Drake's Mission in Poland: Tons of Ties and a Turtle

Me with Jan's pet turtle.

Dear Mom,

Ok! This week I actually have some time to email! so here I go! :)

As you know, I am in Kraków. It's a pretty cool city. The branch is pretty small but bigger than Poznań's. The branch president's name is Andrzej Kucia and he has been a member for about maybe 10 years. He is in his 30s, unmarried, and is a dentist! Our newest member of the ward is a 50 year old man named Jan. (Pronounced yawn) He got baptized two days before I got here. So he is the recent convert that we have been working with a lot. We meet with him almost everyday. He is absolutely obsessed with Indians. Like Native Americans. That's what got him so interested in the Book of Mormon in the first place. He is pretty cool. He paints. We went over to his house an there was a turtle walking around on the ground. It is his pet. His room is covered with American Indian stuff and paintings of Indians, that he drew. Last week, he gave us a painting of his of a shipwreck. It is now hanging in our apartment. I will send a picture.

Painting from Jan

We went to Auschwitz a week ago. I sent a voice recording about that and the guy I talked to. It was all very interesting and very surreal. It felt like I was inside a history book or in a documentary. I think that maybe Grandpa would think that was interesting.

When I was in Warsaw, there was a member named Marcin Gałecki. I talked about him in a voice recording once. He is the one that loves temples. When he heard that I was going to Kraków, he told me to visit his uncle Marian Lisek, who lives there. So last week, we went to his address, and right when we got there, an old lady (maybe 90 years old) was opening the gate to the driveway. We asked her if Marian lived there. She said he did. I asked her if we could visit him. She said yes and let us in. I asked her if she was Marian's wife. She said yes. We went inside and Marian wasn't home yet. But she had us sit down and made us some raspberry tea and cookies. I asked her about her family and if she had photo albums. So she got out her photo albums and showed me the pictures of her family. Then Marian got home and we talked to him. We talked to them about the Restoration, the Book of Mormon and the Plan of Salvation. They are Catholics, but don't actually believe in it. We asked them if we could come back another time. So we returned a week later, and they were home and let us in. Marian is 90 years old, and is not healthy. He thinks he is going to die soon and doesn't really care about anything anymore. So we shared with them the Plan of Salvation and testified to them of what we know.

Marian and his wife.

I told him that I know there is a life after death. I told him that my grandma died a year ago and that I miss her so much. But that I know that I will see her again. I asked him if he would want that all to be true. He said, "Anybody would want that. But I just don't believe it." So we testified more. It turned out that they are just so old that they don't care about religion anymore and doesn't really matter to them anymore. Pretty sad. But we offered them service and told them that we may come back soon in the future to help them, check up on them, and see if there is any service we can do for them.

Zone Conference was 2 weeks ago. I got to see Elder Hubbard. That was cool. I was asked to give a special language presentation to the Zone about how to learn Polish. So I did that. Yup.

I bought frozen strawberries from the store today

So yup. That is what is going on right now. Oh! We also have an investigator named Kamil. He has been coming to our English course and he comes to church and institute. We had our first missionary meeting with him last week and taught him the First Lesson (The Restoration). It went well. He said that he will get baptized when he finds out that the Book of Mormon and the church. We committed him to read and pray. At the end of the lesson we knelt down and he said a prayer asking if the Book of Mormon is true. He wasn't in church yesterday because he was out of town. But we have a meeting set up for later this week. I translated for all 3 hours of church yesterday. Haha. After a few hours of translating your brain kind of is melted. haha. But it is really fun.

I think I am going to send a package home soon with some stuff. I have way too much extra weight. It makes transfers really hard. I have like way too many T-Shirts that I don't even wear. Oh, Elder Cieślak and Tingey actually just last week sent a package that I left in Warsaw that I didn't have time to send. So that should come soon. I don't even remember what is in it. But then I might send another package this transfer.

Guess what? I met a guy on the bus today from Los Gatos! Weird, right?

Alright. That's all folks! Love you!

Love,

Starszy Drake Allen

P.S. I think you will all like the voice recording today. haha. It's different than most.

Note from Renee -- In Drake's voice recording, he spent the whole time talking about his ties and which one each of us in our family would like best. (Missionaries wear ties 6-7 days a week, so they get into their ties :) ) It was fun to hear his reasons for why we would like each of them. And he even sent pictures to show us which he was talking about :)