Week 7: inceputul al doilea transferului

Hey everybody,

Hey lots of you guys sent me emails this week, it was awesome.  I was looking at the pictures in Jill's email and you guys all look different, except for Jerm and Emily.  And it was funny how Tom was holding one of the nieces in his arms, which is classic because they all love him.  So, now that I'm not the only missionary out you guys will probably send me more of those mass email things, but it's totally fine.  I'm kind of curious to know what you will be saying to Tom, and maybe it will be things that I need too, even though you wouldn't think about it because I've been out here for a little while longer than him.

Anyway, this week was crazy.  I was in Buchurest for transfers which means that I was out of Arad from Sunday evening until late Wednesday night.  I have a new companion Sora Walker.  She's from England.  It's kind of sad when I realize how little I appreciated my training companion until more toward the end of our transfer together, but I bet she probably understands, cuz she's cool that way.  So...this companion is going to be a little more difficult.

When we were in Buchurest Sora Staley and I knocked some blocks after P-day hours ended and we were in a block and everybody was rejecting us and saying that there had already been missionaries there yesterday.  One guy even came to the door with some money because the other missionaries had asked him for money.  So we weren't being accepted by anybody in the block and Sora Staley turned to me and asked me if we should just leave.  I felt like we should stay, and so we did.  A couple of doors down a lady let us in.  She said she had been out of town for the past few days (so that the other missionaries weren't able to talk to her to make her hate missionaries) and so we were able to teach her a lesson.  Then the next door we met two people who were about to leave their house but we talked to them for a while and we got their numbers to give to the Buch missionaries.  It was cool because recently I had been praying that I would know whether or not we were in the right place, because we always go contacting but we don't find people who are interested all that often.  But it was interesting because I knew that I was in the right place, but I didn't realize that I knew it until that knowledge was questioned, when Sora Staley asked if we should leave.  I think maybe a lot of blessings are like that; we ask for them and keep waiting for them when we are actually receiving them already.  So maybe the better thing to do is to pray for the ability to recognize the blessings when they come.

I spent the next day with the Sisters in the Buch apartment and since it was transfer time the missionaries from the MTC were arriving.  We picked them up in the evening and then went to teach some lessons.  There were three new sisters so we divided up into two threesomes with the senior companion from the Buch sisters taking the two boboace and me and the Junior companion taking the other one.  So I was actually with Sora Hupp who had been in the district before me at the MTC, so it was her at the end of her second transfer with me at the end of my first and the boboaca at the very beginning of her first.  And we went and taught a lesson.
We were meeting with a recent convert and Sora Hupp had already picked a topic and some verses to share.  We got into the lesson and she started out, it was going pretty rocky.  I think she felt a lot of pressure, so I tried to think of something really quick and then I jumped in.  The lesson flowed really well.  We took a little minute to let the boboaca add her testimony, we kind of had to wake her up because she was falling asleep because she had been on a bunch of planes all day, but in the end it was a pretty good lesson.  Whenever I had Sora Staley with me I knew that she could say everything, and that she would, so I generally only taught small parts of the lessons, but once it was all just on us three and I knew that none of us could speak quite that well I taught a lot of the lesson.
Once we got out Sora Hupp told me that I spoke really well, and I thought, I don't really know the language any better than Sora Hupp, in fact I know that I don't, but I just opened up my mouth to say what needed to be said and it came out.

My new companion struggles with the language still because she has a really strong british accent, meaning that people can't really understand what she is saying sometimes, or they thing it's really funny.  It's cool how it requires us to work together though.  When a word comes up that she doesn't know we have to work together and sometimes I know it and can tell her what it means.  And sometimes when people can't understand her because of her accent they ask me to say it.  So, it's an interesting difference going from a companion who is in her last transfer to one who is only in her sixth.
She loves to correct me when I speak in Romanian, and it gets kind of annoying because sometimes she corrects me incorrectly.  It's hard for me to trust correction from the other missionaries because I know that they don't speak perfect Romanian either.  It took me a while to realize that about Sora Staley, but eventually I realized that although she spoke really well she still made a lot of mistakes.  And whenever a Romanian person tells you that you speak really well, it's the same way that it would be if an American told somebody that they speak English really well; what it really means is something like "I'm sure that you're working really hard on this language because I can mostly understand you," while implying "but you are definitely foreign."  And it's meant to be more of an encouraging thing than a compliment.  People tell me that I speak well even when I know that I'm slaughtering the language.

