every other Tuesday we have a zoom meeting with our area leaders at the area offices in Frankfurt, Germany and other assistant area auditors throughout the central European area. Our auditing trips will be mentioned later. On some preparation days we join the young missionaries and we help with random service projects here and there with them as well. Starting in March, we had monthly visits to the Fier branch (this will be explained later). We also taught a temple preparation class to the Kurti family to prepare them for a temple trip with them in September. With all that there is some time here and there to do some sightseeing and spending time with other senior missionaries. I am just going to type up monthly the things we have done this year in addition to our regular missionary work.
JANUARY – Early in January, the Ellsworths invited us to join them to go to Sarandë, a coastal city on the Adriatic Sea, where you can see the Greek island of Corfu super close by. They had previously done a bigger project there at an orphanage and needed to follow up on a few things and also there had been a few funds leftover after the project so they had us come “help” assemble some gift bags (including the blankets we made at the Christmas conference) and distribute them to the children and spend some time with them. Two young sister missionaries joined us for this. While in this part of Albania we also went to some Roman ruins called Butrint which was super cool. It was great to see some parts of the country we hadn’t seen before and spend some time with the Ellsworths. In January two of our sweet girls in the branch turned Young Women age so I had ordered some Young Women necklaces and had Ashlin make the graphics for the Young Women’s theme that I had made into to a poster to hang up in the church and I also printed smaller ones to give to each girl. We had our branch president introduce them as our new Young Women at sacrament meeting, give them their necklaces and have them recite the theme. They are so precious to us and both have some very sad family situations. The middle of January is the start of our auditing season so we started with our audit in Fier, just about an hour away from Berat. Then we went to Prishtine, Kosovo and Skopjë, North Madedonia. Another senior couple, the McAffees who are serving in Prishtina and we love so much, did the audit for us in another city in Kosovo called GJakova. We got to spend a little time with them when we were in Prishtina. Don and President Rakipi (our branch president) had a meeting in Tirana, where our area seventy, Elder Cziesla, was presiding. We also got the audit in Lushnjē done this month. We had to have someone else audit our branch since Don is the first counselor in the branch presidency and there would be a conflict of interest. So, we got permission to make the Ellsworth’s district auditors so they could do our audit. They happened to have a visit they needed to make to a disability center in Berat to follow up on a previous project so when they came to do the audit they had us go with them to that. We got to meet some of the residents there and tour the facility with them. We had an interest in the place because we have a severely autistic member of our branch that we are constantly trying to see what options are out there for him and his family. Unfortunately, he is at an age that they can’t help him at that facility. While we were there we learned of a few small things that the young missionaries could maybe help with in the future so we made plans to get that going in the next year.
FEBRUARY – The area auditors, Elder and Sister Stevens (we call them our auditing “bosses”) came to Albania for us to show them around a little and to meet with the Aurases. We showed them a little bit of Tirana (where we all met with the Aurases to discuss some of the auditing issues in Albania), Elbasan, Vlorë (where they came with us to Institute) and finally Berat, where they attended our branch sacrament meeting and then they came for dinner at our apartment with our elders before we had to get them back to the airport for them to fly back to Frankfurt. It was nice to spend some time with them. They are from Queen Creek so we have plans to get together when we are all back from our missions. Whenever an intake of young missionaries arrive in the mission our mission leaders take them to the place in Tirana where the dedicatory prayer to open missionary work was given by then Elder Dallin H. Oaks in 1993. The location is a military cemetery (they call it a martyr’s cemetery). It is up on a hill overlooking an amazing view of Tirana. They always invite any senior missionaries that haven’t been there yet to join them. Finally, this time our scheduled allowed for us to go and it was awesome. This transfer both of our elders got transferred out, one to be an assistant to the president and the other one got transferred to Kosovo. At this meeting the trainers also come and this is where our mission president announces who will be training who. So, we met the elders that would be coming to Berat, the trainer and the new elder. This place ended up being a location we brought our kids to see whenever they came to visit. This month our district president and our mission president started a new program where each senior elder was assigned another branch to visit their sacrament meeting once a month and give a talk and then stay for second hour and then meet with the elders quorum and relief society presidents. We were assigned to visit the Fier branch which is about an hour away. We are good friends with the senior couple that lives in Fier so we were excited about this assignment and the branch albeit very small is so sweet. We finished up our audits in Pogradec and Korçë and decided to drive there the winding backroads way which was slower but very scenic and beautiful. We love going to these branches and cities, meeting with some branch members and getting to know some of the other young missionaries in the mission. We typically take the young missionaries out to lunch or dinner after the audits. Our favorite city is Korçë and we love the darling hotel we stay at there and the hosts. They serve the best traditional breakfast in all the land. We celebrated Don’s 62nd birthday this month with our branch president at a yummy agritourism restaurant in the mountains surrounding Berat.
