Jay Family Missionaries

July 12, 2010 in Galati

Monday, July 12, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hello Family,

I've moved here to Galati (which is actually spelled with a t-cedille so that you can find it on a map). Galati is next to the Danube river and it has been flooding like crazy. When you look over at the river there are trees in it and Sora Hupp said there used to be islands in the river but they are long since covered by water. It has been effecting a lot of people. When I was over in the west I had no idea that there was flooding over here except on my last day there when somebody told us about what they had seen on the news after I told them I was going to Galati. We have some service t-shirts so we may be able to do a lot of service, but we are letting the senior couple, the Van Wagners, set it up for us.

Last week I passed for a Romanian on my last day in Arad. The lady we were talking to thought that I was a translator for my companion, even though I hadn't actually translated anything for her. Then when she asked where my companion was from, and she said England, she asked her if I taught her Romanian. I said "No, I'm from
America." Then I told her that I came into the country in April and she just stared at me. I felt cool. Now I've been moved to the other side of the country though, so whatever accent I may have been able to pick up is now wrong. Moldova is in my mission just so you know. I may be transferred there someday. Moldoveasca is a 'language' but it's more a dialect of Romanian, it's just Romanian that's really hard to understand because they don't pronounce the words the way that they are spelled, like Romanians do.

I came into this area and it was dead. The sister that was here before me had health problems so they didn't do very much work. Sora Hupp said that they taught about 4 lessons a week. I don't even understand how that is possible, but Sora Hupp was really excited when I wanted to go out and teach people. We had 11 lessons in the past four days. Sora Hupp seems really cool. I think we will get along great, and hopefully we can help the branch here to grow. It's really tiny so the missionaries have to help a lot. I get to give a talk on the 25th just like Ed. It will be my first one here in Romania. Sora Hupp gave one this week. This will be her fourth transfer, she was in the MTC district just ahead of me. The mission, as far as sisters are concerned, has just become really young so a lot of the sisters from my district will probably go senior and train in the next couple of transfers. Two of the sisters from my district are co-senior companions right now.

I got some dearelder letters from the Mission Office when I was there for transfers. Actually I got 9 of them. It takes forever for them to get to me because I can only get them during trasfers or Zone Conference if the Assistants remember to bring them, they're nice to get though, and I can read them at my leisure which is really cool.

Love,
Sora Jay

P.S. It actaully is forbidden to read The Miracle of Forgiveness for missionaries, at least here, but there are copies of it around in the apartments.
And I don't have permission to look at your blogs so you can email them to me to read if you want.
And I finally weighed myself again, I haven't since April, and I weigh the same.
And, I was reading in the Book of Mormon in Romanian and I noticed that when the King held a 'feast' that Lamoni didn't come to, the word was actually translated as 'party' in Romanian. So the king was like "Hey, Lamoni, why weren't you at that party that I threw last week." And it was funny.

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5 Iulie 2010, in Romania

Monday, July 5, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hello.

In this mission we have a goal of teaching 20 lessons every week. This transfer Sora Walker and I have taught at least 20 lessons every week and we are the first companionship in the mission to do it from everything I've heard. Our Zone has been getting a fourth of the lessons and baptisms in the entire mission (ca sa stiti ca lucram din greu).

Well, for the fourth of July we went to a wedding, of one of our investigators. She is married to a member now, and the only thing that was keeping her from being baptized was the law of chastity...here we usually just fix that problem by making people get married. So now her husband can pass the sacrament again. She will definitely be getting baptized next transfer, but I won't be in this city because I'm getting transferred tomorrow.

