Brown Eyed Girl Takes on the World: You Can't Spell "Struggle Bus" Without "US"

Hey hey hey everyone!

This week was a great week and thank you too everyone for the birthday emails I got! Wooo! 21! I had a real great mission birthday. We actually had a "birthday week" because Sora Barrera had her birthday on May 28th so we celebrated together!!!! It was fun! I love her so much and I am so glad that I get to serve with her this transfer!

ABOUT THE BIRTHDAY

So my birthday started out with a surprise cheesecake breakfast from the sisters! They showed up at our apartment before church and we had a cheesecake breakfast together. We all headed to church and I had to teach Relief Society that day- which was fun because only the younger ladies were at church that day! It was like young womens/singles ward haha and they all sang me happy birthday and we bear hugged- I was soooo happy. Ward members bought me little bouquets of flowers and Polina, a little Russian member girl (we are tight) brought me balloons in my favorite colors! She is incredible. We headed home and finished studies and weekly planned so It was actually a very relaxed day which doesn't really happen!

COOL EXPERIENCE

So one of our investigators, Ecaterina's sister, whose name is too Russian for me to spell, we have decided to begin teaching with the Russian elders because Russian is her native language. So Elder Findlay begins leading the Restoration lesson and we are all just sitting there- picking out a few key Russian words we know. We see her face change and she became so peaceful. We felt this incredible, comforting feeling fill the room, almost out of nowhere. All of us Romania missionaries looked at each other. The we realized that Elder Findlay was saying the first vision, and it had brought the spirit so strongly. For those of you who don't know what the first vision is, it is Joseph Smith's account of what he experienced after he prayed and asked God which church he should join. ( If you want to read more about Jospeh Smith and his experience you can look here: https://www.lds.org/topics/joseph-smith/testimony?lang=eng ).

Even though I do not speak Russia or understand Russian I was able to see the Holy Ghost bear witness of the truthfulness of this message. It was so incredible and it was an experience that I can never forget.

WE ARE TEACHING A TV STAR

So Natalia, one of our coolest investigators works as a talk show host on a local tv station and we had dinner/lesson with her and her friend with one of our senior couple this week. She had to hurry out in order to make it to work but she told us we could watch her on tv! So about 20 minutes later, we turned on the channel and there she was! She is helping the church get good media coverage here in Moldova and she is helping us promote....

MEET THE MORMONS MOVIE PREMIER IN CHISINAU

Yup! So meet the Mormons, the church's documentary that hit theaters not too long ago got translated and dubbed over in only 4 languages Spanish, French, German and ROMANIAN and we are going to have a huge premier here this upcoming week! We are so excited and very blessed and honored that we have something so cool in our mission language. It is going to be big and we are eagerly awaiting to see how it all works out!

GOODBYE TO ZINA AND THE GIRLS

Zina will be going to work in England for the summer and the girls will be living about 5 hours way from Chisinau with their grandparents while their mom is gone. It was very hard to say goodbye to them but we look forward to our awesome Skype lessons!

SMALL AWESOME MOMENTS

We were on the maxi taxi or marshooka and we here this little boy maybe four years old going off in Russian and then he started singing "a, b, c, d....." IN ENGLISH. We both died with happiness! It was so cute.

I saw this stray dog and I wanted to help it out and give it some food when out of no where, this young teenage boy comes out of the store with this huge, I mean huge can of dog food. He pulls out a pocket knife, and cuts open the can and dumps all of the food into his shopping back, folds it up like a plate and sets it down beside the stray dog. My heart melted. And my hope in humanity was restored.

RANDOM SEMI GROSS THINGS

So hey, I'm Sora Lee and I can't cut a break with weird health things on my mission so this week we found out that we have HEAD LICE! Super fun. It's so great I cannot even begin to tell you how truly fortunate we are! (Read with sarcasm). My tongue also turned black from a weird reaction to some medicine I took. I guess it's a pretty normal thing because on the back side it says under symptoms that a "rare but harmless blackening of the tongue may occur after consuming this medicine". That gave me quite the scare. BUT HEY I'M GOOD!

I just am obsessed with my mission and I am so happy that I have the chance to be here in these 2 countries. I have this deep, inner happiness inside me and it is so weird but I am just so grateful for everything I've learned and done and look forward to making these last 9 weeks insane.

Loving the work, Loving the people, and Loving the Lord,

:) Sora Lee