Jay Family Missionaries

I've started a new transfer again, and I'm here in Bucurest with my
companion, Sora Fraser, who is from England. So far I have gone
American, English, American, Australian, American, English, so we're
predicting that the pattern will continue.
I asked Sora Fraser if she really uses the word 'snogging' and she
laughed and said that I said it totally American, and she does use it.
She likes to say 'proper dodgey' and 'pants!' all the time. My other
two foreign companions had kind of lost their little sayings by the
time they got to me I guess.

We've decided to change things up a little to increase our
effectiveness here in Bucurest. Since this is the strongest area in
Romania we figured we should be setting the standard for the mission.
The mission standard of excellence is to have 20 lessons a week, so we
are going to try to get 30 next week (we tried to find out what the
record was but nobody knew, so we just figured we would go for 30
since we're pretty sure nobody's ever beaten that). But, we also
found out that we have sister-exchanges this week (they are the first
ones to ever happen) so it might mess with our goal.

Sora Fraser is more willing to do crazy things than most of my
companions. There was a guy playing a violin in the park and we
decided that I should go ask him if I could play it. He was really
confused at first, but then he let me take it and play it. It was a
pretty good violin. So I played the violin while my companion talked
to him. It drew a lot of attention, probably because I played a lot
different style than most Romanians would ever play. I tried to play
Orange Blossom Special but I am really rusty and couldn't do it very
well. I mostly played fiddling songs that I could remember and hymns.
We gave him a 'free' Book of Mormon (we actually give them to lots of
people all the time as long as they commit to something) for letting
us play his violin, he was cool.

We also got the elders to come to the park with us on Sunday after
Church and we did 'sing-contacting' in the park, where some of us sing
and the others go and ask people if they want to know what we're
doing. It's a good way of finding people who want to investigate
rather than finding people who we persuade to investigate. We also
tried one last strategy, that I had heard about from some other
elders: we just took all of the materials out of our bags and laid
them out on a bench where people could see them (which was like six
books and a bunch of pamphlets) and talked to the people who came up
and were interested. So we contacted people by sitting on a bench.
We had some good lessons with people from it.

I'm kind of dreading sister exchanges. I've been senior companion
long enough that I don't want to go on splits with somebody who will
try to be my 'senior for the day,' or who will be evaluating my
missionary effectiveness from their perspective.

Love,
Sora Jay

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