The wedding was really quick. We went to the Primaria, or city building, and they said something really quickly and signed some papers and that was it. They took some pictures with everyone that was there so we were in them. Unfortunately, we were all standing near the back so we didn't know that we weren't supposed to smile in the pictures. So it will be pretty obvious to everyone that we are foreigners in that picture; standing in the background and smiling really big when everyone else has serious faces.
Afterward we went to the church for her reception and I got to eat sarmale (cabbage rolls) for the first time. They are classic romanian food, and they just tasted like ravioli, but not actually very good. There were big trays of assorted cakes and treats for everyone to eat, and there are still some left-overs at the church so I think I will convince my companion to go over there with me and eat the desserts before they all go bad. But I'm also going to try to convince her to go play in the 'children's park' with me today too so maybe I'll just go for one of them.
Anyway, the relief society sisters were in charge of all the food at the wedding and something happened in the kitchen so that people got offended and left crying, so this evening we are going to try to fix people's hurt feelings and make sure that they keep coming to church. One of the sisters is just kind of a jerk, even to the primary children.

At one of our lessons with some recent convert little girls we taught about having faith like a mustard seed. I can't remember which verses we used but they had the word 'drac' in them which means devil, and the little girls thought it was hilarious because it's a pretty bad swear-word in Romanian (dracula is actually the vocative form of the word).

So, I'm getting transferred to Galati (gah-lah-ts) so that you say it correctly. I don't really know anything about it right now, so I'll let you know next week.

Cu drag,
Sora Jay

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June 28, 2010 in Romania

Monday, June 28, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hello again everybody,

How was Jill's reception? Did you eat a giant pig? I hope so.

This week we had a double baptism. The elders/Zone Leaders/District Leaders who are the only two other missionaries in our city had an investigator, Daniel, and we had an investigator, Dana. The elders have been really busy and stressed out so we planned the baptism and took care of everything except for the 'bazin' that they brought back from another city where someone else had just been baptized. It's cool. Our investigator has three little boys and she brought them all to church the next day; she had never brought them before so it was really cool. She also brought her mom to help her with the kids, but we sent them to primary and had her mom come to Sunday School and gave her a pamphlet about the restoration to take home. It's cool how Dana has already started being a member missionary. Most of the Romanians are pretty bad at it. In fact, the place in this mission where the church is the biggest is in Moldova; missionaries were pulled out of the country for a few years and when they went back the branch was huge. All of the members had had to do the missionary work.

When I was in the MTC there was one missionary in my district who broke his thumb playing basketball and he wasn't able to come out to Romania. He stayed in Utah and they let him serve in the Provo mission. They were thinking about sending him out here eventually but at the end of his first transfer he had 13 baptismal dates set up, so they decided to keep him there. We talked about his success in district meeting. I knew him in the MTC and he wasn't necessarily a better missionary than any of the other missionaries in our district so the only difference is that there are members in Utah to fellowship and to befriend people who are investigating.
In Romania it seems like the branches are on the verge of massive growth, we just need the members to get in gear.

It's weird that you guys are planning on meeting Tom by the fence. But now that I think about it, I guess our family always broke the rules at the MTC because there was usually someone working there while we had missionaries there. I guess the only one who didn't break the rules was Tim, because his MTC was hundreds of miles away. Well, have fun. You should give him a chocolate eclair, and I'll give myself a huge chocolate-filled croissant, or one of a variety of freshly cooked delicious desserts that can be found here in Europe (especially since I live right next to a bakery) to make up for not being able to be there. And maybe someday I'll be invited to a pig-slaughtering party so that I can eat some of one of those giant pigs that people raise in their backyards.

I don't think it's weird that Jennie still calls her old mission companion Sister Needham, I think it's weird that she doesn't refer to her with the Korean title for 'sister'. I guess maybe since it's so close to the English word in Romanian we never say the word 'Sister' in this mission, always Sora. Even when the general authorities come around with their wives we still call them Elder and Sora so-and-so.

Hey Tom, I was looking back through my Tall-book and seeing if there were any words in there that I didn't know. There aren't really anymore. And I actually found that there were a lot of mistakes in that book, or else things that were just translated in a really weird way. So have fun studying in there. One thing that I noticed pretty quickly when I got into the country was that the metaphorical 'you' is always singular. People would be talking to my companion and me and they would start using the singular form of 'you' and I felt bad for a little while because I thought that they had just stopped talking to me and were talking to only my companion, but eventually I realized that they were just speaking in general like if they said "So if you pray about the Book of Mormon, you'll get an answer?" then they would say it in singular. Is it the same in Portuguese? Maybe one of you returned missionaries can tell me.

