Week 7: inceputul al doilea transferului
Monday, May 31, 2010 by Sora Jay
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.
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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