Jay Family Missionaries: March 2010

Week 6 in MTC

Thursday, March 25, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hey everybody,

I wrote down a bunch of things to address in this email but then I left the paper in my room and my companions aren't willing to go back for it, so I'll just try to remember what I wanted to say.

I got the pi-day box and I shared it with my district on pi-day, I remembered that I never told you. Also, have you checked to see if the SD card is locked or not? It was perfectly fine when I sent it so it must have gotten ruined in the mail. I can get pictures from my companions though, and just take new ones.

So, we got new roommates yesterday and they are in the next Romania district so they will be learning Romanian. So, we decided to tell them that Sister Humphries is from Romania and they are convinced. They ask us how to say stuff and how to pronounce stuff and we can always help them because we have asked our teachers the same things but they think that Sister Humphries is actually Romanian. The teachers are in on it too, even the one that is from Romania. She said that she would stop by our classroom occasionally with her district to talk really fast to Sister Humphries and pretend like she knows her. It helps us to practice speaking all the time because we have to talk to Sister Humphries in only Romanian and then translate into English for her. It's fun.

Well, sometimes life here at the MTC is pretty dramatic. Sometimes I hate my companions, and my teachers, and the rest of my district; but most of the time we are friends and things are good. I thought it was interesting how Mom said that she is really good friends with all of her companions. My companions are nice and we get along well, but their not the kind of people I would hang out with or be best friends with. I think that after living with them for this long they still don't really know me very well, just like a lot of the roommates that I had. Maybe it will be different when I am with my companions in Romania and we are out teaching instead of studying all day.

Sister Petrisor told us that in Romania hardly anyone can play the piano so we practiced a little this week. We have also been planning a musical number for the Sunday before we leave so I checked out a violin and played it. After I finished and put the violin away I walked out the door and there was a guy sitting there on the floor outside the door. He had a suit on but I didn't see a nametag so I think it was a teacher, but apparently he was listening to me play which was wierd.

We have made friends with a lot of missionaries from other districts, especially the foreign language districts because they have been here a lot longer. It seems like it takes about four weeks for a missionary to learn to be a missionary and to be friendly and outgoing; so I don't know how the English speaking missionaries manage after being here for only two or three weeks.

We made friends with the Italian district and they left on Tuesday. We made friends with them because we could understand their italian so we would go say hi to them. Now their gone and only the brand new italian districts are left so they can't talk to us very well. We made friends with some missionaries learning Tagalog now though, and we say hi to their district when we walk past their door on the way to devotionals.

A lot of missionaries say that they know somebody who is, or who taught, or who knows somebody who is Romanian. In pretty much every European country you will find Romanians because Romania is what our teachers call "the Mexico of Europe." They have traditions like slaughtering pigs and then cooking them with a flamethrower. Fratele Middleton told us to go to those types of celebrations if we ever get the chance.

It was awesome on those days when it was bright and sunny but there was snow falling. There were a lot of missionaries just standing outside looking up at the sky with confused or delighted expressions on their faces. I forget how many of them aren't from around here. One time during class two sisters went running past the door shrieking; we recognized them from the new ASL district. Later on we realized that it was snowing outside and one of the sisters was from Hawaii and had never seen snow before so their teacher told them that they could go outside to see the snow.

Rodney and Pete you guys should write me more often. Whenever we get really good letters we share them with our companions and your letters are rare but they are good ones.

I don't live off of letters but every time I get one it's like a special treat.

Thanks for the pictures Joni, the one with Emmett standing on the first place thing is the best.

-Sora Jay

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Week 5 in MTC

Thursday, March 18, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hey everybody,

It looks like I finally got a computer that has a keyboard that works right. Most of the computers get messed up when people switch languages to type.

Well, this past week I got sick. Sister Hansen had a cold that she got from Sister Harward who is in our district, and so I guess I got the same thing but I reacted to it a lot differently. I had a sore throat and I had no energy. During our gym time we just slept for a couple of the days. On one of the days after class my teacher told me to just go sleep so that I would get better faster instead of going to classes but staying sick longer. So that day my companions and I went back to the dorms during the Large Group Meeting and dinner and I just slept the whole time. I've been feeling better yesterday and today though.