Anyway, that's what's happening for me right now.  Go have fun.

Love,
Sora Jay.



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pictures

I don't know if those other one's worked.



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Week 6 in Romania

Hey Everybody,
 
Sounds like it was an eventful week for you guys.  My week was pretty eventful too, but with things that aren't quite as big, (except for sharing the gospel with people so that they can start doing all the things that you guys have been doing which is pretty important).
 
Right now I'm in Bucharest for transfers.  My companion is going home so I am here and I get to recieve the new missionaries from the MTC.  We call them boboace which means 'hatchlings' prettymuch.  Then I'll go back to Arad with my new companion Sister Walker.  I haven't met her yet.
 
Remember how last week I talked about how the members don't come to church?  Well, I prayed all week that they would, and this week was the biggest sacrament meeting that we've had so far.  It was really cool, we were almost to the point where we needed to set up more chairs.
 
It's cool to hear about all of the things going on at home, but I don't really feel sad that I missed them, it's cool enough to think about them happening when I'm standing in the middle of nowhere waiting for a tramvai to show up :).
 
My Zone Leaders told me this story: Elder Moore was on exchanges with Elder Bigu in Deva, I think, and they had just walked up to the highest floor of a bloc to start knocking their way down when they heard somebody come in the bottom.  Elder Bigu said jokingly that it was probably some Jehova's Witness missionaries.  The two old ladies walked all the way up the stairs until they saw the Elders standing there at the top, just finished with their bloc prayer.  They really were Jehova's Witness missionaries.  They stood there and looked at each other for a minute.  Then Elder Moore reached over and knocked on the door next to him.  The two old ladies turned around and walked back down the stairs and left the bloc, and the Elders said that the block was full of cool people that they could set up with.
I just thought it was awesome that they actually encountered the other missionaries, and that they beat them to the chase.  We ocassionally enter blocs and they are really annoyed with us and it usually means that we are in blocs where the Jehova's Witnesses have recently been, because they tend to be contentious when they contact so people hate them.  They see us at the door and just close it without listening to us or they start railing on us until we say that we aren't Jehova's Witnesses.  If they stop to listen to us they usually like us by the time we leave even if they don't want to know anything about our message.
Some parts of town, like the really busy streets down in Centru are really missionaried-out because of the Jehova's Witnesses and the Baptist missionaries.  We have only gone there a couple of times because they're really unreceptive.  Some areas are really good for finding people though.  We spent a few days on only three blocs because so many people talked to us or set up with us.
 
You guys can send me some pictures in emails, Jennie and Colin did and I could pull them up fine.  Good luck to Tom, going into the MTC.  My classroom was in 18M 473 or 437, the Romanian missionary district should be there still and you can tell them that they'll see me in a transfer.  If you want, you can tell them 'iats viatsa' and see what they think (it sounds like the way I spelled it).  It means 'take your life' but means go kill yourself.  They probably won't understand it, but you should say hi to them.  And you should set up your new.myldsmail.net account before you go into the MTC so that you can send me your email address without taking up some of your email time.
 
Sending me emails is definitely more efficient than dearelder.com or regular mail, but it's still cool to get those too.  I got some from you guys last week that were sent on the day that I left the MTC to come here.  They get to the mission home and sit there until there is a time when somebody comes out to Arad or up to Buchurest and back.
 
Thanks for all the letters this week.  I still don't feel like I have a lot to say to you guys just because my weeks are usually the same.  We don't have any baptismal dates or anything set up right now, some people fell through.  We still have lots of people to work with though, and hopefully we can set up some baptismal dates during this week.
 
