question/Mothers day

Monday, April 26, 2010 by Sora Jay

Has everybody been getting these letters?  It's better to write emails for me because anything else will take weeks or months to reach me.  I don't think I have everbody's email in my address book though so let me know, and write me if you don't get these emails so I can include you in the next ones.

Plus, mother's day is coming up so our phone number is: 0753-058-823 and you'll need the country code but I don't know what it is.  But, one of the members has offered us her computer to talk over Skype so if you guys want to find out what time would be good for you considering the difference in time and I'll talk to her and we can use the computer.
The internet is kind of crappy here but we can try it and use the phone as a backup.

-Sora Jay



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2nd Week in Romania

by Sora Jay

Hello everybody,

Things are going okay here in Romania.  We haven't had a lot of success as far as finding people after knocking hundreds of doors or anything like that, and our progressing investigator hasn't come to church and her husband doesn't want her to get baptized, but everything is going well.  We keep working hard and we know that we will find the people who are ready.
Here's a cool story: we decided earlier this week that we would start focusing our knocking in an area called Micalaca which has a ton of blocks.  One door we knocked on a girl said, "Oh yeah I have a book of Mormon.  Two boys gave it to me."  We asked her when and she said it was about two years ago; then we asked her if she read it and she said she did when she felt the need, so my companion told her that we were sent to her door to tell her to read it and she said "Now do you feel the need?"  I don't understand everything so I'm not exactly sure what her response was but we gave her our number and told her to read and call us, because she said she didn't want to meet with us right then.  So, I always wonder about what things might be happening that we do that we don't know about.  Because my companion told me a story about how one day someone had come up to them and said that she saw them all over the place and she was finally curious about who they were and what they were doing and they were able to set up with her and teach her.  So when we get lost in the city or delayed somewhere because of the tramvai I wonder if it is so that some less-active member or previous investigator needed to see us out walking around to remind them about the church.  And when we went into that block where nobody else even took a pamphlet from us we found that one girl who had met with the missionaries before and needed to be reminded about it.
On Thursday we had been out knocking doors all day and it was getting late so we decided to head home but it turned out that because we had moved closer toward our home while knocking the area it didn't take us as long to get home as we had expected so we walked a little way behind our apartment building and randomly found a block and walked into it and randomly walked up some stairs and randomly chose a door and somebody let us in.  It turns out that they didn't actually live there and were only there for one night watching the house while their friend was at a wedding.  They didn't want to go to the wedding because there would be drinking and stuff.  So we talked to them for a while (we got home really late actually even though we told them a ton of times that we needed to leave) and got their numbers.  They are moving to England in a couple of days so we told them that we would find the address of the nearest church and send the missionaries in England over to meet them, they gave us their address and phone numbers for England.  Both Sister Staley and I know missionaries in England who speak Romanian.  So that was cool how we were guided directly to the house that they were temporarily in and they were interested.
And finally, yesterday we had to finish our planning so we didn't have a lot of time for knocking but when we got out there we tried to get into a couple of blocks and couldn't (you have to ring up one of the apartments and ask them to unlock the doors for you) so then we were about to try one and a lady came out so we caught the door and got inside.  We knocked all of the doors starting at the top and then we got to door 3 and nobody answered so we were walking down the stairs when we heard it open and then close.  We decided to go back because we had nothing to lose.  So we knocked on that door again and started with our message like usual but then the guy was like "wait let me get my wife."  And when she came to the door she told us to come in without asking any questions and had us go sit down in the kitchen and asked us if we needed some water or anything.  We were really confused and Sister Staley said really quick in English "I think these guys think that we are somebody else.  It's going to be awkward when we have to explain."  Because she had had that happen before where somebody thought that they were Jehovas Witnesses and let then in until they talked about Joseph Smith and then threw them out.  But then the lady reached up and grabbed something off the top of her fridge and said "Albert gave this to me before he went back to America."  And we were even more confused but when she opened it up there was a little message written on a cardboard covering that had a little message and said "-Elder Sandburg."  Sister Staley remembered that she had actual seen this lady, Dana, at church but had thought that she was a less active member but as we talked we found out that she was an old investigator that had never been baptized (and I guess we were too stupid to stop her at church and talk to her so we had to go find her at her house).  She asked us how we knew where she lived and what we said was "God knows where you live so he showed us."  The reason why she hadn't been baptized before was because she had three little kids but wasn't married to her boyfriend, but she told us that she is getting married May 8.  So I guess now that she's ready to get baptized we had to find her again.  The elders have her teaching record and when we told them about finding her they said that she had moved and they didn't have her address.  But now we have it.
So that was really cool.

