The Orange County, California Companionship. A Match Made in Bucharest.

Let me start off by introducing my trainee, Sora Trebas (Tree and a bus) to you all.

She is 19 years old and is from Irvine, California.  She loves mushrooms, wedge salads, chunky sweaters, Laguna Beach and Chipotle.  She talks with her hands and uses the same weird filler words as me.  We both love taking jumping photos and we love bread. She went to BYU Idaho and she loves dogs. It is a bomb companionship. 

I literally love this girl and I am so honored to be her trainer.  

This week was a pretty exciting week.   

We did a lot of contacting this week, giving us the opportunity to have several gospel conversations with some pretty...interesting people.  Some good, some not so good, but all together we were able to go home with a smile on our face and a knowledge that we did all we could do to invite people to learn more about the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  

We set a goal as a district to talk to 6 people every day about the Romanian language, believing that gospel conversations would come from it.  So challenge accepted and we met this amazing woman on the metro.  Silvia was one of the nicest Romanian women that I have ever met.  She was helpful and happy and smiling all the way.  She gives us her phone number and says, 'I want to meet up with you girls again".  

So we will see how this goes. . . . . .  We are pretty stoked.  

PSYCHED.

We also got to work with our less active members and learn more about them and some of the things they are struggling with.  We are excited and looking forward to easing their burdens and helping them have a stranger relationship with their savior.  

RANDOM STORY: MY LIFE IN ROMANIA:

So Friday morning at 8:30am I get this knock at our door.  I check the peep hole and it is one of our little old lady baba friends who help run the block.  So I open the door and she is like, "Why are you having dance parties at 4am?" and I'm just like, "Whut"

Hahaha so then I'm like, "Wait, maybe I mistranslated that in my mind".  And then she says it again.  

And I'm like, "Wait what?  Haha we don't get out of bed until 6:30.  We only exercise in the morning but no dance parties here". 

She just looks unenthused and she's like, "Your neighbor beneath you says you cracked her ceiling" .  

And I was just like "No way" haha. And she tells me to come downstairs to look at the damage.  

So I grab Sora Trebas and we head downstairs and I have our crazy neighbor lady yelling at us, her neighbor yelling at us, and our baba lady yelling at us.  3 ladies yelling at me in Romanian. 

"You are dancing"

"You are throwing your furniture"

"You are kicking the walls"

"You are beating on the floor"

"I am a 76 years old, without a husband, on pension, living here alone"

"You two are probably thieves"

"The noise wakes us all up!"

And I'm just thinking, "No freaking way do we have enough energy in the morning to do all that, much less do pushups haha"

So anyways, I tell her that she is mistaken, and I apologize and ask her to talk to our proprietar to work it all out.  

So I call our proprietar, who is a member in our branch, and I explain the whole thing.  Turns out, she's been complaining about that crack in her ceiling for over  years now.  

Hm.  Interesting.  

And I also discovered that we have a crack in our ceiling in the same place that she has hers...Hmm... #normalblockproblems

And that is the story of how I almost got kicked out of our apartment.  

Shoot.  Better stop those dance parties now. 

Dangit.  

LOVING the work, LOVING the people and LOVING the Lord.  

:) Sora Lee

Photo 1: First day of church with my new missionary!

Photo 2:  Halloween service party with our best friends!

Photo 3: Expanding our cultural horizons with Indian food . . . and then having to go "find the nearest bathroom" contacting haha.