Jay Family Missionaries

hey everybody, the shift function on this computer doesn't work; it's wierd that the computers here seem to have so many problems and limitations but even then the missionaries find a way to get around them.  actually i think this computer must be set up for a different language because it's really wierd.  anyway, one of the missionaries in our district got onto youtube on one of the computers this past week and he told all of us in the district; so we all told the branch president.  he got in lots of trouble but he didn't get sent home, but the branch president warned us that if anyone else got onto youtube they would get sent home.

i've sent home my memory card in a letter since jill said she was going to send me a package, so you can save all the pictures and then send it back in the package.  i just wanted you guys to have some of the pictures of me here in the mtc.  everything's going pretty good here.  it gets a little boring at times because we do the same thing all day every day, but it's not bad.

sometimes funny things still happen.  after someone sneezes you say sanatate, in romanian, but one time one of the sisters sneezed and the other sister said saptamana, which means week, and we all laughed.  then the teacher said it later on accidentally i think.  also, the verb 'to snow' in romanian is 'a ninje' and one time it was snowing and one of the sisters looked out the window and said 'ninja' and one of the teachers in the room was from romania, so she especially laughed really hard.

for one of the lessons we taught this week we went on what our teacher called j-dub exchanges where we switched companions so that they were elder-sister companionships and taught lessons to our real companions with them.  there are two elders that don't get along very well because one of them is extremely dominant but his companion was with one of mine; they taught us and it was one of the best lessons i have been taught, because the quiet elder was actually able to say things.  i was with elder rasmussen who is a lot like aaron olson, i think.  it was hard to transition between us at first but we caught on pretty quickly.

but i'm glad i have my companions and not anyone else's.

did i ever mention that in my companionship i am a stats major, sister hansen is a math-teaching major, and sister humphries is a number-theory math major?  we thought it was cool how we all got put together in a companionship because the other two sisters are majoring in stuff like communications.  one time when we were really tired of studying language we took a break for five minutes and derive the quadratic formula on the whiteboard in our classroom.  we erased it all but the next day when our teacher was writing on the board he could see where the math had been written and he told us we were crazy.

whenever we get breaks during class we walk past the rooms where the italian-speaking missionaries are.  when they talk to us in italian we can usually understand everything they say because our language is latin-based too.  they can't understand us as easily because of the slavic influence in romanian.  we have some russian-sounding words.  it's like the language that i'm learning is the one that's the mix between portuguese and russian, both languages that more than one person in our family speaks.

during the trc this week we taught investigators how to pray and helped them move.  we did great for helping them move, but i think we didn't do very well teaching them how to pray because we didn't work on that part as much, i guess.  the sentences we had planned were pretty long so we couldn't remember them without looking at our notecards.  so this week we have been practicing speaking only romanian to each other a lot more outside of class so that if we forget how to say something we can figure it out again instead of having to refer to notes.

yesterday our district played a game called 'nativul', 'the native' for the first time.  each person drew a paper and on one of them it said 'nativul,' and that person had to be 'the native' and not speak or understand english for the rest of the day.  i was the one who was 'nativul' yesterday (si nu am spus nimic in limba englezeste).  so tonight, because it was p-day today, everyone in the class will vote on who they thought was 'nativul' and whoever gets the most votes wins.  a lot of people seemed to have figured out that it was me.  i think it's fun to talk in only romanian though so i'll try to get the most votes when i'm not nativul too.

 

so far joni, mom, and jill & stewart have written me consistently every week, so thanks.  some of you guys i haven't gotten any letters from though.  tell jesh that he can send me letters from dearelder.com, and then when i'm in romania he can send me some real letters before he goes back to america.  i've been here for a month, so i only have about month left. i'm halfay.

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