Letter from Mission President

Dear Brother and Sister Alldredge:

I am happy to inform you that  Elder Cameron Todd Alldredge  has been called to serve as a senior companion in the Hungary Budapest Mission. He is a diligent and effective missionary and has demonstrated great enthusiasm for the work and a love of God and the Hungarian people.

I am delighted to have Elder Alldredge  take on this new responsibility and know that it will be a growth opportunity for him.

It has been such an enjoyable experience for Sister Smith and me to serve with Elder Alldredge. Thank you for your ongoing support while he continues to serve the Lord in Hungary. 



Warmest regards,

LOWELL V. SMITH

Mission President

Week 30 in Hungary (Feb. 19-25, 2013)

Sziasztok Mindenki!

After a sad departure from Elder Smith, I brought Elder Christensen back to Pécs and we've been hard at work ever since! He's in his third transfer and he's a super stellar guy. He's probably the most chilled and relaxed guy I have ever met but he's been super great to work with so far! We were miraculously able to pull off another week with super standard! It came through a lot of miracles while tracting.

On the day of transfers, a group of us missionaries went to a famous all-you-can-eat-buffet in Budapest. Good earth, it was so good. Those kind of places are very rare. It was super awesome though! I tried some shark for the first time. 

So get this! On our way over to this internet cafe, a car pulled up along side us and the man inside asked us if we spoke Hungarian. We came to his window and I said, "Igen, beszélünk Magyarul." (I just put that into google translate and it completely messed it up haha) Anyway, it means "Yes, we speak Hungarian." and he said, "great!! Where is your guys' meeting house and when are your worship services?" so I gave him the information and before he drove away I got his contact info and told him we would love to meet with him and he agreed and said he would love if we came and taught his family!! Wow!!

This Saturday is the baptism for our investigator! I'm super stoked! It's been really stressful as the senior companion here because a lot of planning and things go into it but it's been a great experience. I'm really happy for him. 

For our youth night activity, we had a karaoke party. It was rad and it was a lot of fun to hear all of these Hungarian youth sing these English Disney songs. 

While tracting, we tracted into an 82 year old lady who was blasting Justin Bieber in her little apartment. I had to laugh and give her some bonus points for being awesome. She ended up letting us in and giving us her daughter's phone number and said she thinks that her daughter would maybe like to meet with us sometime.

One thing I really get a kick out of is when someone is answering our "survey" while we tract and say that they don't believe in a life after death after they have already exclaimed that they are a proud Roman Catholic. Or when we say, "hi! We're doing a survey!" and they say, "what's it about?" and we say, "it's about God and his relationship with us." and they reply to that with, "sorry, I'm Catholic." 

Anywho, be rad and read out of The Book of Mormon EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.

Szeretettel,

Alldredge Elder

 We have one of the oldest phones in the mission. This is the total amount of call time that is on it. It equals about to be half a year of being on the phone!!

 Saying goodbye to Elder Smith

 The Pecs Gang

 My new companion, Elder Christensen! And yes, he's always that smiley.

Week 29 in Hungary (Feb.11-19, 2013)

Sziasztok!!

Jó ég, ez volt egy csodalatos hét!

First off, we received our transfer calls today! Elder Smith is very sadly leaving me. It's a bummer but we knew it had to happen. BUT we finished off our last full week together with our fourth achievement of super standard in a row! I'll be honest, it's pretty unheard of! We're actually really positive it has never been done before! We have had some really really great experiences together the last few weeks. We have been absolutely blessed.

I am going to be staying in Pécs and my new companion is a really new missionary who just finished his second transfer. I'm super super stoked!! His name is Elder Christensen and I will have some more information about him next week!

It has been "Farsang" lately here in Hungary. It's a holiday similar to Halloween but it's in celebration of winter ending and spring coming. We had a little branch activity and everyone dressed up! It was awesome! I went as Inspector Gadget and Elder Smith went as someone in the Adjustment Bureau! Okay fine, maybe we didn't dress up... But the activity was loads of fun. The kids had their cute little costumes on and we all danced and played games. There was also a little costume parade around the branch house. What a fun holiday!

Elder Smith and I were able to set up another baptismal date this past week. He is actually the son of the man we have on baptismal date right now! It was our second meeting with him and he accepted the invitation to be baptized. So amazing! I'm really excited for him.

