Jay Family Missionaries

Hello Everybody,

 

I've been here for a long time now.  We should be getting our travel plans today; they usually give them to the district ten days before they fly out so we should be getting them.  It seems pretty close now, but I feel like I can speak enough Romanian to be able to contribute to lessons when I'll be teaching with a senior companion so I feeling mostly ready to head out.

From what I've heard in our branch we are allowed to call home from the airport but I don't know if we are allowed to see anybody there.  Our branch president has changed since anybody I knew left though, so maybe he has a different policy.  I'll find out and let you guys know.

 

Last Sunday I saw Jill and Stewart walking around the temple.  I just went up to them and said "Good afternoon" and then shook their hands and walked away.  I felt kind of mean but that's what the MTC presidency told us to do.  Then I felt sad all day because I missed being with my family.  But then I felt better the next day.

 

There isn't going to be a missionary choir at conference this time, so I didn't have a chance to try to get into it.  Are you guys going to have an Easter-Conference party?  Easter in Romania is celebrated on the day that the Orthodox church celebrates it so it is a week after our Easter, but I will barely miss it.

 

I got the pictures from the Booth kids of what you guys planted in your garden this year.  They're pretty good at drawing.  I was thinking about planting a tomato plant in my apartment in Romania, but I would get transferred a ton of times so I would have to put a tomato plant in every apartement I lived in and then hope that the other sisters would take care of them and that I would eventually end up with one with ripening tomatoes.  But I can just get tomatoes on the street anyway, I just have to bleach them before I can eat them.  I've heard that the tomatoes in Romania are especially good too, because Romania is such good farming land.

 

So, I've been getting tired of having companions all the time, I was always really independent when I lived at home.  Part of it was because Sister Huphries would always ask what we wanted to do and she would use the singular 'you' to ask, so I figured she was just asking Sister Hansen because she always seemed to direct her questions at Sister Hansen.  But recently I've realized that she's just really bad at conjugating to the plural 'you' form of verbs (even though it's a lot easier so I don't know how she could be that bad at it).  So maybe she hadn't been exempting me from the question all along.  Anyway, so I've been making a point of asking and speaking in the plural conjugations so that she can learn.  We have never referred to any of our investigators formally so far, so I think we should practice before we get to Romania and offend people.

 

This week we did hosting for the new missionaries, so I got to be alone when I was walking back from escorting a sister to her new classroom.  It was cool to walk back by myself.  I went straight back, but it still felt awesome to not have a companion.  I think it wouldn't be so bad if I only had one companion instead of two, because I think that Sister Hansen and Sister Humphries are best friends and I'm the third one, that spoils their fun and gets serious when we teach our practice lessons (and forces them to plan for things).  So I get the feeling their getting sick of me too.  My nightmare is that I will be put into another threesome in Romania, especially with one of my old companions in it.  Just because we're tired of each other already.

 

The cool thing about Romanian is that because of the declension if you're not sure how to say something correctly you kind of just make the sentence rhyme.

For example these are the feminine forms of "she/they is/are my companion/s" and they have internal rhyme:

Ea este colega mea.

Ele sunt colegele mele.

The same thing happens with the masculine forms.

 

By the way, if you ever send anything to Romania when you address it don't put Sora or Sister before my name because that causes problems.  I didn't get any more explanation than that, so that's as much as I know.

 

Thanks for telling me about Rachel, Tom.  She is a friend of mine.

 

Love,

Sora Jay

 

I liked Alma 58.

P.S. my acne medication isn't really doing anything for me.  I have used it with perfect faithfulness ever since I got it and it hasn't made any difference.  It only gets better when my skin gets really dry, so it'll probably be bad when I get to humid Romania.

 

I don't think Jesh has ever written me, and Emily never wrote me back.

 

And can you send me a new copy of my patriarchal blessing, or two.  And any copies of patriarchal blessings that we have of our ancestors.

 

and I would like to know when everybody's birthdays are.

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