Colin asked about the TRC so this is what it is: the Teaching Resource Center is where we go to teach people who pretend to be investigators. The people who come have to have a temple recommend or be a BYU student to be able to go there, or some sort of other permission like a bishop's note. In the TRC there are just a bunch of rooms with couches and tables that are supposed to be a 'living room' type setting. There are cameras and microphones in each of the rooms though so that you can ask the people in charge to record you if you want and so that your teacher can watch you teach the lesson. Our teacher just flips through each companionships lesson to see how they're going and then she can give us advice afterward. The investigators always have a role that they are supposed to play, so that we can prepare for them in advance. When we help them move they just scatter a bunch of pictures around the room and we put them into a box or wherever they want us to put them. And for another one we pretended it was a cafe and picked food from a menu. This next week will be a pretend clothing store, so we are learning a lot of clothing vocabulary to prepare for it.

This past week was the first time that we taught a lesson in all Romanian. It went pretty well. When they asked questions we were able to understand what they wanted, and even though it probably took us a long time to formulate explanations we were able to tell them everything. Usually we wouldn't see the investigators afterward but I needed to get a drink in the hall because I was dying from being sick and still teaching the lesson so we saw them out there. One of them said we did really well and the other one just smiled. Sora Humphries said that during the lesson he looked like he was trying really hard not to laugh, but I didn't notice.

Elder Cook talked at our devotional on Tuesday, he talked about a lot of different things but the thing that he said the most about that I noticed was having investigators make commitments. He said that the commitments they make to read the Book of Mormon or pray is what converts them, and it prepares them to make temple covenants.

One of the Sisters in the ASL district right next door to us hurt her foot playing volleyball or four-square so she wasn't able to leave at the same time as her companions so our district has been escorting her everywhere. She is deaf but she can read lips really well and she can speak really well. We even taught her some romanian words and she could say them just like us, except for the ones with "r"s. Her name is Sister Roberts. There were a couple deaf elders that we talked to all the time too; they couldn't read lips very well or anything but Sister Humphries studied ASL for a couple of years so she could communicate with them. One of them, Elder Melkonian, was really good at basketball so we had him teach us how to shoot during one of the gym periods. I think it made me a lot better. He prettymuch just showed us how to do it because he couldn't talk when he had the ball in his hands.

There are some pretty funny stories about the ASL missionaries because of the deaf ones. Their classroom is right next to ours and they always make tons of noise so that sometimes we have to go ask them to stop doing whatever they were doing. One time one of the elders was vacuuming in his dorm and the door was locked and his companions got locked out so they were banging on the door really really hard trying to make it move to get his attention, eventually they finally stuck a paper under the door and waved it around until he noticed it and went over and opened the door.

Ever since a lot of the ASL missionaries left we have gotten really good seats at the devotionals because they have a huge section reserved for them and no one to sit in it so they invited us to sit there with them; there were only three people until this Wednesday.

We got a new mission president this week: President Borne, I think that's how he spells it. He and his wife both know ASL. So did the last mission president. I guess they need to know it so that they can do interviews with the deaf missionaries without an interpreter. I don't know where the new president is from or anything right now.

I could have told you the scripture to go on my plaque before I even left, it's Matt 11:28-30. And the picture that I liked was the one with the white background and my arm resting on the thing. But just have Jill pick which one she thinks looks best.

See ya,

Sister Jay

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week 4

Thursday, March 11, 2010 by Sora Jay

hey everybody, the shift function on this computer doesn't work; it's wierd that the computers here seem to have so many problems and limitations but even then the missionaries find a way to get around them. actually i think this computer must be set up for a different language because it's really wierd. anyway, one of the missionaries in our district got onto youtube on one of the computers this past week and he told all of us in the district; so we all told the branch president. he got in lots of trouble but he didn't get sent home, but the branch president warned us that if anyone else got onto youtube they would get sent home.

i've sent home my memory card in a letter since jill said she was going to send me a package, so you can save all the pictures and then send it back in the package. i just wanted you guys to have some of the pictures of me here in the mtc. everything's going pretty good here. it gets a little boring at times because we do the same thing all day every day, but it's not bad.

sometimes funny things still happen. after someone sneezes you say sanatate, in romanian, but one time one of the sisters sneezed and the other sister said saptamana, which means week, and we all laughed. then the teacher said it later on accidentally i think. also, the verb 'to snow' in romanian is 'a ninje' and one time it was snowing and one of the sisters looked out the window and said 'ninja' and one of the teachers in the room was from romania, so she especially laughed really hard.

