Adunare in the Hungary/România Mission

We had a quiet Monday this week.  Tuesday we drove to Oradea for Zone Conference and took the Elders with us.  This is their final conference before they go home.  A little bittersweet day, however, they are ready to go home.  President and Sora Hettinger always have such good things to teach us.  This time we learned from Ether 1 and 2 about the boat that was tight like unto a dish.  We discussed what we would need to do to make our mission tight like unto a dish.  Sora Hettinger taught us to put down our weapons of rebellion and become better missionaries. We had pizza for lunch.  You can see the few boxes left out of the mountain of boxes they had delivered.  Missionaries always like pizza.  Following our lunch break we were treated to some role-playing, companionship study and an arrangement of "Come Thou Fount" musical number by Elder Giron and Elder Bontempo.   Later in the week, we worked on ...

Our week began with a trip to a small town a little outside Arad where we took Sora Mogos to search for a birth record for her grandmother.   We visited the office of the town registar and were told they would call her when they have it for her. Hmmm... not sure how long we should wait until we pay them another visit.  We will see.  Following our trip to Livada we stopped in centru to do an errand and found this cool picture made from colored pencils. It is fun to look at and imagine how to put a similar one together.  Here is a photo from our walk in the woods this afternoon.  Like so many Romanians, the guy is using his bicycle to haul firewood. I don't think he liked me taking his picture. Here are a couple of other wood cutters who were getting wood on another day. The next day we made another visit to Sora Muscan.  The Elders are teaching her the "Endowed from on High" lessons for temple preparation.  She h...

The Elders and Sisters have "Cabin Fever".  They don't care what the weather is - they wanted to go to the Fortress in Lipova for P-day, so we went.  It was a cold, dewy morning, barely above freezing.  There was rain on Sunday and during the night so there were slickery, muddy places on the mountain that you climb to get to the fortress.  The street in Lipova where we parked the car. Now we will visit the Monastery.   All decked out for Cracuin Ferecit - Christmas. We were escorted to an upper floor in the monastery where the hall was decorated with paintings that depicted accidents and sickness.  The paintings show angels and St. Mary. A photo of the man who showed the hall to us.  Notice he is sporting some cotton in his ears, very common in Romania, to keep the wind out of his ears. We finished our P...

At our Sunday meetings yesterday, Brother Moldovan explained to us how to find the lot that the church owns in Arad.  He said, "You go right down this street that the church is on to the first colored light.  At the light, you turn right.  Now go down the street until you see the big gypsy hotel.  It has big columns like the White House."  Monday while we were doing some errands we decided to see if we could find it.  Yup.  Here it is.  And there is a big fenced, locked up lot across the street from it.  We peered through the fence.  It seems like a nice place to have a church someday.  The members are looking forward to that day.  Very often when we are out in the car, we see the horse-drawn wagon carts.  This one had a family with a load of something like carrots or onions.  They seem to be busy hard-working people. Again the wagon is set up for two horses, but being used with one.  They tie the pol...