Well, that's probably it for now.
Love,
Sora Jay

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June 21, 2010 in Romania

Monday, June 21, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hey Everybody,

How's it going. Today we went out to Lipova again and climbed all over the castle ruins. I didn't take a lot of pictures this time because I had been there before, and it was a sunny day this time so we climbed on the ruins more. I can send you more pictures through email as soon as I get a chance to use a computer that has a USB port that works (which means probably not for about three weeks 'til if I'm in Buchurest for transfers).

This past week has been kind of rough. We have had some companion problems some more, but they seem to get settled out as they come along. I didn't know what to do more with my companion so I told her to call President; he had the Zone leaders give us some advice at district meeting. They were really cool about it. They said they felt bad for us because we could never go on exchanges to learn the types of things that they tell to the elders when they are on exchanges with them.

I think that it will be a lot different in Tom's mission than it is in mine. In our district it is just us two sisters and the Zone leaders, so they call it a 'dating district' and each of the districts in Romania except for the one in Buchurest are 'dating districts.' So whenever we go out to lunch on P-days people always think we're on a date. In Tom's mission the districts will probably be huge so that for district meeting it will actually be scheduled and people will have assignments, because here it isn't always like that. Usually, but not always.

We got asked out a few times this week. The guys in Romania are pretty bold, and the girls are too I guess because the elders have told us about things that happen to them as well.

Our investigator, Dana, is getting baptized this Saturday, and the elders have an investigator to get baptized on the same day, so it'll be cool.

Hmmm. I don't really have anything else to tell you guys. I think there are probably a lot of things that I could tell you about, but I've gotten used to the way that things are here so that they don't stand out to me as things to tell you.

We have been working on starting up a Young Womens program here, so we taught a YW class this past Sunday. There were like eight girls there and they've called one of the strongest members in the branch to be the Young Women's President so we think it will start going really strong and we can get the girls to bring their friends and other people to the activities. They're all really cool girls, even the ones that are inactive aren't the way that inactive members in Utah are. I wish you guys could hear the way that they pray. I get used to hearing them pray that way in Romanian, but I was translating it into English in my head on Sunday and I realized how different it was from the way that I usually heard people pray in English. They're prayers are usually a lot longer too though, so I can understand why it would be different in a place like Utah where people probably pray a lot more in public places, so they've learned to do it differently.

Tom talked about getting a lot of letters and pictures and I was like, "Yeah I got those too," but then I realized that he must have been talking about getting things in the real mail instead of just through email, and I was jealous. I remember those days in the MTC when I would get letters like every day and I would have so much stuff to write that I could never get it all into a 30 minute email. But, ce sa fac, we won't get anything from the real mail or through dearelder.com until somebody comes out to our zone from Buchurest, which isn't until transfers on the 6th.

I got Joni's pictures, I wish I had somewhere to print them off so that I could keep them on me, because a lot of people like investigators and members really like to see the pictures that I have of my family, especially when I tell them how big it is. I guess if I get transferred I'll be able to print off some stuff in Buchurest really quick, if I have somebody with me who knows their way around the city.

Love,
Sora Jay

P.S. It's been a long time since anyone has called me Ariel, so it seems strange when you guys call me Ariel. It's like my secret name. It's actually the name of a popular laundry detergent here but it's still a hard name for them to say. I have told people that my real name was Thwithulthwarth before, because it's impossible for them to say and it's funny to hear them try, usually they say something that sounds like fifly-fourf when they repeat it back to me.

