Knock Knock. (Who's there?) Missionaries. (...) Okay, next door.

We'll start off today's email with a couple of dumb jokes:

- One night a missionary woke his companion. "I think there’s a burglar in the kitchen eating the cake I made."

His companion replied, "Should I call the police or an ambulance?" 

- Did you hear about the two Mormon missionaries that were called to teach a small tribe of cannibals in Africa?

They gave them their first taste of religion.

Ba-dum, tish! Okay, now that you're not expecting anything actually funny, here goes with this week.

Things are going well in Arad. We've had some really good lessons with both Ioana and Maria, with Ioana we've starting going through all the commandment lessons, even though she doesn't have a baptismal date, and we committed her to fasting to receive an answer for a date, so that was pretty awesome.

When we met with Maria, she started telling us about how she can hear or feel her son who passed away every once in awhile, and how everyone was telling her she was imagining it. So we linked that to family history and the connections we have in this life and the life to come. It was pretty touching, and I can now safely say that Maria is back on track for baptism. We had her fast for a date, too. And as we were leaving, she told us "I hope it's in the will of the Lord that I can be baptized while you two are still here in Arad." AWESOME.

We met with a guy, Stefan, who we contacted the first time last transfer. Back then he was insistent about the Sabbath being on Saturday, so I was a little nervous for a Bible bashing night coming to meet with him again. Well, it didn't turn out that way and it was awesome. His wife and sister were there, and we talked with the three of them in a park for a while, telling about why we're here and how we decided to come to Romania and leaving our families etc. etc., and Stefan asked a lot of difficult questions. BUT. We were laughing, chatting, and at the end got to share a good testimony about the Book of Mormon that his sister seemed to be excited about reading, and him and his wife wanting to see us again. That's what I love doing as a missionary.

We FINALLY had branch Family Home Evening. I've been trying to hold it for transfers now, and it finally happened. And it was a blast, we held it right after English so we had people stay and it was nice. I SO hope it will keep happening weekly.

So I still don't have any idea what I have to do as an STL, but uh... well there's an STL Conference this week (that I have to conduct...) so hopefully I will find something out so I can do exchanges before this transfer is over. Haha, I have no idea what I'm doing...

So those kids that were disrupting conference have actually been causing a LOT of trouble this week. They were running around screaming in the church, so we asked them to leave and as they were going they cracked one of the windows. That and they apparently were speaking a lot of vulgar language and drove people away from English classes....  We tried talking to their parents and they don't care what their kids are doing.   So... we'll figure something out this week. Otherwise, I fear for the lives of those children...  :-)

We went grave digging.

Well okay, we were helping Cristina clean and weed her father's grave. Perfect activity for October.

Nothing else I can think of to report. The weather has been absolutely perfect. We've been listening to Conference and it's been really great. And... oh yeah I get to fly to Bucharest and back for the conference so that'll be cool.

Anyway, I hope everything is going well at home!
Sora Sleepy Smith