Sister Gale in the Greece Region of the Adriatic South Mission

You'd think things might normalize out here a bit but this week was just as wild as ever! Ya never know what to expect!  Some here's some of the crazy stuff: • our front door key broke in the lock at 10:45 Tuesday night when we were trying to let Sister Reynoldson in because Sister Campbell was in the hospital and they wouldn't let Sis R stay. So sis R had to drive over and pick up the zone leaders who had some genius idea to hammer the spare key from the other side and pop the broken key out • 5 missionaries  in Albania were suppose to return home but their flights got canceled the day before and they are now detained indefinitely in the country. Already have an extra week in the mission field. Not sure what'd be going through my head if that happened to me • 3 new sisters from the UK were scheduled to arrive here Thursday  afternoon but they got deported by Germany... while all their luggage was kept in there too. Then Saturday they got flown through Sweden...

Elder   Uchtdorf reposted a video our mission made about how we've been doing missionary work since the quarantine on his personal instagram and facebook! We've got first hand apostle approval for the work going on here. That's pretty dang cool.  Everything country wise is back to normal now minus social distancing. Schools even started back up. We were out with our district walking around Μοναστηράκι on pday and some lady called us out saying we're gonna turn into America if we don't stand 2 meters apart since we were all standing together haha. We all kinda chuckled under our breath and nearly told her we were from the states, but then she might have actually freaked out, so we didn't.  Our Filipino members had us over for dinner Sunday night which was so enjoyable. I love the kinda, warm-hearted, friendly spirit they constantly have! Found out that one of the members, Cleo, had actually found and converted to the church in Hong Kong in 2000, just a fe...

Hey hey everyone! Been another good week here. A little more exciting than last because we were actually out and about visiting some members. Stopped to see Sister Thorton and her cute daughter, Abby. One of the American embassy families. They're busy packing up since they'll be moving to Australia mid July. We caught up with them as well as visit with Hedy and Lucy, our cute Filipino ladies. I'm not super close with the members here because I've spent majority of my mission in Thess, so it was really good to see them again. We'll be making our rounds with all of them these last 2 weeks before Sister Mathis goes home. We're allowed to visit or meet up with members or friends but still aren't allowed to do any street contacting. Saturday night we met up with Ana. I got to teach her when I served in Athens last and we all love her! She met the missionaries nearly a year ago now and still wants to get baptized but is still waiting on parental approval. Sh...

1st off NO I am not home but yes we have just turned into an instagram mission this past week. aka we got this "expanded access" update and have all social media and basically our phones aren't really restricted anymore like normal. It's weird having social media back but it's another way that friends and fam back home can be strengthened and uplifted by hearing about mission experiences! I'm not just a missionary for the people I serve here but also for all those I love back home! Well guys it's hecka hot and we might die of heat stroke before Corona gets to us. Some of the shops opened up and we went to Jumbo (dollar store rendition of IKEA) with the elders and loaded up on summer things to keep us sane everyday. Needless to say the office is now jazzed up with a basketball hoop and mini golf plus a pool may or may not have also been purchased. Senior couple isn't gonna recognize it if they ever come back haha. Our thing this week has been making...

Anddd back down to 2 in our companionship, we dropped Sister Stillo off at the airport bright and early this morning since she decided to return home. So now it's just Mathis and me... the dangerous duo you could say ;) There's tennis courts right across the church and sometimes we'll literally just stand and watch people play out the windows. We're not crazy I promise... just miss our sport a LOT. We really need to figure out where we can get racquets and hit the courts. We grabbed some extra mattresses and every night we always go up to roof where the stargazing is just...amazing. Every day basically feels like a pday in a way nowadays besides the calling home part. We're at the church with our district for the majority of our time making more FB ads, music videos, other content, or talking with some of our online contacts and its just super fun! (And this is expected to last till June 1st since that's hopefully when we'll be done with missionary qua...

Some more music videos in the works! So fun being able to hear GREEK efy songs for the 1st time ever. That's kept us all busy lately, shooting em is pretty fun since none of us our pros and we just gotta work with what we got. We get some great responses from the videos tho so it's good stuff ;) We're still working on getting more creative.  We also have decided that instead of putting on a live sacrament meeting for all the members and our friends each Sunday, that we'd just prerecord everything and make an "episode" kinda deal every week for anyone to watch church. Basically meaning we don't have to give weekly talks anymore and we can assign members to send in a video and we'll put it all together. Our 1st episode was a hit tho and we had 60ish members tune it! That's both Thessaloniki and Athens. But still, quadruple the normal amount we have each Sunday in the Thess branch! Makes me wonder how everyone else is doing church and if all the ...

*Whoops forgot to press send last week so ya get a double dose of Sister Gale this week!* ... Never thought I'd come to the point of enjoying being an "inside missionary" but hey, miracles exist. And we're a TRIO now! Sister Mathis joined us and man, she is literally part 2 of me haha. Same birthday, personality, both AMERICANS, tennis players, and ya... basically the same person at this point, love her! Someway and somehow we kept ourselves busy, with lots of techy, technical, technology stuff. Finished up the timelapse video I started last week and it turned out great! The scripture is Amos 3:7. Make sure to follow the prophet guys :))) Check out the vid HERE!  https://www.facebook.com/709990925689308/posts/3134049756616734/ Also tried to be creative and created another video with the goal of showing people we (missionaries) are just normal people with an extra special message! We've been encouraged to use our social media to the max and think of...