MARCH – There are two big celebrations in March in Albania. First, Dita e Nënës, which is basically Mother’s Day and is celebrated on or around March 8th in conjunction with International Women’s Day. We had a branch party for all the sisters in the branch. Then on the 14th is Dita e Veres, which means Days of Summer, even though its spring! We’re thinking that they don’t really differentiate between spring and summer and it is just a celebration of warmer weather coming…? Albanians do not like to be cold! During most of March you will see flower decorations, signs and banners all over the cities. You see stands all over that sell red and white striped bracelets and some places wrap red and white fabric on tree trunks. Elbasan made the traditional treat of the celebration popular. It is called Ballokume and the way I describe it is basically if cornbread and a snickerdoodle without cinnamon had a baby it would be ballokume! It is a great treat to dunk in hot chocolate or if you are Albanian to dunk in coffee! You see ballokume stands all the time along the street in Elbasan but they show up in March in other cities as well. It’s also in early March that the Muslim month of fasting, Ramadan (in Albanian it is called Ramazan) begins. They fast from sunrise to sunset every day for a month. We were in a restaurant once when some Muslim ladies came in to break their fast at dinner and they rolled out their prayer mats and knelt and said some prayers before eating. We were in a city park on the day in April when they break the fast and it was a huge celebration with catered food boxes. We loved seeing all the Muslim holidays and celebrations and hearing the call to prayer 5 times a day! In March we had back to back visits from some of our kids. First, Dalton and Sarah, and as soon as they got here, in the airport parking lot they announced that Sarah was pregnant with baby #2! Poor Sarah was not feeling the greatest because she was barely in her first trimester so we changed our itinerary as much as possible to not have to go on too many winding roads (very hard to find any that aren’t). But we were still able to show them some highlights. With them we got to show them all that Berat had to offer, they attended District Conference in Elbasan with us where they got to meet the Aurases. Sarah served her mission in England with the Auras’s son and daughter in law! They got to eat at our favorite restaurant, Kondor 2, in Elbasan, then it was off to Gjirokaster (but the castle was closed), the Blue Eye, Sarandë, Butrint and then Vlorë. We ended the trip with them in Tirana where we showed them the dedicatory sight at the martyr’s cemetery, Skanderbeg Square and the walking tour of Tirana. We dropped them off at the airport, stayed overnight in Tirana, and then the next morning picked up Zach, Tara and Porter at the airport and then did a lot of the same trip but in reverse order. They didn’t have quite as much time so we didn’t get to hit as many places with them. But when we were in Tirana we took them up the gondola to Mt. Dajti, then to the dedication sight, then the Tirana walking tour and Skanderbeg Square. We went to Gjorokaster but they got to go to the castle. Then the Blue Eye and back to Berat and all the Berat things. They got to go to branch night and Porter and Zach played ping pong with the members, they attended a sacrament meeting in our branch and Tara sang a song, I Know That My Redeemer Lives, for a musical number, which we never have, and the members loved it! Especially, because she sang the last verse in Shqip (Albanian). The elders went over how to pronounce the words and she practiced it a couple of times and pretty much nailed it! It was fun having Porter! We played several games at our apartment and before they left they hid 200 tiny multi colored plastic ducks all over our apartment so we could try to find all of them! We eventually did (there were some funny places). We were down to only finding one and it had been a long time since we found any. When we were cleaning out our fridge and freezer before coming home there was one in the freezer! We fed them and the elders an early dinner of Shrimp Gumbo and cornbread and then it was off to drop them off at the airport so they could catch a very early flight the next morning. It was a crazy whirlwind couple of weeks but such a delight to share some of the things we love about Albania and the wonderful people with them. Easter was at the end of March this year. We had a nice branch Easter gathering for branch night. In these parts they dye their Easter eggs a bright dark red and Edlira, the Relief Society president dyed a bunch of them and brought them to our branch night.
