Week of August 26, 2012: Reframe!

The subject line is because, as I mentioned last week, I am training again! A young, sprightly whippersnapper (is that how you spell that?) named Sister Frame! And we're still in Stara Zagora. We got here on Thursday, had just enough time to go to a produce stand (Stara Zagora is still the undisputed capital of tomatoes) and fall asleep.

On Friday we had some really good meetings with new members Mitko and Maria, who both got baptized while I was here, and basically re-taught some basic doctrine that they both had gotten dusty in since it was taught to them seven months and eleven months ago, respectively.  It made me really appreciate first of all, having such awesome new converts to work with, who are so awesome and non-crazy and non-mean. Thanks, Lord! And second of all, it made me really appreciate the need of missionaries to constantly review basic doctrines with people, even long-time members. Stuff like God being there for us. Or God being our Heavenly Father, and having a body like ours.  So remember: everything that's most important in the Gospel we either learn in Primary, kindergarten, or in the first missionary lesson taught by someone who doesn't really speak our language. Oh and Maria fed us the most delightful hot summer evening meal: sliced fresh pupish (basically cantelope with a weird outside shell), chunks of sirene (editor: feta!), and bread. She explained to us that this is a classic Buglarian meal (purposeful typo) that works for breakfast, lunch, or dinner! And I said, okay! Cheese and melon! Okay! Anyway. She also found out that I knew some old Bulgarian folk songs (YOU know why) and ended up bringing out her favorite little knishka of old songs and we sang "Sto Mi E Milo" together. So. Blah blah blah, corny.

And OH MAN. Sister Frame's first Sunday was probably the most interesting first mission Sunday I could think of. I had about fifty things to do in the branch (helped teach relief society, control/teach the one and only primary kid, teach Gospel Doctrine until the teacher showed up halfway between the hour, and somehow greet and organize the struggles of each of the twenty-ish people who ended up coming, get water for people with heatstroke because it was like 110 degrees with 100 percent humidity on Sundee) so I just kind of had to leave her and say, "Wait here! I love you, I'll be back!" And rush around like a crazy person. And then we tried to find people. I've really been struggling with finding lately. I've never considered myself good at it, and have never really been forced to do it a lot or "branch out." So any mission or non-mission people: how did you find people to teach?

Shout-outz to Mom and Mimi and Bam and GG and Dana for letterz.

I'm just a very, very lucky kid who gets to hang out here for a year and a half and talk to people about very important things that not everyone knows about. And I'm very, very lucky to have all of you. Don't forget that politics are stupid at the end of the day, everybody gets along when we're eating food, and the Simpsons are funny.

Love you all.

Week of August 20, 2012: Five Thousand Words

Important details:

1) Maria was baptized! It all went perfectly.

2) I'm staying in Stara Zagora for another two months!

3) I'm training one of the two new sisters coming in on Wednesday. What??

I love you guys. Thank you for everything you do and help me with. More next week.

Week of August 13, 2012: Probably

First of all, a quick party salute to my good comrade Thomas, who has continued the family tradition of serving missions to formerly communist countries. And also I am so excited and proud for him (wherever he may be?). Sorry for this weird third-person address. Anyway, it's just cool to me that missions continue happening and people continue getting ready for them and coming home from them and continuing to get up at 6:30 on them. Hooray for Zion!

Welcome to another week in Stara Zagora, the home of the best beer in Bulgaria! (According to many. The Zagorka beer factory is very near by, and looks like a scary orphanage or sword factory.) Ooh, also, notice the slogan of said Zagorka beer company: "Probably the best beer in the world." Probably. Oh, and also an interesting language note for all of you language nerds (nobody cares, I know, sorry): Bulgarian contains a tense used to express doubt or sarcasm in something having happened. So where in English we could say, "Supposedly she ate 5 watermelons in a row," or "Oh, so you 'Didn't have time to make me a sandwich,' huh??" in Bulgarian, you can just get rid of those air quotes and supposedlies and use a tense to express it all! Interesting. I am excited to embark on a sarcastic Bulgarian journey when I am capable of doing so.

Goings-on of the second week of August. First of all, hung out with awesome member Zladka, who needed help with her technologies (camera/skype/email/finding LDS.org/learning how to use Liahona talks for lessons). She is adorable and also made little lists of commands written for all of the above things to help her remember, e.g. "Press the red button, then click the round button, etc." She is also the current Relief Society president, and we got to have another lesson with her on Wednesday about how everybody (her, me, etc.) feels inadequate for their callings and as if there perhaps is no hope. But there is! Even though our Relief Society consists of about 4 active women and 2 or 3 investigators/non-active women, we are still sisters in Zion, darn it all! And we will MAKE pies for each other! And TEACH each other the Gospel! So there.