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June 14, 2010 in Romania

Monday, June 14, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hey,

It has been really hot here in Romania for the past week. I'm a lot browner now, even though I wear like spf 30 every second that I'm outside. On the first day that it was super hot I just felt sick and light-headed because I think my body didn't know how to handle it, but now I guess I've adjusted. I'm just soaked with sweat all the time. That's probably something that Ed and Tom have to look forward to as well, but at least for me the winter will eventually come back. It might for Ed too, I'm not sure where he will be in Argentina or what the weather will be like there. People don't like to wear very much clothing when the weather is hot. And there is a giant park place across the river where everyone goes to go tanning and I told my companion that considering how scantily dressed they are on this side of the river we should never attempt to go over there. One time a girl asked us why we didn't go over there to tan, and we were just like "umm...we're missionaries, we don't do stuff like that."

We met with the Branch President last week at his house with the elders to tell him about our investigators and his band was there. His rock band. I guess I never told you guys but whenever he's not wearing a suit he's wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses. He's really new at being a branch president so he's really cool because when we tell him how things go he takes it. The elders told us that one of the first questions he had was whether or not he could call women to be his counselors in the branch presidency. We are working on starting a Young Womens program right now in addition to missionary work so that we can try to get the inactive girls to come to church. It's hard when the members are kind of complacent about missionary work. The problem is, I think, that every single one of them was found by the missionaries and that's how they joined the church. But I think that the branch would explode if the members started finding people for us. One of the less active members that we visit was telling us about how she had been reading her Book of Mormon at work one time and her coworker asked her about it, and she told us that she didn't have "chef" (like energy or motivation, but there isn't really an english equivalent) to explain it to her, and I just stared at her and we were like "Next time just give her our number." One of her other coworkers actually found us on her own and searched us out and we met with her, without finding out until later that she knew somebody who was mormon.
When we met with her she actually told us that her husband had just been arrested. So we threw our lesson plan out the window and improvised. I remembered the verse that is written on the missionary plaques of all of you older siblings: Helaman 5:12, and shared it with her. She started reading it in a kind of bored way and then got more interested and then after she finished reading it she just looked at me and smiled. She said that whenever the missionaries wanted to meet with her she didn't have the chef to meet with them or she had other things that she wanted to do, but that every time that they came over they told her exactly what she needed to hear. And then she was happy and she told us to go and find other people and make them as happy as she was now.

But the elders had a baptism on Saturday, Marinela, and since she is brand new to being a member we are planning on teaching her to be a good one right from the start by having her at member-present lessons already. We also have a baptismal date set up for a lady who has been an investigator for a long time, Dana. Sora Walker was kind of a jerk to her when we left her house last time and she seemed mad when we left so I figured we wouldn't be visiting her anymore because the argument had been about baptism. But when she came to church on Sunday she said that after we left she knew that she needed to do something and told us that she wants to be baptized on the 26th of this month. She has had all of the lessons now so it just depends on her following through with the commitment. She is the lady that we blocked knocked into, who had let us in immediately and we had found out she was a previous investigator. We used a little strategy that I remember Jill talking about: we gave her the checklist from the investigator progress sheet and went over each of the topics again to show her that she knew everything and had her check them off. So our lesson last time was the one where we taught her the only things left to teach her and we were either going to drop her or get her baptized. We thought we were dropping her, but then she told us on Sunday that she would get baptized.

When I was at the MTC my room was on the top floor of one building, and my classroom was on the top floor of another building, Tom, so I know how it goes.

The food that I eat the most in Romania is sandwitches, at lunchtime. I haven't tried a lot of the native food. I did eat stomach soup once though, and it was disgusting.

Love,
Sora Jay

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Week 2 in the second transfer, or something like that

Monday, June 7, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hey Everybody,

Pete asked me some questions about what things are like here. Our apartment is really nice compared to anywhere that I've ever lived before, I think. It's little but pretty nice. I would send you some pictures if the internet place here was able. Here we have two different kinds of milk, normal milk and shelf milk. We ran out of normal milk this week so we had to use some of the shelf milk and it is disgusting. When we get water from the tap we have to use a three-level filter to make sure we don't get all sorts of parasites and things. In fact, my companion has been saying that maybe she has a parasite now.
In Romania the lawnmowers are tiny and crappy so usually people use weedwhackers for everything. I have seen people using scythes to cut the grass by the sidewalks. There isn't really such a thing as a front lawn here though, unless you're really rich and you have a massive gate to keep people off it.
People here in Romania are pretty racist against the gypsies. When a little kid is misbehaving a lot of times his parents will call him 'tsiganule,' which is the vocative form of 'gypsy', as an insult, and a joke. But the people in the branch aren't racist like that. They accept anyone and everyone that comes into the church. There is one girl who lives close to the church who can't read or write or tell time so she doesn't know when to come to church. So, we just ask some of the other girls to run and get her before church starts and they all jump up and run off together to do it.

