Week 2!

Hey Everyone!!!!

Romania folks! That's where we are headed

Soooooo Week 2!!!! :D Yaaaaaaaay! It's so much better than week 1!!!! Thank you so much to everyone who has written me/dear elder me, I'm working on replies if I haven’t already sent them. Getting a letter in the MTC is like Harry Potter getting his letter from Hogwarts :D It's AMAZING! And also..."no post on Sundays" hahha ;) Colin dearelder’d me a lot last week because I have the best brother EVER! and sometimes Dear Elder duplicates letters, so on Thursday last week I received 14 Dear Elders !!!!!!!!! :D I broke the district record hahaha... all of them were from Colin cos he sent me this amazing talk from Jeffrey R. Holland and the Dear Elder duplicated some parts of it so it was hilarious all the elders couldn’t believe it hahahah :D YAY me :D

Sora MacDonald & I

My Sora and the amazing district of elders are all leaving on Monday at 5am :( I'm sooooo sad!! It's just gonna be me and Elder Criscenti left, so the Swedish sisters are gonna be adopting me and the Elders learning Italian are adopting Elder C. until the new Romanian district arrives in 4 weeks time :( So yeah we're gonna be a little lost and homeless for a while. But I don't think I could make it without my amazing MTC teachers :) I have three.... Fratele Sandberg, Fratele Frandsen, and Sora Whiting. Sora Whiting provides me with the much much needed female love and support. She's just amazing! She is so sweet and supporting and the other day I totally cried (I'm fine it was just stress and emotions and sucking at the language but all is well) and Sora Whiting just hugged me and cried with me and gave me amazing scriptures to read DC123:17 :D READ IT!!! Fratele Frandsen is the nicest person in the whole world! He's always telling me "Poti! Poti" (pronounced liked pots)  meaning ‘You can! You can!!’ Whenever I get scared and I'm not sure how to say sometime. Fratele Sandberg is also amazing!!! He's really laid back and we laugh sooo much in his lessons. It brings the much needed relaxed environment and I find myself speaking Romanian pretty well in his lessons just cos he brings no pressure. But then its the perfect balance because the Fratele Frandsen tends to give me the needed pressure the push myself harder. And Sora Whiting is the best of both worlds and a girl... so she can hug meeee :D I love hugs... I miss hugs... I hate not being able to hug the Elders/any male... some of them I admit though... like this sweet but super weird elder I met during devotional the other day... I fully admit I'm glad he cant hug me :P

All worn out!

Language - well.... it's going much better this week. I've really been trying to push myself to learn new vocab and review grammar. Fratele Frandsen helped me make a language study plan so I have set goals to work on each day, different things to focus on, it has helped me feel less over whelmed :) But I'm really really enjoying it, especially as I realize I can translate some of my favourite quotes/ funny things into Romanian. For example yesterday we were all playing volleyball and it was super super fun!! Well of course I'm still pretty bad and I "turtled" a couple times, (the California friends will no exactly what I mean by that, and you all can imagine me dropping to the floor and covering my head if the ball cam near me) however I actually didn’t do tooooo terrible yesterday. Well anyway, a couple times I won a few points for my team and I decided to trash talk by saying "Ce acum fiu?!" which means What now son?! hahhahaa it was hilarious! ;)

I'm learning so so much! My time is almost up but I love you all and I promise my testimony is growing like crazy amounts!!! I just want to share the gospel with the whole wordl!!! Even if I suck at the Romanian language I just wanna get out there and tell people how happy they could be!!! They could be like CRAAAAAAAZZZY happy!!! I love love love this gospel. I know that I belong to the only true church on this earth! I know it! I know it because I've read the Book of Mormon, the Lord has confirmed in my heart that it is the word of God! If it wasn’t true then I wouldn’t put myself through such crap... I wouldn’t bother killing my brain everyday to learn a new language, I would bother to leave my family and friends for 18 months... but it is true! So here I am... doing the Lord's work, working my butt of here so that I can work my butt off in Romania.

Thank you for your love and support

Love Sora Rivera

PS... Dear Elders win...

PPS But seriously.... Dear Elder/write to me :)

Mission Week 1!!!

Hello everybody...

Sora Rivera! and so it begins

Henceforth I shall be known as Sora... so I get to the MTC and find out that I'm a Solo sister, which is sorta weird because I do have a companion... Sora Macdonald from Salt Lake City Utah. We're the only 2 sisters going to Romania in the whole MTC (missionary training center). So we’re the only 'Soras.’ She's also going to Romania but she's been at the MTC for 7 weeks, so in just under two weeks she'll be leaving and I have no idea what’ll happen in terms of having a companion. Being a solo also means that I either have to be with my companion, a group of Elders, or my teacher and whoever else. So yeah that's just super weird because being a Solo doesn't mean oh good I get to have some alone time... oh no... it's the opposite, I'm constantly supervised and surrounded by huge groups of people and you know just how much I love huge groups of people.

