Romania 21 March 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011 by Sora Jay
Hey everybody,
How's it going.
This week has been pretty uneventful. Just the usual; knocking on people's doors, stopping them on the street, giving out hundreds of pamphlets, etc.
When I was at the church one day I was listening to one of the girls talk and I realized that the way that she pronounced the different conjugations of the verb 'to be' was different from me. I put the accent on the other syllables. So then I left all discouraged thinking that for my entire mission I had been pronouncing the most basic verb wrong. But I told one of the elders and he looked it up in one of his books and said that it is just a regional thing. In all of the other cities that I've been in it's pronounced the way that I pronounce it. So that was good.
Ed, I don't drink the tapwater even in Romania, and missionaries here get parasites. We are all required to take a de-worming pill at the end of our missions. So, you probably should do something about it. The worms that Tom drank were probably just some larva, so he probably just got a little more protein. I heard about one elder who would buy pig skin at the outdoor markets all the time and eat it and one day he got really sick. They sent him to Germany and said that he had like 36 different kinds of parasites living in him. But that was from eating the pigskins not from drinking the water.
Anyway, we went up to Chisihau in the Republic of Moldova for district conference on Sunday. We had to go over the border and show our passports and everything. We never had to get out of the van though. There is a guy named Oleg who always drives the missionaries to and from Chisinau and he gets us through the border really easily. You can take a train there but it takes like three extra hours because they have to change the wheels on the train because the railroad tracks are different sizes. In Chisinau there is one branch but half of the members speak Russian and half of them speak Romanian (there are some that speak both languages) so they have to have everything translated. There are little headphones that they give to everyone and somebody who can translate talks into a little microphone and translates for everyone. They told us that the meeting was going to be in Romanian so we didn't grab any little headsets, but then there actually were a couple of talks in Russian/Ukrainian. I can understand the basic testimony statements and some of the words are similar to Romanian words but other than that we just sat and listened. I'm used to talking to people when they show up at church so I was trying to talk to all sorts of people and some of them I couldn't communicate with because they only spoke Russian. They taught me how to say "I speak Romanian" and they were trying to teach me how to say 'hi' and 'how are you,' but I couldn't get the formal version down. I know how to say it informally and they told me that I could just say it like that because everyone knows that I'm American anyway.
We drove over some little mountains and saw a ton of little villages and massive vineyards and stuff like that. There were sheep and cows on the road, and people drawing water from wells, etc. It would be really cool to go into an area like that to see how it is. They keep the missionaries to the big cities though. I tried to take some pictures but the windows of the van were dirty and we were driving really fast so they are blurry anyway.
Well, that's probably all I've got to say. The only different thing this week was that we had English signups. Lots of people came, even though we didn't ever have the flyers to give out, but because we put the ads in the newspaper we got about a hundred people to sign up. We gave them a little form to fill out and on it there was a question about whether or not they would like to know more about the church, and quite a few of them said they would, so hopefully we can have some success from our classes.
We got letters and packages last week and I got the picture of baby Aubrey. I also got some news from my previous city that some more of the people that I found with Sora Ausen are scheduled to get baptized soon.
Love,
Sora Jay
P.S. last week I was craving a regular candybar, (not a gross Romanian one) and I thought maybe I would be able to get one from Republica Moldova (because they have normal-ish ones from what I've heard) but we were only there on Sunday so I couldn't, but then on Sunday night my companion gave me a swiss-cake roll that she got from her package last week and it was perfect. And we lived happily ever after.
How's it going.
This week has been pretty uneventful. Just the usual; knocking on people's doors, stopping them on the street, giving out hundreds of pamphlets, etc.
When I was at the church one day I was listening to one of the girls talk and I realized that the way that she pronounced the different conjugations of the verb 'to be' was different from me. I put the accent on the other syllables. So then I left all discouraged thinking that for my entire mission I had been pronouncing the most basic verb wrong. But I told one of the elders and he looked it up in one of his books and said that it is just a regional thing. In all of the other cities that I've been in it's pronounced the way that I pronounce it. So that was good.
Ed, I don't drink the tapwater even in Romania, and missionaries here get parasites. We are all required to take a de-worming pill at the end of our missions. So, you probably should do something about it. The worms that Tom drank were probably just some larva, so he probably just got a little more protein. I heard about one elder who would buy pig skin at the outdoor markets all the time and eat it and one day he got really sick. They sent him to Germany and said that he had like 36 different kinds of parasites living in him. But that was from eating the pigskins not from drinking the water.
Anyway, we went up to Chisihau in the Republic of Moldova for district conference on Sunday. We had to go over the border and show our passports and everything. We never had to get out of the van though. There is a guy named Oleg who always drives the missionaries to and from Chisinau and he gets us through the border really easily. You can take a train there but it takes like three extra hours because they have to change the wheels on the train because the railroad tracks are different sizes. In Chisinau there is one branch but half of the members speak Russian and half of them speak Romanian (there are some that speak both languages) so they have to have everything translated. There are little headphones that they give to everyone and somebody who can translate talks into a little microphone and translates for everyone. They told us that the meeting was going to be in Romanian so we didn't grab any little headsets, but then there actually were a couple of talks in Russian/Ukrainian. I can understand the basic testimony statements and some of the words are similar to Romanian words but other than that we just sat and listened. I'm used to talking to people when they show up at church so I was trying to talk to all sorts of people and some of them I couldn't communicate with because they only spoke Russian. They taught me how to say "I speak Romanian" and they were trying to teach me how to say 'hi' and 'how are you,' but I couldn't get the formal version down. I know how to say it informally and they told me that I could just say it like that because everyone knows that I'm American anyway.
We drove over some little mountains and saw a ton of little villages and massive vineyards and stuff like that. There were sheep and cows on the road, and people drawing water from wells, etc. It would be really cool to go into an area like that to see how it is. They keep the missionaries to the big cities though. I tried to take some pictures but the windows of the van were dirty and we were driving really fast so they are blurry anyway.
Well, that's probably all I've got to say. The only different thing this week was that we had English signups. Lots of people came, even though we didn't ever have the flyers to give out, but because we put the ads in the newspaper we got about a hundred people to sign up. We gave them a little form to fill out and on it there was a question about whether or not they would like to know more about the church, and quite a few of them said they would, so hopefully we can have some success from our classes.
We got letters and packages last week and I got the picture of baby Aubrey. I also got some news from my previous city that some more of the people that I found with Sora Ausen are scheduled to get baptized soon.
Love,
Sora Jay
P.S. last week I was craving a regular candybar, (not a gross Romanian one) and I thought maybe I would be able to get one from Republica Moldova (because they have normal-ish ones from what I've heard) but we were only there on Sunday so I couldn't, but then on Sunday night my companion gave me a swiss-cake roll that she got from her package last week and it was perfect. And we lived happily ever after.
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