Su Kaledomis

Merry CHRISTmas!

Well I guess i wont have to write much today because i will be talking to all of you on friday. I will just give you all a little update on what we did this week.
We started up english classes again. The other cities in Lithuania are all going to wait until after the holidays but me and Elder Anderson wanted to get right to work so I went and put some ads in the papers and we got things rolling. Since there are only two of us I will be teaching first class english by myself again. Elder Anderson will be teaching 2nd level. We met for the first time yesterday. I asked my class what they wanted right now for enlgish. THey said they want to be able to have basic communication skills and be able to understand alot of what people say. I told them if they commit to some rules they could do that i a month. They wanted to know how I learned to speak Lithuanian and they want to do THAT. So i said, " Ok if thats how you want to learn first things first, lets apply the first principals of the gospel." I told them that they must apply first FAITH. Then i said the need to humble themselves (subtle right?) A hardened heart can't learn to do anything. And then I put them on an SYL program. Anybody who has served a mission recently knows what that is. SPEAK YOUR LANGUAGE! They have to each speak English at least 1 hour each day. I wanted to make them do more but i am going to go easy for now. They are all really excited and i think we are all going to see some real progress.
Second thing that need to be taken care of this week was closing down an appartment. We had an apartment that nobody was living in. I needed to close one but before I did that I called the landlord of our current appartment and told him if he could cut our rent down I would just go ahead and close the other apartment with no negotiation. I dropped our monthly payments by 150.00 litas. I was excited about that for sure. THen came the fun process of closing down the other apartment. I know this might be boring but it just shows what kind of mission this is. Since there are so many languages people in the office can't take care of stuff like this so the missionarys do. THe part that made this difficult was the fact that my companionship has done the visa work for missionarys coming into the contry in THAT apartment. This means i have to transfer missionaries visa records to another appartment through the government. It's just a fun process ofr everybody but it is going to save the mission alot of money each month. And you all know i find this kind of stuff fun and interesting.
Something not so fun happened this week. Aurumas's step dad isn't being very east to work with. He is not allowing Aurumas to go to church as far as we can tell. We are still working with him. He still hasn't smoked or drank. YEA!
Me and Elder Anderson went to an orphanage yesterday. It was such a great expieriance. We sang for them and I juggled to SHeDAISY. Elder Anderson talked like Donald duck then I played a couple songs on the piano. I was way fun and the kids loved it. Afterwards we gave them a buch of candy. We have been eating potato soup the last few days so we could afford to buy all this candy for the kids and members. Me and Elder Anderson have committed ourselves to spending a lot less money because we really are taken care of very well. I have already contacted the director of another orphanage here in siauliai that we are going to go to with some members on Christmas. We are excited.
Well I guess I have turned a short email into a long one. Sorry. I will talk to you an Friday.
Love you!!!


Elder Cooke