I'll try sending you guys some pictures right now.
 
Love, Sora Jay
 
 
P.S. Jesh or Pete told me that the US is like heaven compared to Russia, and I think it is the same with Romania.  Not because you get free water in Restaurants, and you can drink the water in your shower, and it's clean and well structured; but because that's where my family is, and no place could be heaven if my family wasn't there.
It sounds like things are going well with you guys.  It's awesome to hear from you.



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Re: Week 5 in Romania

Yeah, congratulations Joni!  Now that we all know, how far along are you now?
 
Melissa

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 1:21 PM, <jonibalogne@gmail.com> wrote:
This official announcement...in case some of you missed it..... :)

Joni

Re: Week 5 in Romania

This official announcement...in case some of you missed it..... :)

Joni

Week 5 in Romania

Hey Everybody,

Hey Jerm, I'm sorry I didn't get to talk to you on the phone, it's good that you went to church.  Here there aren't very many members who come to church consistently so I almost felt bad that you guys would stay home, when I'm here trying everything I can to get people to come.  But I know that you guys are strong members, and it's cool that you all went to a different sacrament meeting because you couldn't go to your own.

Well, it's cool that Joni's going to have another baby.  There will be a few of them before I get back I guess.  I don't remember when Jennie is supposed to be due, so can you let me know?

I know that Jill is getting married this week; I wrote it in my planner.  Good luck with everything!  If you guys send something to the mission home in Bucharest (like an invitation) it might get there before Monday, which is when I will be going up for transfers since my companion is going home, so I'll be getting a new one.
I always knew that having a companion would be the most difficult part of my mission, and it has been, but it hasn't been bad.  Even companions like me and Sora Staley, who are very different, can get along well because we have common goals.  She is really talkative and exciting, and I'm quiet and more...sober.  But we have fun, and we work hard to try to meet our goals.  Our mission goal is to teach 20 lessons every week.  This week we got 17.  We were planning on getting our last three on Sunday evening from knocking in the blocs, but only one person let us in during the four or so hours that we were knocking in a bunch of different blocs.  We had two investigators at church this week, so it was good.  They are both people that are ready to get baptized, they just have to make the commitment.  We hope they can get baptized on the 29th so that Sora Staley can see them when she comes touring through with her parents.

We went to Lipova today which has the ruins of a castle on top of a hill.  It was really cool.  I took a ton of pictures, so I'll see if I can send any in the mail.

I don't have a lot to say this week.  I guess I'm used to things here now so that I don't notice all the differences that you guys would find interesting.  I'll try to have more prepared for next week.

It's really cool that Tom and Ed went to the temple.  People here usually go to the temple in Germany, which is a long way away and expensive to get to.  Soon there will be one in Kiev but it is still expensive to get there, so we should appreciate how close the temple in Provo is.
Also, there are only about 6 people in Romania who have patriarchal blessings, so don't take those for granted either.

Anyway, that's it I guess.
I wish you guys would send me pictures of Utah that I could show to the members or to my English class.  And pictures of each of your families since I only have Joni's and Rodney's families.  Well, maybe you already did and they're waiting for me at the mission home. :)

Talk to you later, Love
Sora Jay



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Week 4 in Romania

Hey guys,

Hows everything going.  I got to talk to some people yesterday on Mothers Day, and that was cool.  When I'm out here I kind of forget that I have a family and it's cool to talk to you guys and to get your emails because I remember that there are people like me somewhere.  The members and the other missionaries are cool, but nobody else is like all of you guys.  So it's cool to talk to you.

When you guys send letters here I get them whenever the APs come out to our city or when we go up for Zone Conference.  So I got the letter that Joni sent.  It would be cool to have a bunch of pictures of Utah to show to people like what Pete had.  They can't really just look up things on the internet for themselves since technology here is a few years behind.  Most people don't have computers and the internet is pretty crappy everywhere.  So it would be cool to get some pictures from you guys.  I have pictures of Rodney & Melissa's family and Joni & Aaron's family but not of anybody else.  I only have one pictures that has every sibling in it, and none with Mom and Dad in them.  So, if you guys send me some pictures in the mail I can pick them up when we go into Bucharest at the end of this month for transfers.  This is my companions last transfer so I know that I'll have to go up for transfers.

