New Baby

Early Tuesday morning our phone rang and Flori, a member of our branch was in labor. Her third baby. They asked if we could come and stay with her other two children while the husband took her to the hospital. We got dressed and hurried over to their apartment. One hour later she delivered a baby boy, 9 lb 7 oz.





They are naming him Matias and everyone is healthy.

We spent the day tending their other two children - trying to communicate with their 4 year old Mihalis who spoke perfect Romanian and wondered why we talked so funny.






Later in the week we went down to the dock area and had this man do a caricature painting of each of us. He was so friendly and happy.









Our pictures turned out just lovely.








While we were at the docks, another man came up to us and started talking very excitedly. We didn't understand what he was saying but he ran back to his office and came out with a missionary name tag for an "Elder Owens". We finally found out that he had been baptized by Elder Owens 9 years ago and had gone inactive because he had moved and now works on Sundays. He was so happy to see us. He put on Elder Owens missionary name tag for a picture. 



He works as a security guard at the old historic Constanta Casino We got his phone number and plan to visit with him again.

He took us into the building and showed us around. It was built in 1910 but has not been used for many years. It's in need of major renovation.




Guess it only takes one roller skate to have fun.










Our apartment is on the 6th floor and it seems strange to look down and see birds flying below us. We have lots of seagulls and crows by our apartment.







Curent issue! 

Pronounced curent' with the stress on the end of the word means a draft or a breeze in Romanian.

We love our apartment windows that open to the Black Sea because we get a nice breeze thru our apartment that feels so good with the weather warming up.  However, there is an old belief among the Romanians that if you let a "curent" blow on you, you will get sick.
So the taxi drivers keep their windows rolled up and if we open a window at church, someone will immediately close it and tell us how bad curents are for us. The humidity is rather high here and the temperatures are about like Utah - we aren't looking forward to the really hot temperatures with no windows open. There is some air conditioning but it is far from adequate to cool the buildings. At least we can go home to our apartment at night and open the windows.


We started a new English class in Constanta last week. The missionaries passed out a lot of invitations to people and we had over 40 people attend. We had to break the classes into beginning, intermediate and advanced. The classes are held Tuesday evenings at 5:00pm and on Saturdays at noon.






We always begin and end with prayer and have a spiritual thought at the end of class. It has been very positive and we have made many new friends. Several of the students attending the class want to know more about the church and receive the missionary lessons. The classes are restarted every 6 weeks.






Many of the homes grow grapevines on a trellis for shade.  Grapes seem to really like the climate here - there are fields and fields of grapes growing out in the countryside.