I don't know what it was like in the places where you guys all served missions but here in Romania, and especially in Arad the area is super religious. The elders told us about one time when they were knocking on doors out where the vilas are and they had just been rejected. They had been walking through mud all down that street so after they knocked that last door they stopped to scrape the mud from their shoes. The lady in the house they had just left came out to do something and saw. She was shocked and then she invited them to come back to her house and come tell her their message. And it was because there is a scripture in the bible that she remembered about "shaking off the dust of your feet" after being rejected (I think it's in Matthew 10). So then she let them into her house because she didn't want the bad consequences. People here know the bible pretty well, or at least the verses that are most commonly used in their church. As missionaries we kind of learn to quote them because we hear them so often, and people always know the quotes and can finish them with you.

I got a lot of emails today. It's cool to hear about everything that has been going on for you guys. It feels like I have stepped out of time here, because I totally forgot that school was ending for everybody and stuff, and that it was the time of year for the Nestle 5K. Here we rarely go running. It takes too long to get ready and then go out of the apartment and down in the tiny elevator and then go outside and run somewhere and then come back that I don't think it's worth it. We don't get to run very far because it takes so much time to get outside and get back inside because everything is pretty securely locked up. So I just do situps and crunches and pushups and stuff like that every morning. I'm pretty ripped now. All of the sisters say that elders lose weight in this mission but the sisters gain weight. I haven't kept track of my weight but I don't think I've gained any. I can see how it could happen though because there are delicious smelling pastry shops on every busy street. My first companion and I only stopped to get things if it was lunchtime so I never got into the habit of going to them.

I haven't tried a lot of Romanian food. We mostly just eat at home for lunch like, sandwiches and soups, and we always just eat cereal or eggs for breakfast. We have eaten at restaurants on P-days with the Elders but they are all themed from different countries like Germany or Italy, and one is Japanese. Today we are planning on eating at a real Romanian place though.
I did eat stomach soup one time. It was the greasiest thing I have ever tried. I only took like two bites. There were rubbery stomach strips floating around inside.

When I was in the MTC the main thing that I tried to accomplish with the language, besides learning the vocab and grammar, was to preserve the accent that I had picked up from the internet programs that I had looked at before. It turned out pretty well for me and the rest of my district followed my example. The teacher that was Romanian said that we spoke better than any other group when we left. Sometimes people think that I've been in the country longer than my companion (who has been out for seven months) and that I speak better than her because I have tried to learn the accent. Now I'm trying to learn the voice of Romanian. There are certain inflections that everybody uses when the say a certain phrase. I picked up on the one's we hear all the time really quickly: "Nu ma intereseaza" which means "I'm not interested." Everybody always says it the same way.

Thanks for writing me everybody, and good luck to Tom.
Good luck with everything, and read your scriptures.

Love,
Sora Jay

P.S. It's funny that you found those folders that I had written names on. I remember when I did it, and then I used them all that semester and kids would give me weird looks. It was awesome.

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Week 7: inceputul al doilea transferului

Monday, May 31, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hey everybody,

Hey lots of you guys sent me emails this week, it was awesome. I was looking at the pictures in Jill's email and you guys all look different, except for Jerm and Emily. And it was funny how Tom was holding one of the nieces in his arms, which is classic because they all love him. So, now that I'm not the only missionary out you guys will probably send me more of those mass email things, but it's totally fine. I'm kind of curious to know what you will be saying to Tom, and maybe it will be things that I need too, even though you wouldn't think about it because I've been out here for a little while longer than him.

