July 5th letter

Yay for USA's birthday! The Elders were lucky enough to get invited to a real 4th of July celebration thrown by a real American! A former missionary who is married to a Swede and has been living in California for the last few years was there on a long visit and decided the missionaries needed some real American celebrating. The Elders were fed hot dogs and hamburgers straight off the grill and it definitely reminded Elder Arko of good ole American celebrations. They also had some pasta salad and chips. The only Swedish thing they had was pear drink instead of some other type of soda. It was really fun for the Elders to sit and talk about the American way with the family that invited them over. Plus, it was right after a fast Sunday so it was a great way to break a fast.

Transfers are coming up at the end of this month. In about 3 weeks Elder Arko will probably know where he'll be heading. The way that these transfer things go down is pretty neat. Elder Arko has heard a few things about the President during his deciding time. One thing he's heard was from one of the last assistants and he said, "He's so.... Bound by the Spirit." He takes transfers very seriously and apparently a few years ago assistants did all of transfers or most of them, but President does almost all of them now. Since the assistants are suppose to be out with the missionaries and they talk with the zone leaders ever night, they usually have a large amount of contact with missionaries. Since they are in such close contact, they can help President with giving him information on how certain missionaries are doing and things of that nature. Oh, and the President also decides the group of Elders who will be training the new missionary arrivals. After he has an interview with the new missionaries, he assigns a trainer missionary to each new missionary based on how he feels. That's the gist of this whole transfer thing.

Elder Arko got the question, "Since you're in the office, have you had to deal with any problems?" That was a funny question for Elder Arko because that is kind of what they do in the office. They have regular stuff that they do and then they take care of all the extra stuff that needs to be done...which often includes a fair amount of problems. However, it's really not that bad, and since Elder Arko has been there for a little while he can usually figure out how to help most people. If he doesn't know how to help, he then pulls the "that's not my department" card and pass the buck, ha ha. Elder Arko would say they're problem solvers. Lucky for them, the Elders don't do any apartment inspections. They have all the couple missionaries do the inspections and Elder Arko believes they do that because they don't trust missionaries to rate missionary apartments honestly since they might be a little bias :)

Here's a little bit about Elder Arko's week. They had a Sister missionary training in Stockholm so the Elders had a fun time shuttling the Sisters from place to place and also getting them where they needed to be. It was really fun for Elder Arko to see all the Sisters in his group. They have also been out doing a good amount of missionary work and with an extra Elder in the office they've been able to double the work.

They have also started playing some sports on Saturdays. This week it was football! European football that is (Elder Arko knows his Dad just probably died a little inside when Elder Arko referred to soccer as football, but not to worry, it's a "when in Rome" kinda thing). So they got to play soccer and Elder Arko was a little bit sore from it the next day. It was quite the workout for him...and he even scored with a header shot :)

Well, that's all for this week kompisar (Buddies). He can't wait to hear from you all next week!