APRIL – We didn’t get quite as good of a turnout for General Conference this time as last time. Maybe because we didn’t offer a meal after one of the sessions like we did last time! Sad, but probably true. Conference at home is something I really miss here. It is impressive that our amazing translators in Tirana can translate it for our Albanian brothers and sisters. We made our traditional April conference brunch of a Dutch Baby for dinner for the elders and then they watched the Sunday morning session with us at 6:00 pm. Then at 10:00 pm Don and I watched the Sunday afternoon session and were so excited that they announced a temple for Cincinnati! We had a finding activity in Fier this month because their branch is super tiny. Several districts of young missionaries and the Aurases came for this. The Ellsworths invited us to go with them to a hospital in Gjirokaster for them to follow up on a project and to put the church’s stickers on some of the equipment. They had Don take photos and had me put the stickers on the equipment that was donated (to make us feel important haha!). We met an amazing doctor that they had been working with who knows English and she had arranged for a meeting with the director of the hospital and the Ellsworths invited the young elders that were serving in Gjirokaster to join us at the meeting. And they ended up eventually teaching the doctor the missionary lessons and she was eventually baptized! Good on the Ellsworths for inviting them to the meeting! On the way home we stopped to see Permet, a town that is famous for a thermal spring. Then we also drove past two beautiful coastal beach towns, Borsh and Himare. Later in the month the Ellsworths arranged a pday with any senior missionaries that wanted to join them at the Tirana Zoo. The zoo wasn’t that impressive but it was a fun day in Tirana with other senior missionaries. And we tried Burger King for the first time while on our mission. I only got fries which were okay but Don said that the hamburger tasted pretty much like Burger King in the US. Red poppies were popping up all over Albania this month and into May. The red poppy is Albania’s national flower. The Senior Conference this year was in Korçë. We stayed at a hotel in Korçë. The first day we went on a little day trip to a monastery in North Macedonia along Lake Ohrid called Sveti Naum where we went on a boat tour, explored the monastery grounds and had lunch. The next day was Sunday and it was the Korçë branch conference. Then we all went to the big cross on the top of a hill. We had been there several times before, once when we were there on an auditing trip and another time with Landon and Ashlin when they were visiting. Then there was an activity with a senior couple serving in the area offices who are mental health missionaries. Then a yummy dinner back at the church made by Sister Manwaring. The last day we went on a city walking tour and then had a byrek demonstration back at the church and then ate the byrek for lunch before all heading home. It was fun to be with the other senior missionaries. Like I said before, Korçë is probably our favorite city in Albania. At the end of the month for p-day we met the Gomms, our missionary friends serving in Fier, in the beautiful mountainside city of Krujë, which is famous for its castle and is the birthplace of Skanderbeg, a national hero. It was so fun to spend the day with them exploring this historical city.
