Easter in Romania

Dear Home and Family,

HI! Happy Easter! I know that you already had Easter, but my Easter was yesterday. It was super fun, but let me back up a bit. Because it was the week before Easter, no one could talk to us. The work was kinda slow because school was on vacation and everyone was either out of town or cleaning their houses or making any other lame excuse to not hear the Gospel. (Easter is like the Biggest thing here.) But we did have a few good lessons.

Ani and Lika are doing great. They want to get married, but there are a few things standing in the way like money for their physicals that the country requires them to get before marriage, and Ani needs to find a new address to update her Identity card, and the manager of the place they live now won't let them use that address for a weird reason, and her mom in law won't let her use hers either for dumb reasons, so we need to find a new address or have faith that someone's heart will soften so that they can get married and then get baptized.

Lika is trying to quit smoking. They have 3 kids who are so cute but it is amazing to me the conditions they live in. They only have 2 rooms in their house which is used for everything, no running water, and in order to go to the bathroom they have to pay 1 leau which is money that they really don't have. But amidst these meager conditions, they are starting to be so happy and I know it's because of the gospel. Because they have chosen to live the gospel principles – not just accept and believe them, but actually live them – they are loving each other so much more and are able to be happy regardless.

Ani had an experience where she was so sad that she couldn't give her kids a proper Paste (Easter) meal because they didn't have meat. And then she thought “why am I complaining? All I need to do it pray to heavenly Father and He will take care of me” so she prayed, and the next day someone gave to her as a gift a ton of meat. And their meal was really good (I know because they invited me and Sora Thompson to eat there for Paste which was the pride of their life to be able to serve us. It was really good.)

We ate Salate de Beuf, which is kind or a spread thing for any food, tomato and cucumber salad, different types of meat, Sarmale which is a very Romanian dish that is meat wrapped up and cooked in pickled cabbage (doesn't sound great, but it really is) and hard boiled eggs and Cozonac (a desert-type bread) and prejatura (which is pastry type deserts). It was a good meal.

We are hoping that they will be able to get married in 2 weeks and baptised in 3 so hopefully things will work out for that to occur.

Another of our investigators, Bogdon, has a baptismal date! He wants to get baptized May 26, but we are hoping to get him to May 9th ...he also is trying to stop smoking and has gone from 3 packs a day to 1 cigarette per day. It is because of prayer, scripture study, a lot of faith and support and the Atonement of Jesus Christ that he can do this, and it has been amazing the transformation in his life that he (and we) have seen in just 2 weeks.

A lot of people here make fun of you when you change your ways – not just religion, but also habits – and they call you “Pocait” which means “repented” but they use it as a mean term which is weird because repentance is a blessing and a gift. So some of his friends have given him a hard time for not drinking coffee or smoking, but he is doing good and staying strong. It's exciting.

Amalia is another investigator that we are hoping will get baptized soon. We asked her if she found out that our message is true if she would get baptized and she said “yes” so she is praying about our message that we have shared (Restoration of the Church, the Plan of Salvation and the Gospel of Jesus Christ) and we will meet with her this week, hopefully to set a date of baptism. She is awesome though. She's the one who teaches the elementary class and brought them to the vila to learn that there's more than just the Orthodox church. She is so fun.

Another fun thing for easter we did, is that we learned how to dye eggs Romanian style. First, it's all one solid color, and super bright. After they dye it they paint it with grease to make it shiny and it's amazing what the difference is in looks. One day you'll see my pictures of that. But Another way to dye eggs is you get some little leaves from outside, place them on the eggs, get a piece of nylon and wrap it around the egg to hold the leaf in place and tie it. Then you put it in water with red onion peels and slowly bring to a light boil until it's hard boiled. When you take the nylon off and wash off the leaves, the egg is dyed a red-orange and the place where the leaf was is a perfect yellow imprint. It's so cool because you can see the veins and everything, and it's a perfect decoration.

Now to tell you about Easter mass at Midnight. There were thousands of people there at the Orthodox church, inside and out, and each one has a candle. Then at midnight, the priests come out with their “holy fire from heaven” and they start lighting people's candles, and those people light other people's candles until everyone's candle is lit – neat concept. So then the priest and whoever amongst the congregation wants to follow, does a procession around the church 3 times, and then the prayers begin, with chanting, prayer, and song that a lot of the congregation knows by heart. It goes on for about 4 hours. We only stayed for one. But it's good luck if you have your candle still lit by the time you get home (we blew ours out to get home faster, but found some candles right outside our appartment, re-lit our candles and said it counts. But it was super neat to see the culture.

Another something fun is that Sora Thompson and I have a little choir at church which consists of about 7 or 8 people that consistantly come plus the Elders, and they only know how to sing melody, except for the Elders. So we sang “Savior, thou who Wearedst a Crown” for the Paste musical number and they had dynamics this week. It was very dramatic between the loud and soft, and the piano is a little electric keyboard so my dynamics are controlled by a volume switch but it's ok. We were so proud of our choir for just knowing the difference between loud and soft in the volume of their voices!

Today for Preparation day we went as a zone to Lipova which is the ruins of a castle. We had tons of fun climbing around it, finding interresting ways to take pictures, and played ultimate frisbee. Super super fun!

Anyways, I'm doing great, the work is going really good, and I am loving being here in Romania. The purposes of God will continue, and I am grateful to say that I am living in a way to help those purposes continue to grow and to be taught to the children of God.

Also, I want to know if Josh came to Conference or not, and what's going on with him. Tell him I say Hi! Know that I love you all so much and that I pray for you often and am so grateful that I have a family in the gospel. Every time I show someone the picture of our family, they are amazed that it's all girls and that we're all smiling! And they love Cherisse's picture of her and Alley that I have they think they are so funny. They don't really take creative pictures here, so they love it. But I love you all so much, and try if you can to send me some of Cherisse's pictures or more pictures of the family that you took at Grandma and Grandpas. Thanks and keep having an amazing week!

Love always, --Sora Karina