But for Tom and Ed to know, most of the day is just walking from door to door inviting people to listen to us and testifying right there.  But usually something good happens every day.

This city, and I think all of Romania, is super religious.  I feel like this is what it was like in Joseph Smith's time.  There is the default religion, Orthodox, which usually means that they aren't really religious at all, but there are also churches of lots of different kinds with really devout followers who yell at us when we knock on their doors or who invite us in and try to tell us that we're wrong.  Catholicism is pretty big but the Pentecostal members stand out because the girls all wear skirts and shawls on their heads, the Jehova's Witnesses girls wear shawls only to pray or talk about the gospel.  Some people feel bad if we pray with them because they think we are sinning by not wearing a shawl/scarf-thing on our heads.  Also, when you pray with a pentecostal person they add to your prayer which almost made me start laughing the first time, but is actually kind of disturbing.  I'll be saying a short simple prayer and during it they will say things like "Oh, we're thankful!" and "Oh God!" and "Amen!" really emphatically.  And then when I finished saying the prayer and closed they immediately started their own prayer, and they are really emphatic the whole time to the point where I almost laugh and almost want to say "Woah, calm down."  One of our investigators talked about going to a Pentecostal church and she said "I really liked the singing and the friendly atmosphere but when people started praying and jumping up and speaking in tongues the Holy Ghost ran from the room, and so did I."
So it's not the way that I expected a previously communist country to be.
You can really see the effects of communism here though.  Everything is really run down, and a lot of people don't have much hope or motivation to do anything.  I am glad that they are as religious as they are but it is still really hard for them to see why it would matter that we have more truth to share with them, and I kind of hate it how their experience with doctrines and the bible has been messed up by the other churches that have been here for hundreds of years.  Everyone here misinterprets the bible really well and they have all sorts of questions but when we tell them that all they need to do is read the Book of Mormon to have their questions answered they quote another scripture from the bible and refuse to try it.  But I guess some people are prepared and some people aren't.

Anyway, that's probably it for now.
I'll hear from you guys later.
-Sora Jay



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First Week in Romania

Monday, April 19, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hey everyone,

I'm here in Romania.  It took a long time to get here and we were all really tired on the first day.  If you got the letter from my mission president you probably saw how awesome the humidity made my hair be.  Now it has settled down.
My first area is Arad.  You guys can look it up on google earth and probably see the entire city.  I'm not sure exactly where we live otherwise I would tell you so that you could look for it.  The city isn't very big but there are a ton of 'blocks' which are apartment buildings so there are a lot of people.  We call tracting block-knocking because that's what it usually live.  The people who don't live in blocks live in vilas which aren't very nice usually.  The church is a vila though and it is pretty nice.  I did my first street contacting in Bucharest and it was cool.  I could understand a lot of what people said to me but not enough to be able to communicate with them, but I had my senior companion Sister Staley with me.  She had me start the discussion, or stop the people, and then she would talk more to them.  It's pretty much still like that now when we go block-knocking.
My first area is the farthest area from Bucharest that there is in the mission so we spent some of the day street contacting in Bucharest after we bought our train tickets.  We took a sleeper train that left at about midnight and we slept most of the way to Arad.  There was an elder with us, Elder Bigu, who was going to Timisoara so he needed someone to at least part of the way with him.  He is actually Romanian though, even though he speaks perfect English because he lived in the United States for a long time, so he was probably the missionary that would be best off traveling by himself in case anything happened (except he's crazy).

I definitely don't look like anyone else here.  People can spot me as foreign from pretty far away but usually they think I'm from Sweden or somewhere in Europe until I tell them that I'm from the US.  Our first day here we had to get a little medical exam where all they did was weigh us and measure our height.  The doctor asked me if I was a model and she said that I could have a really good career as a model in Europe.  Then later when we were at the mission office there was a member there who was getting ready to go on his mission and he stared at me a lot and then asked if he could take a picture of me.  He said he didn't believe that I was a missionary because he thought that I looked like a model.  It was pretty awkward.  But I guess it shows that I stand out here.
Church was cool.  The branch is really little but it's a good one.  We had carbonated water for sacrament and really good bread.

