Jay Family Missionaries

Hey everybody,

 

This is the last time that I will be emailing from the MTC; we got our flight plans this week.  I will leave the MTC at 5:00 am Monday morning and head up to the Salt Lake airport then we will fly to New York and after that we go to Austria and then to Bucharest.  We are not allowed to meet people at the airport but we are allowed to call from the New York airport when we get there.  I will be there between 1:00 pm and 3:00 pm Utah time, I think.  I don't have a phonecard and they don't have any here that aren't really expensive so if you guys wanted to send me a number for a phonecard I'll use it in New York.  I don't know how much time I'll have to talk, probably not a whole lot because we have to find our way to the place where we get on the next plane and make sure everything is ready to go before we call home.

 

Yesterday we hosted the new missionaries again.  Also, my companionship was chosen to be the example companionship for the new missionaries: when they were learning how to teach we were the missionaries that they watched.  They had us come into a room full of them, and they put clip-on microphones on all of us and we taught the first part of a lesson to some scruffy-looking guys (who are actually service missionaries).  It was fun, and the investigators were golden.  The next lesson I teach will be in Romania.

 

Once again I wrote down a bunch of things to tell you guys in this email and then left the paper in my room accidentally and my companions weren't willing to go back for it.  But, I don't think I ever told you how it turned out when we pretended that Sister Humphries was from Romania.  The entire new district believed us the entire time.  It was really funny because they said things like "It's cool to talk to Sora Humphries because she's actuallly from Romania and she'll just go off talking about things."  And one time one fo them said "I feel bad for Sora Humphries.  She always looks sad sitting by herself not talking to anyone."  She looked sad because she was trying really hard not to laugh.  So they all completely believed that she was from Romania and then one morning we had her say the prayer before we started class and she said it in English.  The other district was confused but their first reaction was to say "Wow!  You speak English really well!"  And then she told them she was from Saint George and that she spoke English fluently.  Some of them felt pretty humiliated because of it, but the next time we prayed together they told us they already had planned who was going to be 'the Romanian' in their district when the next one came through.

 

We spend a lot of time with the ASL district and I think that the deaf elder likes me.  He always 'talks' to me in sign language and by using gestures and he never talks to any of the other sisters.  It's awkward as a missionary in the first place, but it's doubly awkward when the only way he can communicate well with me is through the other missionaries in his district.  So he'll say something to me and either his companion or one of the sister say it out loud.  He doesn't say anything wierd but the sisters always give me these looks like 'cute!'  which is disturbing.  One of the days this week I heard a sister in the dorms talking to her coordinating sister about 'getting over' some elder, It's hard to believe that things like that happen.

 

I've heard that there are seven cases in Latin and in Romanian so far we have learned five: dative, accusative, genetive, imperative, and vocative; I think that's all.  So I wonder if there are two more that they just aren't going to teach us.  They taught us vocative this week and it's really easy and really fun, it's just a yelling-at-people tense prettymuch, that's what they told us it's used for.  The word for old woman is 'baba' and all you do to make it be vocative is make it be 'babo' and he told us to call our other teacher, Sister Peterson, 'babo' to see what she did.  We did it and she just gave us a dirty look and said "Did Fratele Middleton tell you to say that?".  The elders say it all the time now and it's kind of annoying.

 

Our roommates and the other district have gotten cooler now.  It takes about three weeks of being in the MTC before missionaries get their personalities back.  It takes those first few weeks for them to feel out what is appropriate and what is not appropriate; that or they just stop caring.  But for Tom and Ed there is nothing about their behavior that wouldn't be MTC appropriate so you guys don't have to be zombies for the first few weeks.

 

I don't know how letters from dearelder.com work when I'm in Romania but I will have more computer time so you can send me emails now.  I noticed that I have a few in my inbox already but I want to make sure I write everything I need to before I spend any of my time reading them.  I'll definitely go through them next week.  My P-day will probably be Monday from now on, but I'll be on a plane for all of this coming Monday so I probably won't write until the Monday after.

 

We have been practicing door approaches a lot this week because our teachers said that that is probably one of the first things that the missionaries will take us out to do once we get to Romania.  They say that the 'greenies' are called 'boboc' which means baby bird, but they usually translate it as duckling.

 

I'm getting excited to be in actual Romania and teach real investigators.

 

If there is anything else that you want to send to me or write to me before I leave the MTC it has to get here Friday or Saturday or else I won't get it and I don't know what will happen to it.  So I'll see you guys later.

 

Thanks for the letters Mom, Grandma Lola, Pete, Kira, Emily, and everybody else that I forgot.  I left my paper with stuff written on it in my room.

 

Talk to you later!

 

Love Sora Jay.

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