Homeward Bound

Our mission is coming to an end, we will be returning home this week. We have learned so much serving here in Romania. We have grown to love these people and will always remember them. We will also miss the young missionaries we served with.

We are so grateful to our family especially our kids and grand-kids for their constant support and love. We have missed them so much and are excited to see them.

We will report our mission on May 25th. 
We attend the Lehi Pheasant Point 7th Ward and meet in the Pheasant Point East Building at:

3065 N. 1300 W., Lehi, Utah

Our Sacrament meeting starts at 1:00pm

Trip to Oradea - Sylvester Stallone

This is the Phillip family. We have been teaching them with Sister Ralls and Sister Barrera for a few weeks. They live in a small town called Herman about 20 minutes outside of Brasov. It has been a great experience to help teach the lessons - the sisters are so good to work with. Sister Phillip is raising her four grandsons - their father died and there is no one else to take care of them. She is scheduled to be baptized next week and we feel bad that we will miss it.

We have seen this fellow walking all over the Brasov area. Sister Powell finally stopped him and asked him if we could take his picture. We told him he reminded us of 'Elvis' and he said "NO,  I'm Sylvester Stallone". He was very friendly and we enjoyed visiting with him - he was excited to practice his English and loves America.

Do your see a resemblance??

We took a four day trip to Oradea for our final district training. Elder and Sister Dodge went with us to talk about humanitarian work. It was so fun to be with them, they are good friends. We took the district president and his family to dinner after the meetings.

Their son's name is Ammon and he is 4 years old.

Along the way we took some pictures of houses. They love to use bright colors.

  

The Gypsies are one of the ethnic groups in Romania. We often see them in colorful long skirts.

It's spring and the countryside is beautiful. The canola fields are in full bloom and everything is so green.

Easter

We are looking for a new villa to rent in Feldioara to hold our meetings.  We hope to be able to use this building but there is a long approval process.  Normally, we have too many people coming to fit in our present building.  What a nice problem to have!

On Friday, the branch had an Easter activity.  They asked the Relief Society to color the eggs.  It was a 4 hour process.  It was much more involved than the way we color eggs. They start by scrubbing the brown eggs to get the oil off.  Then they put them in cold water with vinegar and sugar and slowly bring them to a boil. Then they let the eggs cool.

They put on plastic gloves and put a drop of egg paint in the palm of your hand.

Then you roll the egg around in your hands until it is completely covered with paint. Sometimes you have to add more paint. Here is Elder Houk busy at work. He offered to help and ended up working a lot longer than he thought.

It's a little messy but the colors were beautiful.

Here's how it's done.

For the activity, we sang hymns and watched video clips from lds.org. After the program we had eggs, sweet bread and juice.  Everyone had a good time.

They have a tradition here of knocking eggs to see whose cracks first. At Easter, they greet each other by saying "Isus a aviat" which means "Jesus is risen". Here are the missionaries with their eggs.

On Saturday, we had the missionaries over for breakfast and to watch the Sunday afternoon session of conference. We love having them in our apartment. They bring such a great spirit.

General Conference

General Conference is a major event in Romania. Everyone has to come to the church to watch it and with the time differences, it makes for a long day. On Saturday, the members arrived at the church at 5pm to watch the Women's Conference and then at 7pm we watched the Saturday morning session of conference. On Sunday, the members arrived at noon and watched conference sessions until 9pm that night. We had a small break in the middle for sandwiches. Transportation is so difficult for our branch. Most have to ride a bus to the church and stay until it leaves at night. The members are so grateful that the sessions are translated so quickly so they can enjoy it right away. It was a wonderful conference.

Our Feldioara group had 4 baptisms this month. Sora Ralls and Berrara have been working so hard teaching these investigators. They are fabulous missionaries. Feldioara is growing so fast. Unfortunately, we were in Moldova during the baptismal service and were not able to attend.

The branch members came to the baptism to support the new members. Many of the members participate with the missionaries in teaching the lessons. The members make such a difference in missionary work.

We were invited to Sibiu for their branch activity. On the way, we noticed the fields of yellow blossoms. We found out that they are fields of canola plants. They harvest the seeds to make canola cooking oil.

