So it's named, and so it is. It seems like the majority of the people we attract, are not all entirely there! I do believe you will all recall my experience with good old Gheorghe, who now thinks this is the devil's church, well I would now like to introduce you to Mihael. Random fact, Mihael is the Romanian equivilant of Michael. Anyways. This is the man that last week we had traveled to the ends of the earth to try to find. Well, last Monday evening we actually found his house, and we had a lesson with him! He lives in this little neighborhood of little government-built cement houses on the outskirts of Bacau with his wife, mother, and 4 kids. His wife works in the city, and Mihael just recently got out of prison. The trip down to his house was surreal, I wish I had taken some pictures to show you. It felt like I was in book or a movie about soldiers or humanitarian workers going out to some remote little 3rd world town or villiage. Mihael met us out on the main road in Bacau and we kept going south until we turned onto this dirt road, a good little ways outside the actual city where there's all these little cement houses, a group of like 15 kids all playing in the road, and dogs running around, it was crazy! We go into his house which is just a little 3 room thing with all there stuff crammed in. They used these stone blocks with grooves etched into the top in which lay red hot heated metal coils to heat the house. He pulled up a little table and told his wife to bring us out some chicken and potatoes, and fed us dinner! I felt really bad eating there food, and later that night Elder Schanck said he had heard Mihael's wife saying that was all the food they had, but that's how Romanians are. They can be some of the nicest most hospitable people in the world, even if it means making their family go hungry. We taught a lesson that over all, went ok. I felt the Spirit while we taught and testified of the resored gospel. Mihael's mom seemed to be getting it better than he did! I felt this odd connection and feeling of familiarality as I talked with this family and sat in their small home.
Sounding pretty great right? Granted, that was probably a night I'll never forget, but what comes after I probably won't forget either. The next day Mihael called me asking for money for food, saying that he had no food to give his family and his wife wouldn't be getting payed for the next couple days. I told him that we couldn't give him money (It is illegal in this country to give money to beggers and as part of being a missionary here the government does not allow us to give out money to anyone who is not a member of the church) and gave him the number of the Humanitarian missionaries here. So he called them, and basically, long story short after I had many phone calls and some heated conversation with him, Mihael now also thinks that we are the church of the devil because our church is not able to help him financially in this situation. It was really sad and a bit shocking to see someone go from a really nice person, friendly and generous to being desperate, illogical, impatient, and extremely close- minded and hearted. The worst part for me is realizing that most likely the only reason he listened to us in the first place was because he thought our church would give him money. Granted, maybe he did actually feel something, and was genuinely interested in the church doctrinally, but something else just completely took over.
On the bright side, this week, yesterday in fact, we met up with our park/guitar friends again! That was super fun. I played some more guitar for them, and we talked to them about our church. They're all Orthodox, and pretty active by the way it sounds, but some of them seem pretty interested in our church, and they all said they'd come to our English classes. This is some of the best contacting I've done so far, and the best thing about it is that our missionary work with them is based off of a friendship. We didn't meet them by walking up and telling them that the Book of Mormon was true. They heard us speaking English in the park, we saw they had a guitar, and BAM, missionary work commenced. "Preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words." And something else interesting that happened yesterday was that while I was playing the guitar, and we were all just talking, these three pentacostal guys came up and literally just started preaching to these kids. The only way I can really describe it is that it was priestcraft. The main guy just walked up, his too little buddies kinda hung back trying to be cool, and this guy just starts going on and on about how close he is to God, about how well he knows the scriptures, and on and on. You could tell he was only doing it for the attention. He wouldn't even answer Elder Schanck when he asked him where he learned English (he spoke a little bit to us when he walked up). It was just weird, I don't really know what he was trying to get out of coming up and talking in front of everybody, but he was just downright obnoxious.
On the other hand on Saturday we contacted this Seventh Day Adventist man, who was on his way to church and invited us to go with him. So, we went! He's a super friendly older man, took us to his church, introduced us to one of his friends, and everyone in the church was really friendly and inviting. The choir director even came up and asked us if we wanted to sing in the youth choir next week! The service was nice, it was super interesting to see how their church was. The way their service went, it was all organized almost exactly the way our sacrament meetings go. Afterwards we exchanged phone numbers with the man, he invited us to their Easter service the next week, and we invited him to ours, to which he cordially accepted. Then later in the evening we met up with him at a little cafe and he gave us a bunch of Ellen White books, and we gave him a Book of Mormon and a bunch of brochures. It was a really good atmosphered, friendly, brotherly exchange of beliefs. Quite refreshing from the usual shutdowns we get from people on the street. I've always had a lot of respect for people of other Christian faiths who strive to live their religion. Being a Christian meens that you follow Christ's example, and if everyone did that who claimed to be a Christian, the world would be a much better place.
Also this week we had some branch activities. We had a big clean up on Thursday, which ended up bing in the rain haha. It's been raining all week up until a couple days ago. Then on Saturday we had an Easter activity! It started with a couple quick talks, the four of us missionaries singing a hymn, and then food! There was salata de beuf which is like a potato salad with chicken, bell peppers, pickles, onions, carrots, olives, eggs, and you eat it with bread. Super dilicious! Then, of course we had saormale, which is really good. And to finish off we had cosonak which is kinda like a cross between fruit cake and cinnamin bread. it's a sweet bread that has swirls of this nutty, cinnaminny-chocolaty-raisiney spread. And hard boiled eggs. The Romanain tradition for easter is to die hard boiled eggs all red which symbolizes the blood of Christ when he died on the cross, then two different people take their eggs, one says "Hristos a inviat" (Christ resurrected) and the other says "Adevarat, a inviat" (truly, he resurrected) and they smash their eggs together. the person who's egg shell doesn't break then goes on to do it with someone else until their egg cracks. The member who made all the food made the missionaries these special eggs that had these orthodox-style paintings of saings somehow printied on the egg, like a lick on tattoo I think.
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Traditional Romanian Easter eggs |
So that was the week! Pretty crazy! It was good though. Also, on Friday we had interviews with President Lundberg and the Asssistants to the President. Mine was good, I got a lot of really good advice from President Lundberg about doing missionary work. So now, to answer questions before I forget, about the music, I would just like the songs from my CD sent through an email, if that's possible. Then I can just burn them onto cd's here easy enough. What else? I know I'm forgetting something........oh well. Oh, also, could you send me recipes for Cafe Rio Burritos and for surprise hamburgers? I was wanting to make the burritos for P-day or something, and I've allways loved surprise hamburgers! It was great, as usual, hearing about your weeek! That go carting sounds really fun! apparantly there's a go-carting place somewhere here in bacau, but we haven't gone. I'll try to send you some pictures next week. I love you all!!! Oh yeah, and April 27 is transfers, so a week from today I'll find out where I'm going!
Love, Elder Myers
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