Transfers !!! Its been a busy week for the Greece Athens Mission.
Elder Teal has packed up Elder Tornar and sent him to Cyprus.
Just kidding, but the two of them have left Thessaloniki and flown to Athens. Elder Teal will be staying in Athens serving as the Zone Leader and training again, this time Elder Burton an American from Iowa. Elder Tornar has flown on to Cyprus to serve as a District leader.
Transfers and new missionaries, means there is lots of opportunities to meet old friends at the office as people pass through. New missionaries get to spend a day or two at the office for training and orientation with their new companions. It was like a mini MTC reunion for Elder Teal as Elder Peel and Elder Dixon are training too, so along with Elder Tornar they got to share a room overnight at the mission office.
In particular Elders Teal and Peel were reunited for a couple of days....
Old hands !
Not Fluent in Greek? The jokers decided to swap tags !
Elder Teal and his new companion Elder Burton.
About the move.
"In case you haven't already heard, I'm in Athens again! I'm training Elder Burton, and we're in Agios Dimitrios. I'm also the Zone Leader for the Greece Zone! I'm looking forward to the opportunity! It's been good so far, although it's only been a couple of days. For most of the week I was in the office waiting for my new companion and then having the orientation with him when he arrived. We got into the area on Saturday, and I don't know anything about it really so we're still finding our way around. Everyone says it's a great area though so I'm looking forward to being here!"
"... the plane from Cyprus had arrived with Elder Dixon and Elder Peel who will both be training. It was good to see them, especially Elder Peel whom I haven't seen for a long time! And it was good to be able to have a real conversation with him in Greek, as at the beginning we couldn't really speak to well. He speaks really well now, and its interesting to see how he has Cypriot figures of speech and I have Thessalonian, or more generally Greek as their isn't a very strong dialect or accent in Thessaloniki"
".. Elder Peel and I still have the same sense of humour and had a lot of fun catching up. Hopefully at some point we will serve together, or at least in the same country, but saying that we will probably swap countries in the next transfer Ha Ha
" Elder Burton was understandably a bit nervous but also excited to talk to real Greek people. The first women we started a conversation with gave us her name and phone number, which was absolutely great, and a good start to the transfer . We continued to talk to people and it went fairly well. Elder Burton said people talk a lot faster than he expected them too! I remeber in the begining when I couldn't really understand what people were saying at all, and it wasn't fun. He did really well though and didn't have a fear to talk to people which was great."
"......just before we had to finish finding we decided to knock on a door right near our house. They immediatly invited us in and asked us to sit. It was a young Georgian family with a small son. We didnt have time to teach a lesson as we had to get home, but we introduced ourselves, gave them a copy of the Book of Mormon and set an appointment with them for tomorrow evening..."