We don't have a lot of time to write right now because the internet wasn't working here at this internet cafe and it is the only one in the city that we know of so we had to come back and try again and now we don't have much time.  I'll try to write more next week.

-Love Sora Jay



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Week 8 in MTC: Last week in America

Thursday, April 8, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hey everybody,
 
This is the last time that I will be emailing from the MTC; we got our flight plans this week.  I will leave the MTC at 5:00 am Monday morning and head up to the Salt Lake airport then we will fly to New York and after that we go to Austria and then to Bucharest.  We are not allowed to meet people at the airport but we are allowed to call from the New York airport when we get there.  I will be there between 1:00 pm and 3:00 pm Utah time, I think.  I don't have a phonecard and they don't have any here that aren't really expensive so if you guys wanted to send me a number for a phonecard I'll use it in New York.  I don't know how much time I'll have to talk, probably not a whole lot because we have to find our way to the place where we get on the next plane and make sure everything is ready to go before we call home.
 
Yesterday we hosted the new missionaries again.  Also, my companionship was chosen to be the example companionship for the new missionaries: when they were learning how to teach we were the missionaries that they watched.  They had us come into a room full of them, and they put clip-on microphones on all of us and we taught the first part of a lesson to some scruffy-looking guys (who are actually service missionaries).  It was fun, and the investigators were golden.  The next lesson I teach will be in Romania.
 
Once again I wrote down a bunch of things to tell you guys in this email and then left the paper in my room accidentally and my companions weren't willing to go back for it.  But, I don't think I ever told you how it turned out when we pretended that Sister Humphries was from Romania.  The entire new district believed us the entire time.  It was really funny because they said things like "It's cool to talk to Sora Humphries because she's actuallly from Romania and she'll just go off talking about things."  And one time one fo them said "I feel bad for Sora Humphries.  She always looks sad sitting by herself not talking to anyone."  She looked sad because she was trying really hard not to laugh.  So they all completely believed that she was from Romania and then one morning we had her say the prayer before we started class and she said it in English.  The other district was confused but their first reaction was to say "Wow!  You speak English really well!"  And then she told them she was from Saint George and that she spoke English fluently.  Some of them felt pretty humiliated because of it, but the next time we prayed together they told us they already had planned who was going to be 'the Romanian' in their district when the next one came through.
 
We spend a lot of time with the ASL district and I think that the deaf elder likes me.  He always 'talks' to me in sign language and by using gestures and he never talks to any of the other sisters.  It's awkward as a missionary in the first place, but it's doubly awkward when the only way he can communicate well with me is through the other missionaries in his district.  So he'll say something to me and either his companion or one of the sister say it out loud.  He doesn't say anything wierd but the sisters always give me these looks like 'cute!'  which is disturbing.  One of the days this week I heard a sister in the dorms talking to her coordinating sister about 'getting over' some elder, It's hard to believe that things like that happen.
 
I've heard that there are seven cases in Latin and in Romanian so far we have learned five: dative, accusative, genetive, imperative, and vocative; I think that's all.  So I wonder if there are two more that they just aren't going to teach us.  They taught us vocative this week and it's really easy and really fun, it's just a yelling-at-people tense prettymuch, that's what they told us it's used for.  The word for old woman is 'baba' and all you do to make it be vocative is make it be 'babo' and he told us to call our other teacher, Sister Peterson, 'babo' to see what she did.  We did it and she just gave us a dirty look and said "Did Fratele Middleton tell you to say that?".  The elders say it all the time now and it's kind of annoying.
 
Our roommates and the other district have gotten cooler now.  It takes about three weeks of being in the MTC before missionaries get their personalities back.  It takes those first few weeks for them to feel out what is appropriate and what is not appropriate; that or they just stop caring.  But for Tom and Ed there is nothing about their behavior that wouldn't be MTC appropriate so you guys don't have to be zombies for the first few weeks.
 
I don't know how letters from dearelder.com work when I'm in Romania but I will have more computer time so you can send me emails now.  I noticed that I have a few in my inbox already but I want to make sure I write everything I need to before I spend any of my time reading them.  I'll definitely go through them next week.  My P-day will probably be Monday from now on, but I'll be on a plane for all of this coming Monday so I probably won't write until the Monday after.
 
We have been practicing door approaches a lot this week because our teachers said that that is probably one of the first things that the missionaries will take us out to do once we get to Romania.  They say that the 'greenies' are called 'boboc' which means baby bird, but they usually translate it as duckling.
 