Well anyway, things are going pretty good here.  Sora Staley gets kind of discouraged pretty quickly, probably because she really wants to make an impact before she leaves, and none of the people that we invited to church have come, ever.  We even set baptismal dates but they didn't come to church so we have to postpone them.  Every investigator has to come to church at least two times before getting baptized, so now none of our investigators can get baptized before she leaves.  Things are going good though.

I guess I should tell you a little more about Romania since lots of people asked questions about it on the phone.  The cities here are less town-ish than Springville and Provo.  There's no such thing as a front yard in the areas where there are houses (which we call vilas), and there's usually not a front door to anyone's house either.  There are big metal gates.  But most people live in apartment buildings called blocs.  They all look really worn and crappy on the outside, except for a few in Bucharest that they have started painting to look more modern; I saw one that was white with big pink dots all over it.  The insides of the apartments are usually nice though, it just depends on how well the people who live there take care of them.  They can't really get that bad because they're just made out of cement.
The streets are usually pretty wide.  The only city that I've been to that I can compare these cities to is New York, and New York had tiny streets.  There is a pretty good tramvai system here in Arad, and in Bucharest there is a nice metro.  The tramvais here all have signs written in German because the entire system was donated from Germany.  The tramvais are really shaky and bouncy.  I didn't notice until a few days ago but the driver has to stop the tramvai and get out with a little lever to switch the rails to make sure we turn where we're supposed to, so it's kind of funny.
We rode on the sleeper trains to and from Zone Conference in Bucharest Thursday night and Friday night.  The trains have really little hallways and there are six bunks that you can sleep on.  Sometimes we get in the same compartment as the elders but sometimes we're just in there with some random people.  You have to wake up plenty before you reach your stop and be ready to go because they only give you like two minutes to get yourself and all of your stuff off the train before it takes off.  The trains aren't actually very fast, and you could drive a car from one place to the other faster than you could get there on a train.

We get to look at the scenery from the trains.  There are lots of farms and fields and also a ton of little towns.  We can see the ruins of castles on the tops of hills too.  Next Monday we are planning on going out to some ruins, so hopefully I will have some pictures to send you in my next email.  It was really foggy and misty in the morning when our train came in, and it was cool.  It feel like you're in a fairy-tale.  And when we were at the church in Bucharest it was kind of overcast with little bits of cotton floating all over in the air so that was like a fairy-tale too.

The people here look like regular people, except in general they're not as pretty as Americans, probably just because they smoke and drink and have really hard lives.  Mostly anyone who is well-off here in Romania is doing well because they earned money in another country for a while or because they have relatives that live in another country and send them money.  People just don't get paid a lot.  For gypsies, they are either really poor or really rich.  The rich ones are rich because of dishonesty, and usually through money from churches.  The gypsy kind lives in Sibiu and has a really nice house and a palace, some of the missionaries there have tried to contact him but he is usually gone.  The poor ones live in cheap vilas, a lot of them all together.  They usually have more kids than a regular Romanian and they will try to steal from you most of the time, but we have found some that are honest.  It's hard to teach gypsies because a lot of them don't have an education and don't know how to read.  Some of them have still been baptized though and they just come to church to learn about the gospel.  The gypsies always wear gypsy skirts and gypsy batics on their heads if they are traditional.  They have their own little culture that is sort of a parasite on the Romanian culture.  Romanians are pretty racist against them, even the members in some cities, but not in this one.  We have found a gypsy-ish family though that doesn't dress traditionally and can read, and we have been teaching them recently.  They want to get baptized but haven't come to church yet.