MAY – Elder Wach, who served in Berat with us when we first got here and then later finished his mission, came back to Albania with his parents and when they were visiting in Berat we had them over for dinner. We really enjoyed seeing him again and meeting his lovely parents! We decided that we needed to start seeing some of the sights that were on our Albania bucket list on pdays since we are down to only 6 months left on our mission. We usually do the regular pday things of laundry, cleaning our apartment and grocery shopping on pdays but decided that we can do any or all of those things on any given day (we don’t have the same rules as the young missionaries) so we needed to get out and see as many things as we could. A lot of them are close enough to just be a day trip so this month we went to Bogove Falls, Skrapar (also known as Çorovodë) and Osumi Canyon, where the Osumi River runs through the bottom of the canyon and there is a tourist industry for raft trips down it. The Osumi River is the river that runs through Berat. Earlier in our mission we took a drive on the road along the mountains that are on the other side of the Osumi River from our apartment and the road dropped us into a cute little town called Dimal. We were telling our elders about it and they had never heard of it even though it is in their proselyting area so we had them come with us to check it out and it is the cutest little town with a darling town center plaza and cool murals on their buildings. The elders discovered when we went there from talking to some people that there are no churches or mosques in the town. Looks like they have their work cut out for them there! Towards the end of the month we went on another extended pday sightseeing trip, this time to Tropoje to ride the ferry on Lake Komeni and see Bajram Curri and Valbona was spearheaded by the Ellsworths for any senior missionaries that wanted to come. The Ellsworths have done a lot of service projects in this area of the country and they knew where all the cool places to see. To get to the destination, which is in Albania, the main nice freeway and quickest way to get there involves crossing the border into Kosovo for a little bit and then back across the border back into Albania. The Gomms rode with us and we left a little earlier so we could make a stop in Prizen, Kosovo, a city on the border that we had driven past a couple of times on our auditing trips and I had always wanted to check it out because we had heard it was cool and is referred to as the city of a thousand mosques. So that’s what we did and I’m so glad we did! We hiked up to the castle in the city and at the top was an amazing view of a ton of mosques. I don’t know if there were really a thousand but on the way back down from the castle all the mosques went off at the same time with their calls to prayer. It was amazing! We then met all the other seniors in Gjakovë, Kosovo at the Skidmore’s apartment. They are the humanitarian couple for the countries of Kosovo and North Macedonia and have places to stay in both countries. Their apartment in Gjakovë has a fantastic view of the city and is pretty much the nicest senior apartment in the mission. We then all caravanned back into Albania and met at our hotel in Bajram Curri/Tropoje. The hotel was on a beautiful river. The next day we caravanned to a gorgeous mountain area called Valbona, which they call the Albanian Alps. Then it was onto Lake Komeni for a ferry ride. There was beautiful scenery on the river but unfortunately there was a portion of the lake that was full of litter which is a common thing in Albania. It was a fun trip and nice to spend time with some other senior missionaries. After a district council meeting in Elbasan we needed to go to the TEG (a mall on the end of town in Tirana) and while we were there we met the Ellsworths to go to the movie, IF, and had dinner at Burger King. The second time for both those things since we’ve been in Albania. While there I had another tooth that had a piece break off (this happened earlier in the mission too). We got back to Berat that night and then found out that I could get into a dentist the next day back in Tirana for that and ended up staying overnight because we had a farewell luncheon the day after that for the Brewers as well as a Sisters Conference that we were going to be helping with the day after that. While staying in Tirana we finally walked up the Tirana Pyramid (a building built originally by the widow of the heinous communist dictator, Enver Hoxha’s wife, then it became a museum and now it is some kind of school) on our morning walk one morning. It was a busy end of May going back and forth between Berat, Elbasan and Tirana.
JUNE – In June we got to attend two baptisms in the Elbasan branch and then Laver was finally baptized in the Berat branch. The elders have been working with him for over a year. He is from a town about a half hour away from Berat called Kuçovë. The elders had found a friend of his and when they started teaching his friend, Laver and another guy started coming to the lessons and church as well but eventually the original guy and the other friend stopped participating but Laver kept coming. He is the kindest man and we were so happy we could be here when he was baptized! One evening we had a “Primary/YW” with our branch president. He wanted to go into town with them, get them dinner and then buy them all some new shoes. The four kids that went are from VERY poor families. It was very sweet and they loved it. We did another fun extended pday activity this month, spearheaded by us. We went to Vlorë and took a speedboat ride out to a water cave where they anchor the boat for 25 minutes and we got to get out and swim around in the refreshing Adriatic seawater. It was very salty and buoyant. Then we got back in the boat and they dropped us off at a beach for a few hours and then back to Vlorë. It was super cool and fun but not quite as glamorous as it sounds. The place where we got on the boat looked like it was in a boat graveyard full of old rusted boats with litter all around. Like I mentioned before, Albania has a lot of litter issues (and many other issues), which is so disappointing because it is such a gorgeous country and they are really trying to encourage tourism and they have hopes to be in the European Union but have a long ways to go before that happens. The Gomms finally came to Berat on a pday so we could show them around to all the things. We love them so much and are grateful for their friendship. The Ellsworths also came one day to go to a disability center with our branch president so he could translate for them about a possible project and then we went out to eat and then showed them the town of Dimal that I had mentioned earlier. I love that cute little town! There was an Elders Conference in Elbasan and we helped with the blood drive that the Ellsworths had arranged. We stayed overnight in Elbasan and the next morning we discovered a cool park we’d never noticed before and walked the whole thing for our morning walk. It wasn’t very maintained which is common in Albania. From what we’ve heard, even though things were terrible during the Communism years, the cities and parks were all clean and maintained. Not so much nowadays, unfortunately. At the end of the month our branch had a Relief Society/YW/Primary girls beach day. Our branch president came also and he arranged for a private “furgonë” to take them. It started on one end of town to pick up the sisters on that side of town and we went to the stop in our neighborhood where it picked up the sisters from our end of town and we gave them a cooler full of waters to take with them. Then we later picked up some sandwiches from a bakery and brought them to the beach at lunchtime and spent the afternoon with them. The beach was about an hour away. The sisters loved it.
