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Jump!

Okay... story of the week! So, we decided to go visit the adorable old Sora Simonescu! She's sooo cute, I just love her sooo much! She has polio as a child so has a very difficult time walking and therefore physically can't get to church in the cold weather, so we hadn't seen her in a couple weeks. Last time we went to go see her there was a ton of construction and we had to walk half the way and take 2 different buses, so this time we left ourselves an hour to be sure to arrive on time. 

me, in a street

However.... the construction wasn't as bad, and we ended up arriving 45 minutes early. Now, we were tempted to just go in and visit with her early, but we figured we should show our faith and do some contacting while we waited. We have been knocking blocs regularly for the past few weeks, mostly using survey contacting. One of the elders even did a statistic that only 2.7% of doors will actually be nice to you and take your survey... 

me, Sora and Familia Tita :)

We decided to knock a block while we waited. It was a huge bloc with 10 floors and about 50 apartments. We got doors slammed in our face over and over again, almost everyone was home and they all yelled at us, saying they were orthodox. Well, about half way down the block, finally one door opened and a lady turned on the hallway light and spoke to us for a couple minutes. She was very pleasant, but not interested. She took a little pass along card and closed the door. We continued, the next man yelling at us ...normal. We went down a floor and every continued to be very rude, when all of a sudden the door above us, where the nice lady had lived opened. We saw the shadow of a man in the stairwell, he yelled, "Where are they?! Where did those girls go?!" Now usually,  man yelling like this results in him calling the police and us having to run for it! So, of course we were terrified. We backed up against the wall, as we watched his shadow searching the stairwell for us. We stayed perfectly silent and tried not to move so as not to set off the motion-sensitive light. Sora gestured to the elevator and we were both about to make a run for it when the man came down the stairs and found us! 

"Hey, I want to know more about this!" He said, holding the pass along card we'd given to the lady. 

Did we feel stupid?! ... YES! There we were hiding, thinking the worst, when in reality he wanted to know more! We ended up going into their apartment and having a short lesson about the plan of salvation. That's the first time I've gotten into an apartment in 10 months! :D It was very exciting. I mean nothing came of it, he's not interested one bit and spent most of the time telling us why we were wrong, but on the bright side, we may have planted a seed... :)

The District

Haha :D Oh funny moment this week was at district meeting. A couple of the elders had received letters from their wards/stake back home. One elder's ward in Idaho, does a letter where they take excerpts from every missionary's emails to create a big newsletter update on how everyone is doing. It was sooo funny! All the other missionaries had huge paragraphs of uplifting  and inspiring stories, the excerpt from the elder in our district was about 2 lines long and just talked about the snow. Well, what was the ward supposed to put in the email? Stories of getting yelled at, nearly getting arrested, and your only investigator dropping you and trying to give the Book of Mormon back, aren't exactly ensign material. But that's okay! Do you know why? Because we have faith! We here in Romania and Moldova know that this is the Lord's work, and he will hasten it in his time. And the cool thing is that there are prepared people here, like Elena, Andreea, Monica and Ritta. They're just a little harder to find :)

Well, I love you all.... oh and guess what?! for my last transfer I'm going back to Iasi! I'm even going back with the same companion - Sora Kelly!! We're going to be the Sister Training Leaders for the East Romania and Moldova :D We're sooooooo excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D :D  I really have loved serving in Buch... it took me a while to love it here, but now I really do! I love Panduri! and Sora Fletcher has been a dreeeeam to serve with! she's amazing!  

The Church is true! Keep the Faith!

Love Sora Rivera