A lot of people in Romania are what we call 'weefy'.  They don't want to commit to do anything because they are afraid that they won't follow through with the commitment and they would just rather not commit in the first place.  But when we do commit them they usually fall through anyway, but it's probably like that in most places in the world.  Tom and Ed may not have problems like that though.  The general authority who came to our Zone Conference was from Brazil and he said that when they first encountered the missionaries they had to wait for two months before the missionaries had time to come to their house and teach them, so there is a greater abundance of willing and ready people in Brazil I guess.  There are people here who are ready though, we just need to find them and it's awesome when we do.  It's kind of sad though, how communism has changed religion into a cultural thing instead of something that is based on God.  A man got mad at us for knocking on his door one time because we were two tall, well-dressed, Americans going around in Romania trying to change their culture.  We told him what we were really here for and he liked us by the time we left his door, but he didn't want to meet with us or anything.  Most of the people that do get mad at us initially end up liking us before we leave them.  But Sora Staley said that they have been thrown out of buildings before and people have hit them with shoes and spit on them, so I guess there are those that are really anti.

It seems like having Zone Conference in this week kind of messed up our plans.  We didn't reach a lot of our goals.  But also, most of our time was schedules with lessons, and then when those lessons fall through we can't accomplish as much either because we are in weird areas and we have be aware of getting to next appointment on time.  We always plan backups, but it's never as good as doing what you planned in the first place.  But anyway, that happened a lot this week so we didn't teach very many lessons and only got a couple new investigators.

Do you have any ideas about getting people to come to church?  But actually, we want really badly for our investigators to come but a lot of the members don't even come.  The church used to be in Centru (like mainstreet) but there were so many people coming that they needed to get a bigger place to meet.  So, they found a bigger place but it's in a pretty obscure location so a lot of people stopped coming because it's hard for them to get there.

Well, this is kind of a depressing letter for you guys I guess, but I'm happy.  People always said that a mission was the hardest thing that they have ever done, and I thought maybe because of the language and because people don't listen to you and people that you care about don't make it to baptism or progress any further that it would be hard.  But it makes me feel good every day that I am out here to help people and that we give them the invitations to read, and pray, and come to church even if they choose to not do those things.  It's cool to be a missionary, and it's not as hard as regular life, I think.  Well, it's probably because every single day hundreds of thousands of faithful members pray for the missionaries, and this is the effect.

The church is really little here, but it's cool to think of how big it is, and how well it functions, in Utah.  We're really blessed.
Okay, I'll hear from you guys later.

Love,
Sora Jay



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3rd Week in Romania

Hey Everybody,

I got your letters!  Last week the only thing that I had in my inbox was one letter from Rodney but today there were other letters in there that said that I got them before I sent my letter to you guys, so sorry if I haven't responded to anything you asked yet.
So, Argentina huh Ed.  Hooray, we're all in third world countries together!  And we all get to struggle through the language learning experience.  It would be so much easier to teach people in English, but it's fun to learn a new language.  Study a lot of vocabulary while you can, because now I don't have very much time to study and I'm really grateful that I did study as much vocabulary as I did.
The weather here is pretty good.  It's a lot like Utah because it's really hot some days but kind of cold other days, as we're transitioning from spring to summer.  It's going to be really hot when we hit full-out summer I think because it's already hot on the warm days.  We live in a fifth floor apartment, which means that the heat from all of the other apartments drifts up into ours making it even hotter.

Romania is an interesting place.  It's like there aren't really any laws here.  Everybody does whatever they want when they're driving and there aren't any speed limit signs that I have ever seen.  We always walk along the train tracks to get to one of our investigators, and there's not really anything wrong with it.  Some trains went by and honked at us but it's just because the drivers were guys, and almost all guys driving cars past us will yell something at us.  I think I mentioned it before but in all of the religions besides ours the women wear scarfs on their heads at church or when they're preaching/talking about the gospel or praying, so that's one of the things that people will yell at us: "wear a batic!"