JULY – There was a farewell lunch for the Longs (office secretary and nurse and later MLS in Prishtina, Kosovo) and the Cottles (YSA) in Tirana and afterwards we went with the Gomms and the Ellsworths to see Lake Bovilla, another thing on our Albania bucket list before we go home. It is pretty close to Tirana. It is a beautiful lake and it was a fun time with the Gomms and Ellsworths. I had mentioned back in January that we had gone to a disability center in Berat with the Ellsworths and had talked about doing a service project there with the elders and sisters in our district. Well, we finally got the chance to do that. In the entrance of the facility they had had someone paint a mural. We were admiring it and the director told us that she wanted a certain saying painted along the top of it but that the artist had told her there wasn’t enough room. Well, I had Ashlin print the saying up on a format that I could get made into a vinyl lettering situation (but the opposite where it’s made into a stencil) which I did and the sister missionaries helped us get that done while the elders went into their courtyard and pulled weeds and spent some time with the residents, one of which was celebrating his birthday so they danced the valle (Albanian traditional folkdance). We taught Institute for the last time before they have their summer break. We decided to make a weekend of it and stayed in the senior apartment (the mission had continued renting it after the Cables left and we had access to it if we ever wanted to stay overnight on Friday nights). The next day we drove to Lushnjë, which is about halfway between Vlorë and Berat, to go to the baptism of Teftë, the sister of the branch president of the Lushnjë branch. But then we came back to Vlorë because we wanted to feed the young missionaries (a set of sisters and a set of elders) dinner and we also wanted to stay over and attend the Vlorë Ward at least once while we were here and to say goodbye to the members we had met and grown to love. We had a great time with the missionaries and loved visiting their sacrament meeting. It was fast and testimony meeting and I bore my testimony and our translator for Institute, Klea, translated for me. I still hadn’t quite memorized it yet. It was a lovely weekend and we will miss all of the YSA’s and other members there. The Manwarings, the MLS couple in Korçë, came to Berat on their way home from our zone conference in Elbasan for us to show them around Berat. Earlier this year, our branch president got a call from someone in charge of 29 BYU students who were going to be touring in Europe and were going to be in Berat this month and asked if they could come to our branch’s Sunday meetings. Of course, our branch president was all excited about this, as were we! After branch night on Saturday we grabbed every chair we had in the building and got them all set up and it was so great to have our chapel totally filled on Sunday. They more than doubled our regular attendance. One of the students gave a talk, another one played the piano and another one led the music. Then for second hour one of them taught the Sunday School lesson. That evening, President Rakipi, our branch president gave them all a walking tour of Berat. The members loved having them and President Rakipi loved playing tourguide! Audit season began again in the middle of the month. A lot of the branches have young elders as branch presidents and in three of these branches the elders were going home in a couple of weeks so we wanted to make sure that we audited them right away before they left so we started with Fier, then Pogradec, where both of the branch presidents are two of the ones going home. We also got Korçë done while up that way. Then we headed to Skopjë, North Macedonia, because that is the other young elder branch president who is going home. Not only was he going home but all but one of the four that were there were also going home. There are awful visa issues with the misisonaries trying to get into North Madedonia so our mission is constantly praying that the missionaries waiting to come will get their visas. While in Skopjë we finally went up to the big cross on the top of a hill that looks over the city. Every time we’ve gone there we have wanted to go up there but always ran out of time but time is running short so we did it this time. It’s huge and there is a fantastic view of the city from up there. We got to have dinner with the Skidmores and all the young missionaries and also got to have lunch with the Skidmores and see the cool little duplex they live in when they are in Skopjë. It is the original place where the original members of the church in Skopjë met for church and when then Elder Nelson was there to