Easter and Bosnians

Hello all fam and friends!!!!!!!

 

This week has been an interesting week. I feel like Easter just kind of creeped up on me from out of nowhere, and now it is over, but it was great!!! Tonight we are having a big Easter concert at church. I'll be singing a solo, consider the Lilies translated (perfectly finally) into Slovene, and we missionaries will be singing v Kristusa Verujem (I believe in Christ). It is going to be great!

 

Yesterday was a great day. We had a lot of people in church yesterday which was great. Afterwards we went to a member's house in the middle of nowhere and had a great traditional Slovene Easter dinner with them and the other Elders, Elder Lyman and Simon. It was great. We had an AMAZING Slovene salad and homemade mushroom soup with mushrooms they had gathered from the forest. Then the real meal, with ham (representing the body of Christ), horseradish (representing the nails/suffering), and hard boiled eggs (representing the tears). The eggs were dyed of course with different plant shapes on them. We also had Austrian schnitzel, chicken wings, rice, and potatoes. It was amazing! Then we had for dessert, a white cake with fruit and gelatin on the top, a blueberry cream in the center, and potica!! Potica is a traditional Slovene dessert they eat for Easter and Christmas. It's a bread, with either a poppy seed filling, or a walnut filling, that's wrapped into a spiral. It is amazing! It was a great day!

 

Otherwise, the work this week has been interesting. We had en exchange with the assistants in Zagreb which was exciting. Elder McAllister came up to Ljubljana to spend the day with me, and I'm pretty sure we found all the Croatian speaking people in our area. We had a great experience at the end of the day where we were sitting on some steps preparing some things to quickly advertise for English class before heading home for the night. So as we were sitting there, and a guy walked by us down the stairs saying, "Zdravo dječki!", meaning "Hello boys!"..... in Croatian .I told him that. Then, as we were finishing up, we started talking to a girl who wasn't too interested, but as we were finished talking to her, the same guy walked by again! We quickly stopped him before he got too far away and had a great conversation with him. He lived nearby, but was otherwise from Bosnia. We ironically gave him a copy of the Croatian book of Mormon though which Elder McAllister had on him, and he asked us three times to call him when he gets back to Slovenia in two weeks.

 

Otherwise all is well. I hope you all have a great week!!!

-Starešina Benson