My class consists of one Elder and me! Just one!... it's super awkward. We have to be supervised by a teacher, or we join in with the other class. And oh did I mention.... that ONE elder... is Italian and doesn't speak English. So basically we've been communicating with broken Romanian, Italian, remnants of high school Spanish, and a whole lot of pointing and charades. So yeah it's been very interesting. His name is Elder Criscenti (prounounced Kri-shen-tee)

Sora MacDonald & I

Apparently at the beginning of this year they changed the way they teach at the MTC. We start teaching an investigator, who's really just one of our teachers pretending to be an investigator on the 3rd day. So getting help from our teachers we plan a lesson in complete Romanian and we have to go teach. Our "investigator" is called Lacov and we've taught him everyday this week. It's been so hard especially since it's just me and Elder C as teaching companions so we can't really communicate properly but the teachers say we're doing an awesome job and progressing super fast. They keep calling us an advanced class because of my previous Romanian knowledge and the closeness of Italian to Romanian so I guess that's kinda cool but I still feel like I'm smacking my head against a brick wall every day. Romanian is okay, I realized that I understand a ton, but I really can’t speak very well. I'm praying for help, (in Romanian) and I’ve learnt a ton in just this past week so I have hope that in the next few weeks I can improve a lot. COLIN - thanks a ton for your dear elders and the one about how you learnt Spanish it was really uplifting :). Oh while I remember ANA - I'm writing you a giant long wonderful letter today :D and I'm also writing Grandad and Grandma :)

Wasn't General Conference amazing? If you didn't see it or don't know what it is check it out here at lds.org it's soooooooooo amazing the announcement about missionary work. Elder Bednar came and spoke to us at the MTC fireside this week... isn’t that amazing??? And anyway he told us it's basically because the Lord just needs to hasten is work and now is the time he's chosen to hasten it! AHH it's just awesome!! And we missionaries are a part of that hastening!! :) I love love love the apostles and the prophet and just everything! I loved GC, especially Elder Holland's talk. Elder Bednar was awesome at the fireside he was sooo down to earth and really funny... he calls it his Apostolic Humour. Ha-ha! I also loved the take from Elder Nelson "ASK THE MISSIONARIES!" We all just had huge smiles on our faces, although in the back of my mind I was think oh poop I need to learn how to respond to all of that in Romanian hahaha!!!

Lacov, our "investigator" told us yesterday that he wants to be baptized and he believes that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ really appeared to JS. YAAAAY!! :D Hahah even though it's pretend we take it very seriously and it's amazing because the spirit really does guide me. For example I was in TALL lab on Monday, which is a computer system program thingy that helps you learn your language, and I decided to learn the word for Trial. Little did I know that I was being guided by the spirit because the next day Lacov asked us about Trials and Elder C just looked at me completely bewildered and I was like wait I UNDERSTAND :D haha it was awesome and in terrible Romanian we were able to speak with Lacov YAY Happy day for us...

The District - me & the missionaries off to Romania soon

The first few days here were kinda awful. I wanted to cry and scream and run away! haha I felt like a small child wandering around lost on a big campus. But the Lord has really blessed me because Sora M loves me sooo much and she constantly tells me that so it's reallly uplifting and my teacher are just wonderful and I completely ADORE all of our elders. They’re technically the Elders in Sora's class but they’ve adopted me and Elder C too. They’re just so funny and wonderful. They let me mother them sometimes and they act like brothers and take care of me and Sora. Btw we had this amazing experience after the fireside this week when we have fireside review which is kinda a testimony meeting about what we learnt in the fireside, and every single elder including this one Elder Hollist cried. Now you have to understand... Elder Hollist was in the Marines, he's the big tall man who grew up an army brat and all he knows is Army Army Army. Everything he does he does with determination! It’s hilarious :) Sora and I laugh about it sometimes and Elder H laughs too because he just cant help it. Like the other day he was eating a salad and kept stabbing the lettuce as though it was going to run away. He also refers to our schedule as the agenda and the MTC campus as the premises :). Ha-ha his Marine-ness makes us lol. I wish I had time to tell you about every single Elder, it’s funny because they’re all so young, the oldest one is a month younger than me, yet so often they’re Men in my eyes and they’re so respectful and kind... then they’ll say or do something completely stupid and 12-year-old boy like and you remember how dumb and young they are haha but we still love them :)

I love this Church and this Gospel!! I really do have a true testimony of this Gospel. Christ's Church, his original church is upon the earth today, We have a living prophet, and his name is Thomas S. Monson! Joseph Smith really did see Jesus Christ and Heavenly Father. The priesthood authority was restored to the earth! The Lord has a plan for us, he knows us, and he loves us! If I didn't have my testimony... I'd be nothing! I couldn't have survived this week, I'd have taken the next flight home. I love you all, I pray for you constantly. Love the Lord with all you Heart Mind and Strength! "Keep the Faith". As Sister Hinckley once said “The only way to get through life is to laugh your way through it. You either have to laugh or cry. I prefer to laugh. Crying gives me a headache." Well I've done a whole lot of laughing this week, but as Carl B. Cook said in his talk in April 2012 it's better to look up. 

Va iubesc ;)

Keep the Faith!! All my love and prayers

Sora Rivera