Zone Meeting

Last week was our zone meeting in Bucharest so once again we made the trip from Constanta to Bucharest. It was a great meeting and we came away wanting to work harder. We watched Elder Holland's talk from the Oct 2012 general conference on discipleship - it's worth watching again if you don't remember it. You can watch it on LDS.org.

There were seven missionaries finishing their missions and it was so uplifting to hear their testimonies. This is a difficult mission for the young missionaries, but each of them were so glad they had been given the privilege of coming to Romania. One of the great blessing of serving a senior mission is getting to know and work with the young missionaries.

This is Elder Ward and Sister Caruso during our last district meeting. Elder Ward is giving an object lesson on polishing shoes to teach the Doctrine of Christ:
     Faith  -   Pick up the shoe
     Repentance -  Brush off the dirt
     Baptism  -  Open the polish
     Holy Ghost  -  Apply the polish
     Endure to the End - Buff the polish
The object lesson might have been a bit of a "stretch", but it has been so much fun to watch their enthusiasm for teaching and being missionaries. They are so positive and fun to be with.


We also went to visit Georgeta, who is one of the members of the branch. She has a non-member son named Alex. They live about 15 km out of the city so we had to take a couple of busses to get to their home.






Georgeta had a table set up outside and we ate some bread and had

a drink of Coca Cola. We had a nice visit with her son. He has a masters degree and does a 30 minute television program every morning on the local TV channel about employment opportunities. The economy is struggling (like everywhere) and there is a lot of unemployment.






We have been looking for an office supply store over here without much success. Saturday we saw this store at the local shopping mall and were so excited until we looked closer.








We stopped to get a pizza for lunch at San Marcos. We got a pizza there last week and it was so small that it was barely a snack. There were only 2 sizes to choose from: Small and Large so we ordered a large. It was huge! It must have been more than 2 feet across. We had to take most of it back home with us.

Walking continues to be a challenge. The sidewalks on both sides of the streets are always used for parking so it's impossible to walk on the sidewalks. The roads are narrow and there is almost always a lot of traffic. They drive really fast - we are surprised that we have not seen any auto/pedestrian accidents yet.

Several members speak some English in our branch which is great but we still don't always communicate clearly. Monday night we were having a branch home evening and thought we had been asked to prepare a game to play at the end. After the opening prayer, the branch president said and now Elder and Sister Powell will give us the lesson. Luckily that morning we had been reading where Lehi had gathered his children before he died and talked to each one of them. So we had each of them tell what they would say to their own children. It turned out to be a good discussion. Some how the members think missionaries should be able to teach a class or give a talk on the spot without any preparation.  It was the same way in Mongolia - guess it's part of being missionaries.