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 :)