Another really neat thing that happened this week happened while tracting. We left our apartment and walked for about 20 minutes. We had no idea where we were and we got to a place that seemed like it wouldn't lead to anywhere. Nonetheless, we felt like we had to keep going. After a while, we came across some apartments and chose the one that felt the best. We buzzed for permission into the complex and then after we rang the first bell, the door was immediately unlocked for us. The lady had her door open when we got to her apartment and she invited us right in. (the following is one of those crazy stories about how someone was prepared by God to receive the gospel) Anywho, we met with this lady (she's in her 30's) and she was just absolutely golden!! She said she knows God answers prayers and she said, "I have been praying for God to show me a better way to live my life lately... I want to have a stronger relationship with him and I have been praying that he would show me the path I need to be on." We just about peed our pants and said, "we know that God has sent us as your answer." She replied with, "well then, I'm listening." WOW! The next hour and half was spent teaching her about the restoration and The Book of Mormon. I cannot even begin to type into this computer how everything played out. If everyone in the church were to experience something like that, there would be absolutely no inactives. It's indescribable.

Well, that's pretty much the summary for my week! I have to hurry back and get everything ready for the change that's happening tomorrow! I hope all is well with all of you. Become familiar with Christ's atonement and do so through the book God has supplied us with--The Book of Mormon.

Sok Szeretettel,

Alldredge Elder

 It felt like we tracted up a mountain side

 Farsang Party!

 Some random stairs we found while tracting.

 Cute little Leah on Valentine's Day

 I'm going to really miss serving with Elder Smith!!

 The missionaries and a few of the youth from the branch.

 A cute family we had FHE with last night.

Week 28 in Hungary (Feb.5-11, 2013)

 pizza party  in the apartment

 sweet tunnel we came across

Sziasztok Mindenki!

Hogy ment a héted? A hétem nagyan jó volt.

Before I forget, I will be emailing on Tuesday next week instead of Monday. We're getting our transfer calls and they've switched some things around.

So I don't know how, but my companion and I were able to achieve the mission's 'super standard' again this week! We figure we might as well go for week 4! Getting it just one time is hard enough, but 3 times in a row is unheard of. The only thing we have done is work our hardest. God has supplied and blessed us with the rest. We were actually asked to give a training in our zone conference about "using time effectively" because we have also been getting the zone goal of at least 10 hours of finding time (streeting and tracting) on top of getting 'super standard'. What a great experience! It's definitely set a standard for the rest of my mission.

We had something really rad happen while tracting this week. We felt like we needed to get onto a random bus that pulled up as we were walking. We rode it until we felt like we needed to get off, we walked until we felt like we needed to stop, we knocked on the door we felt we needed to knock on, and when the lady opened the door she said, "oh! please, come right on in!!" The following hour and a half was spent teaching her the Plan of Salvation and answering her plethora of questions. We're going to return tomorrow like she requested. Good earth, talk about incredible!

All four of us Elders visited a recent convert this week. She had bought us all a new tie! She was so excited and cute about giving them to us. They were actually pretty sweet too! Mine has some little turtles on a sailboat. Random, but awesome nonetheless! After the lunch she fed us, she brought out a cake that was made of 30 crepes staked on top of each other with chocolate in between each one. The darn thing was about 10 inches tall but SO good!

I don't know what it is, but Elder Smith and I have a good record of running into anti-mormons. On our way to a lesson this week, we walked past a little family walking and they turned to us and started talking with us. They were all Baptist and they invited us to their service they were going to right then. We apologized and said that we were actually on our way to a lesson. They said that they would love if we came to their service if for some reason it fell through. Well, as luck would have it, our lesson dogged us. We decided we would attend and experience the Baptist meeting. When we came in through the back, the entire place went silent, the pastor preacher guy stopped talking and just starred at us. Then EVERY one in the congregation turned to watch us come it. It takes a lot for me to feel awkward but that sure did the trick. We sat down by the people who invited us. They were SO happy we came. We sat there and listened to the sermon. It was actually super interesting. The meeting was all in English and they had a translator the whole time. (It was actually pretty great language study!) They read some things out of the Bible and we really did enjoy it! We heard about some of the different parables and what not. At the end of the meeting, a different pastor pointed us out and said, "we have some visitors today, if you boys will stick around, we would love to talk to and get to know you." They pray the exact same way we do. That was interesting. We talked with some of the really nice people sitting next to us and we were just asking them about their beliefs and how they do baptism and receive the Holy Ghost. It was really interesting and we hadn't said anything about what we believe. We didn't think that would be right  during their meeting. Afterwards we had people meet us and shake our hands. Everyone was super nice. The pastors and their wives were all from the U.S.A. and they were really really nice to us. This is where things get sour: the second pastor comes up to us and he's pretty much shaking. He starts some small talk and then pauses for a second before telling us that he doesn't like us around telling everyone lies and things of the devil. He used the church's full name and everything after that was just one anti-mormon statement after another. And he was NOT joking around. He really knew his stuff. I swear he got a degree in anti-mormon...ism. I cut in and said, "so, according to you and your beliefs, how is someone saved?" he replied and exclaimed, "well, when you accept Christ as your Savior and what he did on the cross." I smiled super big and said, "That's great!! I'm saved!!" his face fell harder than I've ever seen a face fall. I continued to say, "Really! That's super great news! You hear that Elder Smith? We accept Christ as our Savior and we know that only through him and his Atonement we can live with God again. We're totally saved! Really, thank you for your great news! And sorry, we actually have to get going, we have another meeting we need to head off to." and we walked away right then. We were proud of ourselves that we were able to get away from him without even arguing once. BUT attending that meeting was actually a really good experience for us. We were able to experience what it's like on the "other side" for our investigators. We found that having nice people coming up to meet you makes you feel really great and welcome. We also were able to feel what our investigators must feel sitting in a completely different way of worship while wondering what the heck is going on. We learned a bunch from it.

