WOOOOOOOOHHH talk about an awesome adventure! :)
Although it is a little bit hard feeling like a brand new missionary all over again.... I am absolutely LOVING MOLDOVA!!! Chisinau is an amazing city. Very beautiful, and the people are even more so!
First let me talk about my journey here. Upon arriving at the trainstation in Bucuresti on tuesday night, we almost missed our train. VERY stressful moments here, people... since the train to Moldova is an overnight sleeper train and only runs every other day. Then, we come to find out that there is actually NO ROOM on the train that night... so after a stressful confusing discussion with the mission president... we are instructed to jump on the next train to a city called Iasi, which is also a sleeper train, that left at 11:00 pm. We sat at the trainstation for 4 hours with all of our luggage. I was assigned to travel with Sora Brinkman, another sister who got transferred to Moldova. We sat and waited, and jumped on the sleeper train to Iasi. As you can guess, it is close to impossible to sleep on a sleeper train out here ;) So we get on the train... and all of a sudden it gets super quiet and we have the realization that we are all alone..... we don't have a cell phone.... we don't know which stop to get off in Iasi... and we have NO MOLDOVAN MONEY! We have this horrifying realization, accept the fact that we are completely winging it out here... and continue on with our travels :) We arrive in Iasi, somehow manage to wake up on time and get off at the right stop in Iasi, and then move all of our luggage to a small little "Maxi Taxi" station. Maxi Taxi's are like 10 or 15 seater taxis that you pay to take you long distances. It is 5:30 in the morning, and we hop on a Maxi Taxi to Chisinau! We stop at the border to get our passports checked and everything, and we are complete zombies because we didn't sleep the whole night! So we arrive at the station in Chisinau, and we have absolutely no phone or anybody's phone number to call. We are simply hoping and praying that a senior couple here in Chisinau knew that we had arrived and that we needed to be picked up at the station! We had way too much luggage and no money, so we couldn't take a taxi. We waited there for quite a while, which gave me some time to listen to my surroundings and really accept that fact that I did not understand a single word that people were saying. EVEN if they were speaking in Romanian, because here they speak "Moldovan" which is a freaky dialect of Romanian. The accent is crazy! So that was an insane adventure, and we finally got picked up by the senior couples here and got taken to our new apartments.
So... in a nutshell.... Moldova is on fire. The church is growing SO FAST here, it is spreading like wild fire! This place is BOOMING WITH WORK. We are currently working with about 17 investigators, and our zone has 11 baptismal dates! I am amazing by how incredible this branch is, people are so kind and open, even though their Russian language scares me a little bit ;) But it has been a fantastic week full of super hard work. Tons of lessons, tons of people that are progressing! I have never been happier on my mission, these last 4 months are going to be full of work and adventures and a LOT of experiences that will change my life forever! I am so blessed to be here, especially to be serving with one of my best friends, Sora Nichols, my companion from my 3rd transfer, over one year ago! :)
SO BLESSED! SOOOO HAPPY!! SOOOO PUMPED!!!
I love my mission :) I love Romanians and Moldovans!
But no matter how much I love Moldova... I will always be a little Romanca at heart :)
have a great week!!
xoxoxo
Sora Draper
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