for one of the lessons we taught this week we went on what our teacher called j-dub exchanges where we switched companions so that they were elder-sister companionships and taught lessons to our real companions with them. there are two elders that don't get along very well because one of them is extremely dominant but his companion was with one of mine; they taught us and it was one of the best lessons i have been taught, because the quiet elder was actually able to say things. i was with elder rasmussen who is a lot like aaron olson, i think. it was hard to transition between us at first but we caught on pretty quickly.

but i'm glad i have my companions and not anyone else's.

did i ever mention that in my companionship i am a stats major, sister hansen is a math-teaching major, and sister humphries is a number-theory math major? we thought it was cool how we all got put together in a companionship because the other two sisters are majoring in stuff like communications. one time when we were really tired of studying language we took a break for five minutes and derive the quadratic formula on the whiteboard in our classroom. we erased it all but the next day when our teacher was writing on the board he could see where the math had been written and he told us we were crazy.

whenever we get breaks during class we walk past the rooms where the italian-speaking missionaries are. when they talk to us in italian we can usually understand everything they say because our language is latin-based too. they can't understand us as easily because of the slavic influence in romanian. we have some russian-sounding words. it's like the language that i'm learning is the one that's the mix between portuguese and russian, both languages that more than one person in our family speaks.

during the trc this week we taught investigators how to pray and helped them move. we did great for helping them move, but i think we didn't do very well teaching them how to pray because we didn't work on that part as much, i guess. the sentences we had planned were pretty long so we couldn't remember them without looking at our notecards. so this week we have been practicing speaking only romanian to each other a lot more outside of class so that if we forget how to say something we can figure it out again instead of having to refer to notes.

yesterday our district played a game called 'nativul', 'the native' for the first time. each person drew a paper and on one of them it said 'nativul,' and that person had to be 'the native' and not speak or understand english for the rest of the day. i was the one who was 'nativul' yesterday (si nu am spus nimic in limba englezeste). so tonight, because it was p-day today, everyone in the class will vote on who they thought was 'nativul' and whoever gets the most votes wins. a lot of people seemed to have figured out that it was me. i think it's fun to talk in only romanian though so i'll try to get the most votes when i'm not nativul too.

so far joni, mom, and jill & stewart have written me consistently every week, so thanks. some of you guys i haven't gotten any letters from though. tell jesh that he can send me letters from dearelder.com, and then when i'm in romania he can send me some real letters before he goes back to america. i've been here for a month, so i only have about month left. i'm halfay.

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Week 3

Thursday, March 4, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hey everybody, everything is going good here. I've gotten two packages this week I think, and I got three letters today from Joni and Jill & Stewart. I got two dearelders during this week one from Mom and one from Colin and one from Sally, just so that you guys know I got your letters. I got the black one from Joni last week too. When the ambassador from Romania came he met with the district that left this week, so it's not like he didn't meet any of the missionaries studying romanian. And he only stayed for a few minutes. Two of the elders in my district have thrown up in the past week, but they both got better really quick. None of the sisters have gotten sick; we probably eat a little better than the elders do. In our district the elders have lots of drama, but the sisters are all just friends, so good luck to Tom and Ed, hopefully you don't get any self-righteous super-critical companions like the one in our district. In class one time it was my turn to say the prayer, but everyone had found out that I had studied chinese so my companions turned to me and said "You should say the prayer in Chinese!" I thought about it but then I decided not to, but then when I was about to start I couldn't remember the words to start the prayer in Romanian, so I ended up saying it in Chinese. My companions started laughing really hard while I was praying because they hadn't expected me to actually do it. But the teacher wasn't mad or anything. Everyone always seems surprised that I am going to Romania when they find out I studied Chinese, but I guess it just makes me feel like I really am needed in Romania because everyone else who studies chinese goes chinese-speaking. In the TRC this week we picked up some members and rode on the bus with them to church. We had planned some things to say to them, like following up on commitments and asking about their families but they breezed past that stuff really quickly and then started asking us questions about baptism, in Romanian. They asked why they needed to be baptized again, and we tried to explain even though we didn't know any of the vocab like 'authority' but we were able to explain, eventually. I think it's cool trying to figure out how to say things because we have a pretty good mormon vocabulary now. We have started practicing teaching parts of the lessons to each other in Romanian because the Monday after next is when we will have to teach the entire lesson in Romanian. I feel bad for the elders because they don't speak as well as the sisters. I don't know if it's just because they don't practice very much or if it's because they are younger and don't study well or what, but they are a little bit behind. We try to involve them in our study by playing games like pictionary, or writing crazy stories. We got some new roommates last week; I don't know if I told you. They are pretty good now, at first they were really wierd and they seemed to hate us, but I guess they are getting used to being here too now. They will leave before us to go to Washington, I think. They are Sister Conger, Sister Gandalf, and Sister Mckray. I have started a sisters' basketball game in the gym during our gym time every day. My companions resisted a lot at first but now they love to play and they always want to play basketball. Sister Humphries sprained her ankle during a game a couple of days ago though, so she hasn't been playing. Girls seem to be a lot better at guarding than any guys I've ever seen play. Last night Sister Mckray was saying companion prayers with our roommates and she said " We're thankful for this P-day; we love to serve thee but sometimes we just need some time to ourselves." Everyone in the room started fighting really hard to keep from laughing and eventually her companions burst out so we all did. Sister Conger said they could say their prayer in a little while, and ask for forgiveness. I try to put interesting stuff in these emails but I don't know if it's funny to you guys because everything lame seems funny here because of our lack of entertainment. It was awesome when Mom sent us the Police Beat from the BYU newspaper. Well I'm pretty much out of time now. Thanks for writing me letters, I have a couple to send this week.