dedicate Madedonia in 2010 for missionary work he sat in a rocking chair that is still in the house so it’s a thing to get a picture of yourself sitting in that rocking chair! We hit Gjakovë, Kosovo for their audit as well on this trip with plans to come back to Prishtina in August because the branch president wasn’t in town at this time. Shortly after we returned from that big auditing trip we did the audit of the Lushnjë branch. Later in the month we found out that both our elders were leaving. We knew that one was ending his mission and was going home but we found out that the other one was getting transferred and they were going to be replaced with sisters!!!! They are darling and hit the ground running the second they got here! A few days after they got here, Elder Grant Anderson, who just left and is going home and Elder Wright, who served here earlier, who is also going home came to Berat with their families who were picking them up and we had a party for them and for the branch members to welcome the sisters at our branch night. At the end of the month the sisters helped me make a video to post on Facebook showing how to get to our church building. The plan was to have the members repost it to all of their local FB friends in Berat but I don’t know if that ever ended up happening so it might have been all for naught. But I tried!
AUGUST – We needed to do the audit in Prishtina, Kosovo and the Ellsworths happened to have a few days between projects and they had never been to Prishtina, Kosovo or Skopjë, North Macedonia so they came with us! We enjoyed showing them around and they had looked up some things in Prishtina that we hadn’t seen yet so it was fun to experience that too. After the audit in Prishtina we headed to Skopje and on the outskirts before we got there we went to the Skopjë Aqueduct, a place the Skidmore’s told us about and it was really cool. Then when we got to Skopjë we walked around the city including going to the church where we met up with the elders. Last time we were there three of the four elders were going to be leaving in a few weeks. When that happened the one elder that was left went to Gjakova, Kosovo to be in a trio with the two elders there until the elder who was waiting for his visa to North Macedonia got there. Shortly before we came this time he had arrived so we were able to meet him. And, in the meantime an employee from the State Department at the American Embassy that had just moved to Skopjë was called as the new branch president so we got to meet him and his darling family while we were there! He had actually been with the American Embassy in Prishtina ten years ago and knew fluent Albanian and then prior to coming to Skopjë the State Department gave him a year of studying Macedonia and he knew it fluently by the time he got there! Plus he served his mission in Bulgaria so knows Bulgarian fluently as well. He and his family are going to be such a blessing to Skopjë. When we stay in Skopjë we usually stay at the Marriott but since this was our last time we decided to stay in what the missionaries call the “Boatel”. It is an old boat on the river that runs through the center of the city that they made into a hotel. We went to church the next day and it was amazing. While we have been on our mission the Book of Mormon was just barely been translated into Macedonian and prior to that they used the Serbian Book of Mormon since it was the closest to Macedonian. They also recently translated the Doctrine and Covenants (which directly translated is “Learning Covenants”) and the Pearl of Great Price (which directly translated is “Precious Pearls”). The Bible they use in Macedonia is in Serbian. None of the bibles in these countries are the King James versions. We were there for fast and testimony meeting and the new branch president translated for whatever language they were given in because some people speak Albanian too. And in Sunday school he just easily translated the lesson given in Macedonian to us in English, no pausing or questioning anything. While we were in Sunday school the branch president’s wife was teaching primary to just her kids (there are no other young families with kids in the branch) and it was so fun to hear them sing primary songs! After church when we got to our car in the parking garage our car had a flat tire so Don and Chris had to put on the spare. The Skidmores had us over for a delicious dinner and Donna got to sit in the “President Nelson” rocking chair and I sat in it again too! Elder Skidmore “knew a guy” that we could get our tire replaced so Donna and I visited with Kristi while the guys all went to get that done. An “ox in the mire” situation! That evening the branch president had us and the elders come