Wonderful Family of Mine

Hello Lovely, Wonderful Family of Mine,

First of all, it sounds like dad is having some exciting times with the Seminary class. It sounds like he's doing a great job with that. I do, indeed, know how frustrating can be your computer problems. Thanks very much to Grandma and Grandpa Frahm for their generosity. They are fantastic!! I am glad to hear that Belle is behaving herself and going gladly to school. Here, the teachers have been on strike for the past two weeks, so all of the annoying youths have been out on the streets every night, yelling American curse words and greetings at us in bad English accents. But, such is the life of a missionary. As for my winter coat, I actually found a cool looking trench coat in our apartment that fits me like a trench coat should, I suppose, and has a nice winter lining, so I think I am going to wear that for the time being. The weather has turned super cold recently, though, so I think I will be looking for a warmer hat and some thicker gloves. It snowed for the first time here Thursday night, and it was really fun to see the snowfall. The next day though, was the coldest yet. I think the big difference between the cold here and the cold in Connecticut is that here, as a missionary, I have to be outside all day long, so I am exposed to it a lot more than when I was just going to school and could choose to stay in all day drinking hot chocolate if I wanted. Still, I have never felt too freezingly cold. I feel sorry for Jenn, though, who is going up to snow-capped Stockholm in about a week, where I hear it is cold pretty much year round.

So, Mihai is the happiest person I have ever met. Therefore, I think he is crazy. In fact, the real reason I think he is crazy is that he is always talking about crazy things that make very little sense. He is a Romanian who, apparently, spent some time living in the US in the mid 80s, where he learned English, and I think, went crazy. Whatever the case, he is not a member, but has been coming to church for at least 7 years and is constantly calling and talking to us missionaries, always in English, about the "proffessional organization of the institutional system for specific apriorical representences at an official level" or something along those lines. In other words, he just kind of rambles incoherently about artificially constructed political jargon that, I am beginning to believe, makes sense to him, but totally eludes the understanding of anybody else. Last Saturday, he was the only person who showed up for our English class, so Elder Peet and I sat and talked to him in English for an hour about his history, about how he lived in New York in an immigrant neighborhood, and apparently staged a hunger strike in protest of the minority situation there under the Reagan Administration until they took him and put him in a hospital for 3 weeks, where a Dr. Kelly, from Bellview, talked to him a lot, and they gave him medicine to rest for a while. Again, you have to realize that this whole time, he is smiling, and randomly laughing in a way that a 5 year old occassionally will laugh for no good reason. It is hard to not enjoy talking to him, as it is almost like hearing Belle tell one of her nonsensical stories that you can't quite figure out the content of, but it, nevertheless, makes you happy just to hear it. Anyway, I am still trying to figure Mihai (or Michael, as he calls himself) out by piecing together his history and trying to decipher his convoluted speech pattern. Is there such thing as an extremely happy pschyzophrenic?

Daniel is coming along super well. He has continued to be free of smoking, and has almost finished reading the Book of Mormon; something that surprised and delighted us when we found out earlier this week that he had been doing extra reading on his own. I am not sure if I told you, but he is rather wealthy for a Romanian, being an air traffic controller at the Bucuresti international airport. We were at his apartment this last week, and he has all sorts of exotic and expensive little trinkets around his house. Not that he is rich -- he still lives in a normal apartment bloc, like most everyone here -- just that he has a better living style than the vast majority of people here. In fact, it is rather ironic that my first two baptisms here are at almost the polar ends of the Romanian socio-economic scale.

Whereas Daniel makes a rather comfortable living for himself, Costel, who was baptised in early September, has been going through some rather tough times. This last week I took my first trip outside of the city to the countryside, where Costel lives, about 14 km outside of the city limits. It was quite an adventure, as it took us a long time to find a bus that would take us out there, and then, we got out at the wrong village. Aparently, he lives in a little village outside of the little village where we thought he lived, and we had to end up walking the 4 km difference ourselves. By that time we were about 2 hours later than we told them we would be, and they had given up hope of us showing up at all. Our purpose in taking the trip out to his village in the first place was to visit his sick mother. About two months ago, their block, where they live on the ground floor, was flooded, and has since been condemned. Everybody else that lived there has moved out, but they have been unable to find anywhere else that they can afford to live in and have thus remained in their damp, cluttered, mold-infected, fly-infested one-room apartment without heating and with but a single light bulb illuminating the room. It was quite the humbling experience to sit down with Costel and his 75 year old mother in a room about the size of my dorm at Yale, and to see the poor conditions in which they live. His mother occupied all the time she could complaining and begging us, in as indirect a way as she could, to give her a place to live. Costel, meanwhile, was obviously embarrassed at his mother's behavior, but it is hard to blame her for her over-the-top affectations when one realizes just how bad they do have it. The problem is that we could help them with just about anything except the actually finding of a house, which has been the one thing they really struggle with. Costel understands this, and is greatful just to meet with us. I admire so much the faith and dedication he excercises in coming to church every week without fail, making the 14km trip, in the cold, on his bike. A true latter-day saint.

I have to go. I love you all! More next week.

Love much,

Elder Frahm