Week 43 – București, România

I laughed about the clothes pins!!! Those can be some serious tools of fun ;). Especially in the hands of a pro. ;).

I do have some stories for you but I will start by saying that transfer board came out and I am staying in Bucharest as the District leader in Panduri, but I will have a new companion. He is in his third transfer and that’s all I know. It will be great though and I am excited to work with him! I am also happy to be staying in this city. It has so much potential! Also, the baptism didn’t happen this week. On Monday I got a call saying that the girl being baptized lost someone in her family, and she would be out of town on Friday and Saturday for the funeral.  SO we put it off a week. I will have the interview tomorrow probably, and it will be fine! I am happy to be a part of this process though!

I am sorry to hear about the storm. We don’t really have storms here that are really big, but occasionally we get some cool lightning storms. That is crazy about all the water and all the problems trees cause! Maybe we should cut them all down! ;). I hope none got hurt in all of that though. I feel like a big storm here would actually kill people, just because there are a lot of homeless, and a lot of the make shift homes are not safe. Who knows?

Okay stories. On monday after I had emailed you all, my companion and I were walking on a road, and we saw this lady selling some fruit and veggies. We kind of stopped and looked and moved on. (this lady was literally selling off a park bench on one of the main roads in Buch). After a minute or so we looked at each other and decided to go and buy some stuff from her. We ended up buying two boxes of these little orange berries that we had never seen before. I had no idea what they were. SO we took them home, and tried one. They were disgustingly bitter, and smelled bad. I felt stupid for buying them, but I remembered what the lady told us. She had told us to make a juice out of it. So we spent an hour experimenting in our kitchen with honey, water and sugar to find the right mix. Lots of bad ones, but then we found it…so good! SO we made juice from berries bought from a random lady on a park bench! That was fun!

This week has been kind of hard on us missionary wise. People just don’t answer their phones, and it is irritating. However, we called a ton of people and nothing. SO we went out and contacted a lot with little success. However, we did calculate a 14 km walking day. That was fun..and painful. Oh well. We did get to eat the most delicious stuffed peppers I have ever had in my life at a less active members house, and they showed me how to make homemade titiki sauce! :D. That made my day!

We got to clean the church on Saturday which seemed like it was going to be boring and a good service nonetheless, but then we realized that we didn’t have any squirt bottles. SO we improvised with squirt guns! It made cleaning a lot more fun! ;).

On Sunday we went chalk contacting again, and I talked with this man for thirty or so minutes about the gospel and the plan of salvation, and it was awesome! He accepted a Book of Mormon and we exchanged numbers, and he is really interested! It was nice to be able to feel like I could talk with him though. Especially for only being out here for nine or so months. People think it is amazing when you tell them how long you have been out here, and they are stunned that you can speak as well as you can. That cheers me up! We are working hard and today we are off to a picnic by a palace place we found on a map, and who knows what it will look like? I don’t know…I will take pictures.

Also one item of business. My camera is not working when I plug it in to upload my pictures. It isn’t “formatted” correctly, so I clicked to format it, but in order to format it I would have to delete the entire card…not going to do that. SO I don’t know what to do. I will keep trying to figure stuff out, but I just don’t have time. Maybe there is something you guys can do to help me figure something out. I don’t know.

Thanks for all the news on sports (even though I know the soccer team is having a hard time)! I appreciate it! You guys keep up the hard work with scripture reading! It really is a safety against the storms of life, and I feel like they are about to be a lot worse, so be as prepared for them as you would a serious physical storm!