The branch activity was to clean the church and then have a barbecue. This little girl's name is Diana and she is 4 yrs old. She thought it was great that we had the same name. She helped wash all the toys in the nursery.

 Many of the members came and they worked very hard. They washed windows, floors, walls and the church looked great when they were finished. They had fun working together.

It rained all day so they had to grill the meat in the garage with the door open. The whole church filled with smoke. So much for the clean building.

While waiting for the meat to cook, they all pulled out their scriptures and took turns reading from Isaiah in the Book of Mormon. They had a great discussion and seemed to understand it. It was way above our heads but they all seemed to enjoy it. They love the scriptures.

Finally, dinner was served and it was delicious. There was a potato-vegetable salad with grilled pork and mici (a type of sausage very popular here).

The Romanians love the storks but occasionally, the storks cause problems by building their nests on top of their chimneys. We thought about Pres. Kimball's story years ago in England about "Storks in the Chimney".

We have been so blessed to have our grandchildren writing us letters while we have been on our mission. We love their pictures and stories. It has helped us feel closer to them. We miss them so much.

Trip to Moldova

This is a family in our branch that lives in Secele.  We went to visit them to see about helping them with a project. The youngest boy is turning 8 and will be baptized soon.

This is their backyard where we hope to do the project. They don't have running water and this is their outhouse. They are a wonderful family. The father is serving as our branch Sunday School president.

The entire neighborhood has to carry their drinking water from a well back to their homes.

We took a trip to Moldova for a training meeting. This is the church in Orhei. It is about an hour and a half north of Chisinau. The branch is small but it is growing.

So many of the people pull little wagons or carts like this to carry their groceries, etc back to their homes.

This is the church in Balti which is about an hour north of Orhei. After our training meeting, they had a baptism scheduled.

This is the portable font that the church uses in their rented buildings.

This young man was baptized and his grandmother, who is a member, was there with him.

His mother is in Italy and so they connected her with Skype so she could watch the baptism.

This is the group picture of those who attended the baptism. We enjoyed attending this baptism but felt bad that we missed the 4 baptism in Brasov. It is great to see the church growing.

For the past year, we have seen these balls of growth in the trees and we thought they were bird nests.  We found out that they are actually mistletoe. Mistletoe is a parasitic plant that attaches itself to other plants.

It can actually harm or kill a tree if too many take over.

On our return trip to Romania, we had more trouble with the language at the border. We showed our documents to the guard and then he said something to us and motioned us forward.  We thought we were done and so we drove on through the gate. He was actually telling to pull over for an inspection. They got very excited and thought we were trying to escape. We had to go back through again after they put us "in time out" for awhile. After a thorough search, we were finally on our way. It took a lot longer this time.

It's spring and everyone is out working in their fields preparing and planting. So much of it is done by hand. They work so hard.

They are doing lots of pruning and tying up the vines. The weather has been very mild and everything is starting to grow. We would love to take this climate home with us.

Branch Conference

This week was our annual branch conference in Brasov. The Bucharest District leaders came and we had a great conference.

We had enough members in Feldioara who wanted to attend that we had to use two buses to bring them in.
We had an attendance of 73 which is really good - we usually have 20-30 attending on a regular Sunday.

Our branch pianist was out of town and so they asked Sister Powell to play for the conference. She practiced during the week and did great, however, during the meeting the District President asked her to change the intermediate hymn to one he had picked out and had structured his talk around. It was an unfamiliar Romanian hymn and was a real challenge for her but she did great.

At the end of the meeting they had a group picture.

Sister Powell was recently asked to serve as the Relief Society president and so she had to speak to the sisters during Relief Society. Our usual translators were out of town and so Sister Ralls stepped up and helped with the translation.

This is one of our deaf members, Sora Coca - she loves Sister Powell and always gives her a hug. She is such a dedicated member and comes every week even though she can't hear anything that's going on.

Elder and Sister Dodge came for the weekend to check on some humanitarian projects. We spent a couple of days with them and enjoyed having another senior couple to talk to.