to their beautiful house for cookies and to visit. It was the best Sabbath day! On the way home we stopped at the St. John of Kaneo church on Lake Ohrid (pronounced Okrid) in Ohrid, North Macedonia. There are more things to explore in Ohrid I wish we could have seen. It is famous for how many churches it has and is referred to as the Balkan Jerusalem. North Macedonia is more Christian than Muslim. We went back to Elbasan to drop off the Ellsworths and stayed at Hotel Guri, our go to when staying in Elbasan. We stayed overnight because our district council meeting was in Elbasan the next day and we also did the audit of the Elbasan branch after that. When we got back to our apartment we found that we had been “heart attacked”. At branch night while we were gone, the sisters had all the members write us notes on hearts and then they brought Visent, the sweetest 11 year old boy in our branch to help them tape them to our front door. So sweet! We had to renew our Albania resident card and we had to go to Vlorë to do that. We met up with Marcel who lives in Tirana and who helps all the missionaries do this and many other things and we took him to lunch afterwards. While in Vlorë we made a down payment on another speedboating adventure we had scheduled for September when Caleb and Mollie are going to be here. Then we took a drive down the coast to a modern new resort development called Green Coast Village near the town of Palasë which is between Vlorë and Himare on the Adriatic Sea. Posts kept popping up in my Instagram feed about it so I had to go see it. Then we went back to Vlorë and met up with Duane and Carma Thompson for dinner. They are a Canadian couple that decided to go to a foreign country for a year while their youngest son was serving the last year of his mission. They just wanted to find a branch they could serve in for a year and chose Vlorë! There hasn’t been a senior couple assigned to Vlorë since the Cables left over a year ago. Even though they aren’t full time missionaries they will be filling that void while here. Duane was called as the first counselor in the bishopric and Carma as the Relief Society president! They are a wonderful couple and will be such a blessing to the Vlorë ward. After dinner this couple walked up to us and the girl had recognized our name tags and told us that she was from somewhere in Europe (as of the time of writing this I can’t remember exactly) but told us that she had lots of friends who were members of our church. We had a nice chat with her and her boyfriend. We had made friends earlier in our mission with some Peace Corp workers from America. We were at dinner at one of our regular haunts, Anxhelo’s, and noticed that these two guys were speaking English a few tables over but their accents were not British or European so when they got up to go pay their bill I motioned them over and we had a nice long chat with them. One of them was stationed in another city in Albania but the other one lived in Berat. He had a girlfriend that was also with the Peace Corp but during the week lived in another city but came to Berat on the weekends. We exchanged numbers and we later had him and his girlfriend over for dinner with the elders one night. This month we met them for dinner at one of their favorite places in Berat and had a nice visit. We had a fun pday this month with our whole district just exploring “our” castle. Our sisters hadn’t been up there yet and most of the others in the district hadn’t been there yet either. Back in June when we did our speedboat adventure we noticed a monastery on the coast as well as a lighthouse. We had to go back to Vlorë to pick up our renewed residency cards so while we were down that way we checked out a couple of things we had noticed back in June when we went on our speedboating adventure. There is a monastery and church called the Monastery and Church of St. Mary of Divinity on the shore as well as a lighthouse so we explored those before heading back to Berat. One morning we got our sister missionaries to go on our morning walk with us and we finally went up to a cute little church, St. Michael’s Church, on the side of the hill along the main drag of Berat that we’ve taken a bunch of photos of during the time we’ve been here. Don had hiked up to it once when he walked one morning without me but I had never been. We also showed them the cute hotel that our landlords were just opening up which wasn’t too far away from the church, which ended up being where we stayed the last few days we were in Berat! At the end of the month we did the audit of the Elbasan District, which was our very last audit EVER!
(Currently typing up the rest to be posted soon)
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