Jay Family Missionaries

Hey everybody,

Happy Birthday Mom. And feel free to treat yourselves to something
nice to celebrate my birthday.

But the 3rd is only my State Birthday, apparently, because I noticed
on my passport today that my birthday is written as the 5th, so my
Federal Birthday is in a couple of days. It's alright, I just get to
have two of them.

Lots of your guy's emails were really funny today, it was great.

New Years was pretty much as Jesh predicted it would be: the aftermath
of a Zombie invasion. The city was completely empty in the morning
except for a few dodgey looking people staggering around. The air
smelled like sulfur and there were the remnants of explosives all over
the ground. I think it was a bigger holiday than Christmas. We were
actually in Bucharest four times this week. The first time we came up
was for Zone Conference, then the next day we came up for Zone Leader
Council, and we came up twice yesterday, so I'm still here. We talked
to young people on the train going back to Ploiesti on New Years Eve
and told them to not do anything stupid. They seemed to respect us
for sassing them.

So this is what happened: as we were getting on a bus to go to an
investigators house (with the investigator, he was showing us where
his family lived) somebody pick-pocketed Sora Ausen and stole her
wallet. The bus went a stop but we went back to the place as soon as
possible and the investigator, Alin, was helping us out the whole
time. We couldn't find anything there so we walked over to the Police
Station near our apartment and reported the theft. The police office
was super sketch and they were super racist against Alin because he's
gypsy. They were really respectful to us because we were all
Americans. We had the district leader come with us to make sure we
got everything right, and we called the office elders and had them
call her family and cancel her credit cards and stuff. The most
important thing that she lost was her visa so that's why we needed to
go the police station (because they can take her and throw her in jail
if they find her on the streets without a visa). So we finally worked
out everything after going back to the police station a couple of
times and fighting with the guy we talked with on the phone to try to
get all of the documents that we needed to be able to get her another
visa without paying big fines.

So, last night the APs were in our city to pick up and extra portable
baptismal font to take it to another city, so they drove us to
Bucharest which is about 45 minutes away by car. But, shortly after
we arrived at the Buch sister's apartment I asked Sora Ausen about the
documents, and she had forgotten them in our apartment. There was no
way anyone else could get into the apartment to get them because we
had the only keys and our proprietar is on vacation somewhere so we
had to go back to Ploiesti. We called the APs and they drove us all
the way back to Ploiesti and back to Bucharest again with the
documents. We got back to Bucharest at about a quarter to midnight,
so I guess it wasn't that bad. And then this morning we got up at six
and went over to the office to meet up with the office elders so that
we could go to the police station here in Buch where we could order a
new visa.

Sora Ausen has been super stressed out. I have laughed a lot.
Sometimes I felt bad for her, but I can't really relate. I think I
would have just laughed if I lost my wallet.

This week was really slow for missionary work because of the Holidays,
but we spent most of our time moving apartments, so we used our time.
This is the second time that I have moved a missionary apartment, so I
better not ever have to do it again. I have connections now, though,
so I guess it's easier for me to do it than most of the sisters.

I got my Christmas package, all of the missionaries thought it was
hilarious that there were so many Junior Mints in there. They should
be able to last me a couple months, but actually at the rate I have
been eating them they might not last that long...

I really like the photo album, it's really good, it's exactly what I
have wanted my whole mission. I especially like that picture from
last January that has all of us in it, and the one of us holding Dad
in the air is really fun to show people too.

It sounds like everything is going really well at home, especially
with Aubrey and Sally's new house and Tim's engagement. You guys
better thank me and Tom and Ed for earning all those blessings for you
guys.

Sunday this week was really really good. Only the devout members came
to church because everyone was still exhausted from New Years and the
fast and testimony meeting went really well. We had two young teenage
boy investigators there and they both said that they really liked
church today. They usually tell the elders that Sacrament meeting is
boring, but it was really good this week.

I thought about how everyone usually uses the new year to turn a new
leaf, to set goals and do things differently, but at church I realized
that we as mormons do that every week when we take the sacrament. We
can forget all of the things that we have done wrong and just move
forward nice and clean.

Hope you guys have a great week.

Love,
Sora Jay

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