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Ariel in the MTC

Monday, March 1, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hello again everybody, thanks for writing me letters. If it seems inconvenient to write a tangible letter you can go to DearElder.com and type something up. It's better than emailing me because I will be able to get the letter during the week instead of waiting until P-day to read them. Brother Irion is one of the teachers of the other district, we spend a lot of time with them though so he knows me. I'll tell him that my brother knows his brother. We were in our classroom writing letters when the Ambassador came; we didn't get to meet him, but I accidentally bumped into one of his bodyguards after I finished filling up my waterbottle at the drinking fountain. There were some elders hanging out in the hall and the bodyguards told them to stand up straight and not put their feet against the wall. The elders looked scared. After the Ambassador left, he was only there for a few minutes, Elder Caliniuc (the Romanian Elder) came into our classroom and was talking to us, or trying to. My companion started trying to say something to him in Romanian and he said, "Just speak English." I laughed really hard, I don't think he meant to be so blunt, but she said she never wanted to speak Romanian again. I can't start new paragraphs in these emails. This week in the LTRC (Language Teaching Resource Center) we were practicing knocking doors. There was one door that we knocked and when we were introducing ourselves one of my companions accidentally said "We are a message" instead of "We have a message." So we laughed really hard. At the same door we asked whether or not the guy believed in God and he either said "Noi" or "Nu" 'believe in God.' One of them would have meant that he, and his wife, did and the other one would have meant that they didn't. Two of us thought that he said they didn't and we didn't know what to say to him. My other companion thought he said that they did so she continued the conversation. We could never agree on what he said but it was pretty funny that such a small difference in words made a big difference in the meaning. Janice Kapp Perry spoke in relief society last Sunday. She had us sing and she sang to us a new song that she wrote. I found my journal, I just put it inside of a box so that it wouldn't get ruined and I didn't open the box until after I had just typed my email last week. Mom sent me a lot of writing materials but I'm not supposed to write letters on any day other than P-day, so I don't know what she was expecting. I've got all that stuff though so I did write some letters and I got some stamps at the bookstore to send them. I don't have very many people's addresses though, only the one's of people who have already written to me. So tell Sally to write me a letter so that I can send one to her. You probably shouldn't send me emails because I only have 30 min. of computer time each P-day, but once again you can send a letter through dearelder.com. I don't know exactly how it works but that's where lots of missionaries get their letters from. My teachers say that I have a really good accent. I tried to preserve the accent that I learned from computer programs before I came here. During my first week here I got lots of letters and packages but now I'm not getting very many, relative to the amount of family members I have that could be sending me letters. I haven't had time yet to try to graph, or figure out Ed's secret message. I fall asleep more than anyone else during classes and meetings; for all of you that wondered what would happen to me when I couldn't sleep all day anymore. I think I'm developing narcolepsy, or whatever it's called, because of sleep deprivation. It's entertaining to my companions though. I'm all out of time. You can write me letters no matter what they're about.

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