Elder Austin Phelps: Spring Has Arrived in Romania!

Spring has arrived in Romania

Things are going good. Still no contact with the man who had the baptismal date. We had exchanges with the zone leaders this week, and the sisters had exchanges with the sisters in Cluj-Napoca. So We had a few extra missionaries here in Sibiu for a couple days. We are still working on the map. Had a few visits this week. And yesterday we sent a list of names out of our system. People that have no phone numbers, addresses, nothing. And nobody knows anything about them. So we sent them to their respective countries and to the lost and found file. We talked to some interesting members who are no longer active this week. One experience as follows:

We had the address so we decided to go see if we could talk to this guy about his membership status. We got to his block, and a woman walked in the block at the same time as us and took the elevator up, we took the stairs. We get to the floor his apartment is on, and ask her which apartment is number 16, turns out, her apartment was number 16. Then, we asked if we could talk to her husband. And she asked us if we were from the church, we told her yes. And she kept telling us to "leave him in peace." Trying to explain that we only need to talk to him for 5 minutes, she then told us that we understand Romanian, but we're not understanding what she's telling us. She told us to Remove his name from the list (we need HIS signature to do so), so seeing that the situation wasn't getting any better, we just left. So, we scheduled with the branch president to go back with the paper for him to sign. He went up to the door without us, and came back down, about 5 minutes later. She again refused to let anyone talk to her husband, and took the paper and ripped it up and gave it back. Interesting experience. Needless to say we won't be making anymore visits to that apartment, we are working on a different plan. Anyways. Every day an adventure.

We made a few other visits. One member works as a clown, he's super cool, but is gone all the time with clown appointments (no idea what you call those, shows, jobs? Habar n-am.) So we invited him to FHE and church and he said he'd come if he was around. Another visit, was to this older guy. He was baptized 22 years ago in Germany. He was being taught by the German speaking missionaries, and his children were translating from German into Romanian. So, him and his family got baptized there, and were active for about 8 months, then moved back to Romania and went inactive. Super nice guy, we think he didn't understand what he was doing when he got baptized with his kids translating and all. Since then, he has kids in Italy, Germany, and here. All inactive with no real interest in the church. It was a good visit though.

Just to prove how out of date the system here is, we were looking for a member, and a neighbor to the apartment that he used to live in, informed us he moved to Spain over 10 years ago. Similar situations with others who have moved over 5 years ago, but nothing has been done with the records. It's a big job, even active member records are missing tons of information, marriage dates, locations, spouse/children names, ordination dates. What a mess. haha, it keeps us busy though.

That's basically it for this week, we also did some block knocking, but nothing really came out of it.