Jay Family Missionaries

July 19, 2010 in Romania

Monday, July 19, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hey everybody,

How is everything going? Some of you guys I haven't heard from in a while, so I wonder if everything is okay during those few moments that I have to think about things besides missionary work.

One day this week we were going from door to door knocking at people's houses and we knocked on this one lady's door and I don't remember how we started the approach but we started talking to her. The door approach went a little like this: we introduced a little message (I don't remember what) and asked if we could have a few minutes to share it; then the lady told us that she was orthodox, so we said "Great, then you believe in God, and in the Bible, and the Bible is written by prophets, so you believe in prophets just like us." And then we told her that there is a prophet on earth today, and she stepped back and looked at us incredulously and said "Are you joking?"
We both said "No" and we kind of stood there for a second and then said "Do you want us to tell you about him?" And she invited us in to talk to her and we gave her a restoration lesson a Book of Mormon and some commitments.

It was really cool to find someone who grasped the 'profoundness' of our message. We knock on hundreds of people's doors every week and they are always like "yeah, yeah, sure" or they just don't listen at all, but seeing this lady's response even made me realize how cool it is that we have the knowledge that we do.

Here in Galati we spend most of our time looking for people because there were no investigators when I got here, because one of the sisters before had 'health problems' and it was her last transfer. Fortunately, my companion Sora Hupp is willing to work hard and we are outside all day long looking for people.
I was thinking one day that it's a good thing that God is a lot more patient than me because I would have destroyed this city already because everybody is wicked and set in their ways...and then I realIzed that this city is currently being destroyed by flooding. So I thought about that for a while.
There are areas in this city where the missionaries are not allowed to go becuase it's too dangerous.

People actually do listen to us though, we just have to persuade them to a lot of the time. Some people just let us right in though; one day this week some young people let us in and we taught a lessons to like ten people who were sitting in the courtyard. I thought about how earlier on in my mission I might have been nervous being in front of so many people, but now I don't really care. We try so hard to get people to listen to us that when they are willing to listen we talk to anyone and everyone.
We have been able to find a few new investigators this past week though, and someone came to sacrament meeting.

The branch here is pretty small, and the previous missionaries in this area have set sort of a low standard. There was one member who wanted us to hold her little boy and help her carry him home which would have taken an hour. For Sora Hupp it was really hard to say no, because she had done it before, and the member kept telling us that she wouldn't get us in trouble for it or tell anyone and that she couldn't do it without us. I just told her that I couldn't because it was against mission rules. She kept trying to persuade us but eventually she got distracted and we just left. It's too bad that there aren't any members who could help her because I believe her when she says she needs help, but as missionaries we can't and that's just the way it is.
Sometimes when we are asked to do certain things to be obedient we don't always understand why or we feel that there are exceptions, but whenever we are obedient, no matter what comes of it, it will be "accounted unto [us] as righteousness", just like the Nephites who kept the Law of Moses. The Branch President here has asked us to help people to have the faith to pay their tithing so that they can recieve the blessings. It's one of those things that we just need to do out of obedience without trying to come up with reasons and excuses. But we also know that we will recieve blessings from doing so, both temporally and spiritually, so it makes it worth it anyway. It's like what President Hinkley said "Do what is right, no matter the consequences."

Well, that's my little missionary moment for this week's email. Except I guess that the whole email is a missionary moment.
I wish there were members out here like you guys to be good examples and teachers for everyone else.

Well, I'm running out of time. I just have one question for you guys. Everybody here, and mostly everybody in all of Europe I think, has a big pock-kind of scar on their left arm and I found out that it is from the TB vaccine. In America I think the doctors hate the TB vaccine, so I am curious to know why if it seems to have been embraced by Europe. I'm sticking with the Americans but I am curious. So, let me know.

Love,
Sora Jay

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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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