And then, guess what. Congratulations to me, I managed to lose ANOTHER wallet on my mission, all within the same six months. Bra-VO. So we spent like four hours one day chasing it around, asking the store where I probably lost/had it stolen if they had it, turning off my cards, etc. Sigh. I will never grow up.

Also, mostly, helped the long-time investigator Maria prepare for her baptism this week! And all that that implies! She is a professional cook, and very insistent upon having an excellent spread of not just a pie at her baptism, and therefore the following traditional meal will be present: kebapcheta (ever-present spicy sausage thingies), bannitsa (you know about it), mlechen salad (cucumber and dill and yogurt), watermelon, pitki (bread balls) and bread. Bread must ALWAYS be present. I am delighted by Maria and her sweetness and her insistence upon only eating things that are appropriate for the given month. For instance, even though her shopska salad is amazing, I would never dare to ask for it anytime except in between May and August. Before or after that, it is inappropriate, and according to her, might make one sick, because of the temperatures of the ingredients (?). Also, the peaches are getting bigger, just so you all know. Bigger and better. It's out of control.

We also got to have a great lesson with this new lady Bogdana, who is very Pravoslav and very sweet, and insisted upon buying us drinks at an outdoor cafe (one of the youthful ones where people sit all day long in purple leather booths and listen to rap from 2008 and techno from Croatia from 2006 or so) which was a funny place to give a lesson on the Restoration to a 65-year-old lady, but awesome. 

Mostly I've just been realizing this week that I am not perfect, but that the main thing is to not focus on that but to do my best every day and try to show love to people around me. And that's it. That's all you can do.

I love you guys. I might leave Starz next week. Who knows??? Stay tuned!

PS: Bulgaria's volleyball team is doing well, I heard? In that 'supposedly' case?

Week of August 6, 2012: Read Alma 34!

What are you doing?

I'll tell you what I'M doing. Sweating, that's what. But it's a refined, controlled sweat these days, since I think my body is finally adjusting to extreme temperatures and is getting too lazy to sweat as much as it used to. It's just like, "Meh, whatever, here's a few drops, I'm going to sleep." And also, the leaves here in Stara Zagora are already kind of turning. Summer is . . . ending. 

Some interesting things in my planner from this week (worst sentence ever, you probably all stopped reading right here):

1) Go and find some less-active members from our branch spisek, knock on the random block apartment door and have a lady open it and tells us she now attends the Evangelical Church, they speak in tongues there and she likes it better, goodbye. About 3/4 of the registered members on our klon spisek (branch directory! oooh words!) are inactive/disappeared/sometimes dead. So it's sometimes interesting/amusing to go find them.

2) Deliver vegetables from a member's celo to another member's house, who is currently having really bad back/money problems, and give her a massage for an hour while her children play on the floor! I never thought massage skills would be so useful here on "the mish." But they are. Almost . . . every day. And I've gone back to do similar massages a few times since then.

3) Go to a lesson with recent convert Tanya (remember her???) and accidentally ask her if her husband, Peter, was alive. I phrased it this way: "And Peter, alive is?" But I meant to say healthy!! I really did!! Because he used to be sick!! It's just that there's this expression here that everyone says as they leave or say goodbye: "Da budesh zhiv y zdrav," or like, May you be alive and well, basically. So the words "healthy" and "alive" just got a little too mixed up in my mind, I suppose? Oh well. Tanya laughed and laughed for like 30 years, so it was worth it. 

4) Pluck eyebrows. This is crucial, since it is altogether too hot to wear my bangs, and the ol' forehead is what makes an impression on people.

5) Go to the copier place and make a million copies of our English class flyer, since this is the week we advertise for such classes. Hand them out for hours on the glav, saying, "Zapovyadaite," which is like this word that means, "Here you go," or "Come in," or "Eat this tiny cookie, please," depending on context.

6) Two dinner appointments! What? That has never happened. People don't really "feed" us here, unless it's like soda and weird biscuits. The first was with Raiko, the old guy who is an artist and probably an agnostic and also, this week, kept complimenting me on my new dress (thrift store!!) and gave me and Sister Turnbow these awesome old pictures of him as a young communist man. The second was with Nikolai, a youngish investigator of the Elders', and his parents, with whom he lives, in their awesome courtyard patio outdoory house. Shopska. Make it, everybody. 

We are continuing to find investigators and it's pretty slow, especially since people keep going in and out of town for summer and moving away and whatnot. But we're excited about a few people and especially excited about being able to hopefully build up the branch here. But anyway.

I love you guys. Read Alma 34 if you get a chance. Okay?