Missionary Work is so Exciting!

This is super English. This was my dinner last night. English people like to put beans on their toast. And when you say beans here, it means baked beans. You may be able to see that I threw some eggs in there as well. It was pretty tasty. 

 This is our phone. Until I got here, I didn't even know Nokia still existed. But it does here. They make some smart phones as well, but this certainly isn't one of them. This is basically the cheapest phone ever. For some reason we can receive text messages but can't send them. But that will probably change soon. 

 The Book of Mormon in Farsi! Keep reading to see why we have it. It looks just like the other ones, bound with the same blue cover and everything, but it isn't actually the full book. The translation isn't complete yet, so it just has the excerpts in it that are done. 

So about Paul, the less active guy we ran into a week ago...we started teaching him and his girlfriend! He knows the truth (well, most less actives do I have found) the struggle now will just be getting him back in the doors of the chapel. 

We had another amazing experience finding an awesome person this week. So there are these things called Media Referrals that we never get. Its where people enter on Mormon.org that they want a visit from the missionaries and the message is sent to our mission office and then from there to us. Every week my whole mission when we do our weekly planning we read this part of Preach My Gospel that says we need to make plans to contact media referrals and we think "man, it would be really cool if we actually got those." I hope you've figured out where I'm going with this by now. On Friday we were in our flat having lunch and we got a text message from the mission office. It was a media referral!!! It was pretty exciting. 

So, that evening we stopped by. Halmet (that's his name) let us right in. He was excited to see us. We weren't quite sure what to expect. But it turns out that he is a single father, and he has been looking for the best way to raise his 5 and 8 year old sons. He has been looking at things on the inter-net, and so he requested that we visit him. So we did. We saw him again on Saturday, and he brought his kids with him to church on Sunday. They absolutely loved it!  What a great miracle that we were able to come into contact with him!  He has kind of a crazy story. His family is from Kyrgyzstan, but he grew up in Iran. He had somewhat of a Christian upbringing though. Then he was in Iraq because he was working for the Iranian Democratic Party, which is way not allowed because Iran's gov. is run by Islamic law right now. So he was eventually caught and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. After a year however, he starved himself until he was so sick they had to take him to the hospital. From there, he escaped, and now he is here! That story is straight out of a movie or something - so awesome! Anyway, his English reading is not that good, he prefers to read in Farsi or in Kurdish. But t The Book of Mormon is not in Kurdish (yet--he may be one to help translate it, which is really exciting to think about. He actually already expressed somewhat of a desire to do so as well) and only some of the Book of Mormon is in Farsi. Thankfully, our Zone leaders had  a Farsi one, so we were able to get it from them and will be able to give it to him when we see him tomorrow! Missionary work is so exciting. I love it. 

Love, 

Elder Poulsen