I'm getting excited to be in actual Romania and teach real investigators.
 
If there is anything else that you want to send to me or write to me before I leave the MTC it has to get here Friday or Saturday or else I won't get it and I don't know what will happen to it.  So I'll see you guys later.
 
Thanks for the letters Mom, Grandma Lola, Pete, Kira, Emily, and everybody else that I forgot.  I left my paper with stuff written on it in my room.
 
Talk to you later!
 
Love Sora Jay.



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Week 7 in MTC

Thursday, April 1, 2010 by Sora Jay

Hello Everybody,
 
I've been here for a long time now.  We should be getting our travel plans today; they usually give them to the district ten days before they fly out so we should be getting them.  It seems pretty close now, but I feel like I can speak enough Romanian to be able to contribute to lessons when I'll be teaching with a senior companion so I feeling mostly ready to head out.
From what I've heard in our branch we are allowed to call home from the airport but I don't know if we are allowed to see anybody there.  Our branch president has changed since anybody I knew left though, so maybe he has a different policy.  I'll find out and let you guys know.
 
Last Sunday I saw Jill and Stewart walking around the temple.  I just went up to them and said "Good afternoon" and then shook their hands and walked away.  I felt kind of mean but that's what the MTC presidency told us to do.  Then I felt sad all day because I missed being with my family.  But then I felt better the next day.
 
There isn't going to be a missionary choir at conference this time, so I didn't have a chance to try to get into it.  Are you guys going to have an Easter-Conference party?  Easter in Romania is celebrated on the day that the Orthodox church celebrates it so it is a week after our Easter, but I will barely miss it.
 
I got the pictures from the Booth kids of what you guys planted in your garden this year.  They're pretty good at drawing.  I was thinking about planting a tomato plant in my apartment in Romania, but I would get transferred a ton of times so I would have to put a tomato plant in every apartement I lived in and then hope that the other sisters would take care of them and that I would eventually end up with one with ripening tomatoes.  But I can just get tomatoes on the street anyway, I just have to bleach them before I can eat them.  I've heard that the tomatoes in Romania are especially good too, because Romania is such good farming land.
 
So, I've been getting tired of having companions all the time, I was always really independent when I lived at home.  Part of it was because Sister Huphries would always ask what we wanted to do and she would use the singular 'you' to ask, so I figured she was just asking Sister Hansen because she always seemed to direct her questions at Sister Hansen.  But recently I've realized that she's just really bad at conjugating to the plural 'you' form of verbs (even though it's a lot easier so I don't know how she could be that bad at it).  So maybe she hadn't been exempting me from the question all along.  Anyway, so I've been making a point of asking and speaking in the plural conjugations so that she can learn.  We have never referred to any of our investigators formally so far, so I think we should practice before we get to Romania and offend people.
 
This week we did hosting for the new missionaries, so I got to be alone when I was walking back from escorting a sister to her new classroom.  It was cool to walk back by myself.  I went straight back, but it still felt awesome to not have a companion.  I think it wouldn't be so bad if I only had one companion instead of two, because I think that Sister Hansen and Sister Humphries are best friends and I'm the third one, that spoils their fun and gets serious when we teach our practice lessons (and forces them to plan for things).  So I get the feeling their getting sick of me too.  My nightmare is that I will be put into another threesome in Romania, especially with one of my old companions in it.  Just because we're tired of each other already.
 
The cool thing about Romanian is that because of the declension if you're not sure how to say something correctly you kind of just make the sentence rhyme.
For example these are the feminine forms of "she/they is/are my companion/s" and they have internal rhyme:
Ea este colega mea.
Ele sunt colegele mele.
The same thing happens with the masculine forms.
 
By the way, if you ever send anything to Romania when you address it don't put Sora or Sister before my name because that causes problems.  I didn't get any more explanation than that, so that's as much as I know.
 
Thanks for telling me about Rachel, Tom.  She is a friend of mine.
 
Love,
Sora Jay
 
I liked Alma 58.
P.S. my acne medication isn't really doing anything for me.  I have used it with perfect faithfulness ever since I got it and it hasn't made any difference.  It only gets better when my skin gets really dry, so it'll probably be bad when I get to humid Romania.
 
I don't think Jesh has ever written me, and Emily never wrote me back.
 
And can you send me a new copy of my patriarchal blessing, or two.  And any copies of patriarchal blessings that we have of our ancestors.
 
and I would like to know when everybody's birthdays are.



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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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