Romania 10 Dec 2010
Monday, January 10, 2011 by Sora Jay
Hello again,
This week has been a lot more normal than that past few weeks, because we are pretty much finished moving and the holidays are mostly over. They celebrated the baptism of Jesus on the 6th of January, so the holidays actually kept going for a little longer than they usually do in Utah.
We were able to work everything out with Sora Ausen's visa and stuff. We had to go to the police station one more time and we gave them all fliers for our English classes. We also gave fliers to police officers on the street one time and they told us that we needed permission to hand things out, but they took the fliers and kept walking, so we kept handing out fliers. We gave them to a few more police officers too.
I remember Tom saying a couple emails back that he got a referral from God around Christmas time, and I thought about that for a little while, and it just so happens that two people so far have called us that want to meet with us. The first one said that we had called him and was calling us back, but we looked in the phone history and there wasn't anything from his number and he told us his name and he wasn't one of the people that we had recently called. The other one just called us today. We haven't been able to ask him yet how he had our number or anything like that. He just asked about the church and wanted to know if there were any youth activities.
I spoke in church yesterday, it's been a while since I've spoken so I can speak a lot better than I probably could last time I spoke. Of course it was in a different branch anyway. I spoke about missionary work and told the members that the missionaries are too few to be able to help all of Romania and the Republic of Moldova alone, so we needed the members to help us. I told them that we want to teach people but that, unfortunately, we have to spend too much of our time looking for people that will listen to us before we could actually do any teaching. I told them how they could help us to find people, by giving us referrals, and quoted from Elder Holland's talk from last conference (except we didn't have it in Romanian so I just had to translate what I could). I told them that we had decided as a mission to use them more to do missionary work. I read a lot of scriptures that talked about the joy that comes from the living, and sharing, the gospel. A lot of the members really liked it, probably because I was super blunt with them.
One lady told us after church that she has a bunch of neighbors that she wants us to come visit, so I guess that it's already bringing success.
It's kind of awkward to talk about missionary work when you have investigators at church, you just kind of have to neglect them for a minute, but one of our investigators actually really like my talk too and started crying while I was speaking.
It is our mission goal to work more with the members this year. We are going to make sure that everybody had a Preach My Gospel and we are going to teach them a little out of it so that they can learn to be better finders and be better member-presents at our lessons. I asked President if he could keep me in the same area longer so that I could work with the members better and he said he would try.
I think I have lived in Romania long enough to be developing a more natural ability to speak, like how little babies learn to speak, now I'm like 9 months old in Romania. A lot of things that understand and grammar that I use I have no idea where I picked it up from but I just know that it's right. I can also pick out accents in Romania a lot better.
But actually I had a conversation with a guy in Russian this week when we were handing out English cards. I gave him a card and he read it and he said, "I speak Russian" and I said, "I don't speak Russian" and he said, "I know." Then I told him in Romanian to come to the English classes.
Sora Ausen told me yesterday that she feels safe when she is with me no matter where we are because when people bug us we just mess with them back. Like when we hand out English cards the young kids always tell us, in Romanian, that they speak perfect English or that they could teach an English class better than we could, so we always say "Oh yeah?" or "Wanna bet" or think of something more complicated to say to them to see how well they really know it. One time I said to one kid, "Whither didst thou learn thine English?" and they gave us really bewildered looks, it was super funny.
When they make fun of us as missionaries or make fun of our religion we just tell them to shut up and be respectful (it isn't as offensive in Romanian as it is in English). And when they swear at us in English we just teach them to say the fake swearwords like 'heck' instead.
I still have a ton of time left on my computer, but I can't think of more things to write about.
This week has been a lot more normal than that past few weeks, because we are pretty much finished moving and the holidays are mostly over. They celebrated the baptism of Jesus on the 6th of January, so the holidays actually kept going for a little longer than they usually do in Utah.
We were able to work everything out with Sora Ausen's visa and stuff. We had to go to the police station one more time and we gave them all fliers for our English classes. We also gave fliers to police officers on the street one time and they told us that we needed permission to hand things out, but they took the fliers and kept walking, so we kept handing out fliers. We gave them to a few more police officers too.
I remember Tom saying a couple emails back that he got a referral from God around Christmas time, and I thought about that for a little while, and it just so happens that two people so far have called us that want to meet with us. The first one said that we had called him and was calling us back, but we looked in the phone history and there wasn't anything from his number and he told us his name and he wasn't one of the people that we had recently called. The other one just called us today. We haven't been able to ask him yet how he had our number or anything like that. He just asked about the church and wanted to know if there were any youth activities.
I spoke in church yesterday, it's been a while since I've spoken so I can speak a lot better than I probably could last time I spoke. Of course it was in a different branch anyway. I spoke about missionary work and told the members that the missionaries are too few to be able to help all of Romania and the Republic of Moldova alone, so we needed the members to help us. I told them that we want to teach people but that, unfortunately, we have to spend too much of our time looking for people that will listen to us before we could actually do any teaching. I told them how they could help us to find people, by giving us referrals, and quoted from Elder Holland's talk from last conference (except we didn't have it in Romanian so I just had to translate what I could). I told them that we had decided as a mission to use them more to do missionary work. I read a lot of scriptures that talked about the joy that comes from the living, and sharing, the gospel. A lot of the members really liked it, probably because I was super blunt with them.
One lady told us after church that she has a bunch of neighbors that she wants us to come visit, so I guess that it's already bringing success.
It's kind of awkward to talk about missionary work when you have investigators at church, you just kind of have to neglect them for a minute, but one of our investigators actually really like my talk too and started crying while I was speaking.
It is our mission goal to work more with the members this year. We are going to make sure that everybody had a Preach My Gospel and we are going to teach them a little out of it so that they can learn to be better finders and be better member-presents at our lessons. I asked President if he could keep me in the same area longer so that I could work with the members better and he said he would try.
I think I have lived in Romania long enough to be developing a more natural ability to speak, like how little babies learn to speak, now I'm like 9 months old in Romania. A lot of things that understand and grammar that I use I have no idea where I picked it up from but I just know that it's right. I can also pick out accents in Romania a lot better.
But actually I had a conversation with a guy in Russian this week when we were handing out English cards. I gave him a card and he read it and he said, "I speak Russian" and I said, "I don't speak Russian" and he said, "I know." Then I told him in Romanian to come to the English classes.
Sora Ausen told me yesterday that she feels safe when she is with me no matter where we are because when people bug us we just mess with them back. Like when we hand out English cards the young kids always tell us, in Romanian, that they speak perfect English or that they could teach an English class better than we could, so we always say "Oh yeah?" or "Wanna bet" or think of something more complicated to say to them to see how well they really know it. One time I said to one kid, "Whither didst thou learn thine English?" and they gave us really bewildered looks, it was super funny.
When they make fun of us as missionaries or make fun of our religion we just tell them to shut up and be respectful (it isn't as offensive in Romanian as it is in English). And when they swear at us in English we just teach them to say the fake swearwords like 'heck' instead.
I still have a ton of time left on my computer, but I can't think of more things to write about.
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