We got seven investigators this week, four of them that are progressing really well.  One of them, Tina, couldn't come to church because her husband wouldn't let her.  We fasted and prayed with her so that she would be able to.  On Saturday night she asked her husband if she could go and he said no.  But then he went to her Sunday morning and said "Get cleaned up and get dressed and go to church."  It was awesome when she walked in to sacrament meeting because we thought she wouldn't be able to make it.  She was really happy to be there.
Church meetings are interesting here.  When people give talks they call on people in the congregation to read scriptures.  I think the elders even talked to them about not doing it anymore but they still do.  We usually go to the primary class and then to Relief Society.  Primary has like five kids and the teacher is super devout lady but she doesn't know how to handle the kids (who are actually mostly teenagers).  She had them get up and practice bearing their testimonies so that they could do it in sacrament meeting next month, and she was telling them exactly what to say.  We were like, they got baptized because they had testimonies, and they know what to say already.  Most of the kids in primary, in fact I think all of them, come to church without their parents.  A couple come with grandparents I think, but the rest just get themselves there.

We went and taught lessons to a couple of inactive people in our branch.  It's sad that they stop coming, but it's always something that comes up and then keeps them away forever.  One lady that we taught, Ani, just lives really far away and doesn't have a lot of money to come up to church every week, plus she has to work every other Sunday.  We told her to try to make it and she would be blessed.  She had an experience with tithing that was really cool.  The missionaries had asked her and her husband to pay tithing and they agreed to even though they knew that they wouldn't have enough money to be able to take care of their family of three little boys when they did.  So, they paid the tithing and on the next morning they found a bag of food on their front porch.  It had everything that she needed inside.  She asked all of the members at church if they knew anything about it and nobody did, so she decided that it was angels that had dropped it off at her door.

We teach English classes which is where we got one of our investigators.  A lot of people here in Romania know a little bit of English, at least the young people.  They hear us speaking English to each other and will turn to listen and say things to each other about us and how they can understand what we're saying.  They we say something to each other in Romanian and they are always all really surprised.  Anyway, the English classes are fun because my companion is in her last transfer so she messes things up in English.  We were talking about a story that we read, talking about a tree and the students were all referring to the tree as 'he' or 'she' and they didn't know which one to call it.  My companion started talking about it and referred to it as 'she' in an obvious way, so that the class would catch how she referred to it, and I stood there for a second and then said "it?"  She was confused for a second but then she realized what she was saying.  She always throws Romanian words into her English sentences too.  I told her she's going to have a really hard time when she gets back home. 
This is her last transfer so she'll be back soon.  She is leaving soon so we are going to spend our p-days doing cool things.  We are going to the market today, and we are going to go to the ruins of a castle on the 17th.

We got a copy of conference last night when the APs and President Lundberg came through town to talk to the district president who lives in Arad.  So now the members can finally watch it.  We watched the first session this morning because it's p-day.  I already watched everything but the priesthood session at the MTC so it's wierd that it took so long for it to get here, and kind of annoying.  There's no other way for the members to watch it so it seems like it shouldn't take that long.  At least they get it eventually though.

A lot of the people here have dreams that they get their answers from.  One of our investigators called us and told us that she had prayed about the things that we told her to pray about and then she had a dream and she wanted to know if it was her answer.  We just asked her if she felt good and she said yes so we told her it was an answer, but then we told her to keep praying and reading to get more responses.  There are quite a few members who decided from a dream that they needed to get baptized, from what I've heard from the other missionaries, so it's like a normal thing.  Was it like that in Russia?

My advice to those of you entering the MTC is this: practice speaking with a good accent even in the MTC.  Most of the missionaries don't try to do any sort of accent except for rolling the r's if it's necessary in their language, but once you pick up a bad American accent it's really hard to get rid of, and it's difficult for people to understand.  All of the missionaries in my district have been out for about a year and a half but some of them still have really bad accents.  I guess it won't be much trouble for Tom, being in his country when he learns his language, but Ed will have to be careful.

Well, I think that's all I have to write.  The pictures that Jennie and Colin emailed me are cool, I'll try to see if I can put any of my pictures in some emails and send them.

See ya,
Sora Jay



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