Elder Udy Serves Hungary: I am excited to teach him how to survive in the Hungarian missionary world

March 18, 2019

Jó reggelt! (Good Morning)

It has been great being here in Pápa, the smallest city in the mission, and away from the mission office. On Wednesday we arrived in Pápa, and we had to walk 2 kilometers with all of our suitcases from the train station to our apartment which was a pain.

Train station in Pápa

My companion is Elder Gardner, who just arrived to Hungary last week. He is from San Antonia, Texas. It's been a while since I have been around a new missionary or have been a new missionary, so I sort of forgot what it is like. Being a new missionary can come with a lot of fear since they must try and do a lot of new things that they have never done before. I am excited to relive the new missionary experience through him and teach him how to survive in the Hungarian missionary world.

Pápa is a lot different from Budapest. It will be 6 or 7 in the evening and if you walk around the town for and hour you will only run into 4 or 5 people to talk to. But so far things have been going great here in Pápa. We hit the ground running as we tried to bring people into our teaching pool. Through area book work, street contacting, and tracting, we were successful in finding a good number of investigators in just a few days.

We had a great lesson with a former investigator who has been investigating for about 8 years. He previously struggled with the Word of Wisdom. But last year he was able to quit smoking which was a big step for him. The only small worries are that he said at times he will drink a cup of coffee and drink with his friends. He has a testimony of the Book of Mormon and has a desire to be baptized. His baptismal date is set for June 1st.

We had 3 investigators in church, the above mentioned being one of them. The other two were a man and a woman who moved from Mongolia to Pápa two weeks ago. The man lived in Hungary when he was younger, so he speaks Hungarian and translated for the woman during church. They seem very interested and we are excited to start teaching them.

Church was great. There were 30 of us. I thought I would escape having to translate church since I am now in Pápa, but the Schows were there, a senior couple in the office who come to Pápa about once a month, so I translated all of sacrament meeting and Sunday school for them. The members here are really great and supportive of the missionary work. They were really excited to see us because there hasn't been any missionaries here for a while. In August the elders got pulled out of Pápa and then starting the end of December there were sisters in Pápa for three weeks.

I didn't notice anything special on St. Patrick's day, so I don't think it is anything special here. As of now we probably won't be using google hangout next week. We email in a local library because the meetinghouse only has 1 computer, and I didn't see a video camera. But we can probably try and get one.

I am thankful for the opportunity to be here in Pápa serving the Lord, and I am excited to see what the future brings.