Anyway, this week was crazy. I was in Buchurest for transfers which means that I was out of Arad from Sunday evening until late Wednesday night. I have a new companion Sora Walker. She's from England. It's kind of sad when I realize how little I appreciated my training companion until more toward the end of our transfer together, but I bet she probably understands, cuz she's cool that way. So...this companion is going to be a little more difficult.

When we were in Buchurest Sora Staley and I knocked some blocks after P-day hours ended and we were in a block and everybody was rejecting us and saying that there had already been missionaries there yesterday. One guy even came to the door with some money because the other missionaries had asked him for money. So we weren't being accepted by anybody in the block and Sora Staley turned to me and asked me if we should just leave. I felt like we should stay, and so we did. A couple of doors down a lady let us in. She said she had been out of town for the past few days (so that the other missionaries weren't able to talk to her to make her hate missionaries) and so we were able to teach her a lesson. Then the next door we met two people who were about to leave their house but we talked to them for a while and we got their numbers to give to the Buch missionaries. It was cool because recently I had been praying that I would know whether or not we were in the right place, because we always go contacting but we don't find people who are interested all that often. But it was interesting because I knew that I was in the right place, but I didn't realize that I knew it until that knowledge was questioned, when Sora Staley asked if we should leave. I think maybe a lot of blessings are like that; we ask for them and keep waiting for them when we are actually receiving them already. So maybe the better thing to do is to pray for the ability to recognize the blessings when they come.

I spent the next day with the Sisters in the Buch apartment and since it was transfer time the missionaries from the MTC were arriving. We picked them up in the evening and then went to teach some lessons. There were three new sisters so we divided up into two threesomes with the senior companion from the Buch sisters taking the two boboace and me and the Junior companion taking the other one. So I was actually with Sora Hupp who had been in the district before me at the MTC, so it was her at the end of her second transfer with me at the end of my first and the boboaca at the very beginning of her first. And we went and taught a lesson.
We were meeting with a recent convert and Sora Hupp had already picked a topic and some verses to share. We got into the lesson and she started out, it was going pretty rocky. I think she felt a lot of pressure, so I tried to think of something really quick and then I jumped in. The lesson flowed really well. We took a little minute to let the boboaca add her testimony, we kind of had to wake her up because she was falling asleep because she had been on a bunch of planes all day, but in the end it was a pretty good lesson. Whenever I had Sora Staley with me I knew that she could say everything, and that she would, so I generally only taught small parts of the lessons, but once it was all just on us three and I knew that none of us could speak quite that well I taught a lot of the lesson.
Once we got out Sora Hupp told me that I spoke really well, and I thought, I don't really know the language any better than Sora Hupp, in fact I know that I don't, but I just opened up my mouth to say what needed to be said and it came out.

My new companion struggles with the language still because she has a really strong british accent, meaning that people can't really understand what she is saying sometimes, or they thing it's really funny. It's cool how it requires us to work together though. When a word comes up that she doesn't know we have to work together and sometimes I know it and can tell her what it means. And sometimes when people can't understand her because of her accent they ask me to say it. So, it's an interesting difference going from a companion who is in her last transfer to one who is only in her sixth.
She loves to correct me when I speak in Romanian, and it gets kind of annoying because sometimes she corrects me incorrectly. It's hard for me to trust correction from the other missionaries because I know that they don't speak perfect Romanian either. It took me a while to realize that about Sora Staley, but eventually I realized that although she spoke really well she still made a lot of mistakes. And whenever a Romanian person tells you that you speak really well, it's the same way that it would be if an American told somebody that they speak English really well; what it really means is something like "I'm sure that you're working really hard on this language because I can mostly understand you," while implying "but you are definitely foreign." And it's meant to be more of an encouraging thing than a compliment. People tell me that I speak well even when I know that I'm slaughtering the language.

Anyway, that's what's happening for me right now. Go have fun.

Love,
Sora Jay.

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