Monday, September 18, 2006

I decided to skip a couple days because they weren't that interesting. The only thing that I think was remotely interesting was that I had my first week of conducting for Sacrament meeting. I didn't have any time to practice and it was really hard to figure out when to go up since I couldn't understand anything Pres. Popovich said. I didn't make tooo many mistakes though, except that during one of the song I almost sat down after the 3rd verse because I didn't realize there were actually 4 verses! Anyway, here's the entry for Monday, September 18th:

We went to the Hospital first thing in the morning at like 9 o clock so that we can start to get ready for waking up early to go to the orphanage. First I was with Iulia. She looks like a completely normal really cute baby except that she has a tube in her next which is connected to a machine which pumps air in her at regular intervals so she gets help breaking. It’s really sad though because they come in and change the pressure on the machine and you can tell it hurts afterward because for the next few hours she never stops crying. Of course, she can’t actually make much in the way of sound, so by crying I mean that she scrunches her face so as to look like she’s crying and tears will come out, just no sound. I think that’s even sadder than if she were actually crying. It’s also sad because you can’t hold her and she doesn’t get moved much so her arm skin was sticking to her stomach skin. Anyway, so Holly, Megan and I were in there to begin with we would do a mix of singing to her and just talking while holding her hand and rubbing her back. Ionella is in the room right next to her and after a while there were so many girls that pooled into the two rooms (because we weren’t aloud on certain floors and some kids weren’t there) that I decided to leave and go somewhere else. So after that I went up and saw Maria again and Radu for the first time (also in rooms right across from each other). Radu is adorable. He’s a few months old and has down syndrome and is just soooo sweet. There were also lots of people there though, so I tried to go down and see Octavian, but I met Abbi who was just coming from him and said the nurses told her to leave, so after that I pretty much gave up and realized there were too many of us there. So then Shannon, Abbi and I went home. We were all excited to be able to have a bunch of time to get stuff done, but alas Holly called and wanted us to meet Brother Wright and go over to his apartment because this girl named Alexandra wanted to meet us. Turns out Alexandra is this 19 year old girl who got baptized in April but can’t come to anything because her brothers and sisters (who she lives with because her parents are divorced and her mom is working in Italy) hate the church and won’t let her do anything remotely connected to it. They took away her scriptures and everything. She really wants to come though, so every once in a while she’ll sneak out and spend some time with Bro. and Sis. Wright. Actually, they keep a BOM at their apartment for her and some other things too so she can always have them to look at any time she comes over. It’s really sad. She’s still in like an extended high school program thing (don’t understand) for another two years, but after that she’ll be able to get a good job and move out on her own and do whatever she wants to do. Anyway, she apparently really likes the American girls, so she wanted to meet us, so we went over there and chatted for a couple of hours. After we came back it was pretty much time to leave, so we got ready and left. As a group we went to the Metropolitan Cathedral thing. I wrote a TON about it in my little notebook while we were there, but basically I found it really fascinating and came out of it with a lot of questions. It’s a good thing too because I’m supposed to use it for a cultural proofs and it’s supposed to take me a few hours and otherwise I’d have been done really quickly. But it was nice we got to just take our time and walk around and observe and write down everything we wanted to. After that we went and got a gogosh (or actually a Langosh) and then went straight to the church for FHE. We were really early though, so us and a few of the Romanians who were early as well played hangman. One of the Romanian guys, Adrian, was amazing at hangman when we’d do countries. Like, I think he may have gotten every single one. Even Burkina Faso. For FHE though we played the sign game which was really funny. The funniest part by far though was with Megan. Megan’s sign was a “how you doin?” type of head nod and kiss thing and every time she tried to do it she’d laugh. Well, it was bad enough when one of us girls did it to her, but one time Adrian did it to her and was totally all “I want you” about it and she just couldn’t take it. She started laughing so hard that she ran out of the room!