The fun doesn't stop there. We met with an old crazy lady who read our palms and said we had "the mark" which meant we were close to God. She said she could see the light of God shinning from out of our faces. She put her hands over my head and said I had some deep hidden sadness so she sent her good, healing energies to fix it. She told us that Christ's second coming already happened on December 21st last year. After an hour with such things of this sort, we asked her to say the closing prayer. (to our defense, we thought it would be normal because after we said the opening prayer, she said "yes! that's how prayers should be!!") Anywho, she just started with some deep breathing for about a minute then she started saying all sorts of strange things. She then put her hands on our shoulders and that freaked us out pretty bad. After the meeting, Elder Smith told me that he had prayed in his heart to God that he would send an angel to protect us from anything bad that could happen from whatever she was doing. As soon as he prayed for that she said, "one of you has just invited someone else into the room.... but it's okay, they are good." GOOD EARTH!? Talk about strange! After that she started rubbing my back trying to help my inner, deep sadness... It was extremely odd.

Nonetheless, my week was grand!! I hope all is well in the U.S.A. (fun fact, they say "oo-sha" here for U.S.A.)

Oh! And Happy Valentine's Day! I'm not around to make nasty cookies for anyone--count your blessings! And add one more to your week by reading from The Book of Mormon!

Szeretettel,

Alldredge Elder

Week 27 (January 28-Feb.4, 2013)

 The beautiful view.

 The Pécs Gang

 Pécs streets

 Some cool ruins we came across.

 City Lights!!

 McDonald's

 Awesome famous Church

 A random padded door?

 Tracting time

 Matching ties.

Szervusztok Mindenki!
Mi a palya??

Good earth! Another crazy week! We were actually able to achieve the
mission 'super standard' again! It came down to the very last few hours
last night. We've decided to go for it again this next week! Exciting!

During this week, the monthly cleaning lady came and deep cleaned our
whole apartment. That. Was. So. Rad. We thought we had been doing a
really good job on keeping it up, but it wasn't until the entire place
was absolute perfection that we realized how far we were from clean.

We were able to do a lot of tracting this week which is always a good
time. For some random reason this week, Elder Smith and I were asked
to sign the inside of a copy of The Book of Mormon by someone. Get
this, we were asked by three other people during the week to do that.
I've never done it before and then it happens four times in one week!
As we were writing our names, one older lady explained, "I'm going to
write my name in it after I read it, then give it to my children, who
will give it to their children, who will give it to their children!"
It was super cute.

Also while tracting, we came across a doorbell that said "Kovács
József" which directly translates to "Joseph Smith." We were super
excited, but the man who answered the door wasn't really having any part of
it. Just before he closed the door we yelled, "Wait!! There's
something funny we want to show you." He reopened the door and we
said, "This book we have was translated by a prophet whose name was
Joseph Smith... That's your exact name in English!" To our surprise,
he chuckled and said, "Really?? ...Can I read that book?" Ahhh... So
great.

We took a random bus and got off at a random stop this week and went
tracting at the first place we saw. We ended up going clear up the
side of a mountain and we tracted around some really nice, big houses
up on one of the hills. It was so rad! The view was so pretty. It's
been about 65 degrees this past week. Nice, sunny, and just beautiful!
We haven't even needed to wear our coats for a while. BUT we helped a
member move on Saturday and as luck would have it, that's when Pécs
decided to have a huge rainstorm. I have always wondered how
Hungarians move all of their furniture up and down the tiny, steep
stairs of their apartment buildings. Not only did I find out how, but
I was able to experience it... Yay for the 4th floor!

The senior couple for our area is taking Elder Smith and I out to
dinner tonight for getting Super Standard. We're going to Sushi!!
We're stoked.

It's already February! Wow, that's just crazy.

Really, things are going great for me here. The secret to the best
time attainable during a mission is work. It might sound cliche but
it's too true. We collapse on our beds every night unable to even think
straight. I wouldn't have it any other way.

The many pictures attached to this should be able to explain my
adventures for the past few weeks. Enjoy!

Read your favorite verse out of The Book of Mormon. Right about now
would be a great time.

Szeretettel,
Alldredge Elder