Audit Time

Hello My Amazing, Wonderful Family,

Thanks so much for all your really, really fun letters this week. I really enjoyed hearing about mom and Courter's travel faux pas, and I loved hearing directly from Courtney about her experiences with the fun, slobbery dog. :P It seems like your 4th of July was a lot of fun, spending time over at the Michauds with their new pool and hanging out at the usual Central Park spot. I'm not sure if things on my end were quite as interesting, but they were fun enough.

For the 4th of July, my companion and I went out to eat for lunch/dinner at Ruby Tuesday's -- the only real American food (non fast-food) that you can find here. Elder Bartholomew went crazy, eating two, yes two, Collosal Burgers!! I was shocked to see it done. He was so full, he didn't eat until dinner of the next day. Otherwise, our 4th of July was pretty uneventful.

On Wednesday, we had a full, busy day in the office. We spent a lot of time preparing for the opening of the new chapel which is open for an open house this week. That night, the Facers invited us over for dinner at their house, where they were hosting a father and son who are members travelling in Romania. The father and his wife both served missions in S. America so they really love travelling and decided they would take each of their sons on a travel trip when they are 11 and when they are 18 -- at the major turning points in their lives. So, Coby, their middle son out of three, chose to come travel in Transylvania. It was kind of fun to meet them.

Thursday, we spent the first half of the day moving things from the old meetinghouse to the new chapel. We took a lot of time to move old financial reports and documents from the basement of the old meetinghouse. Apparently, there is a law in Romania that we have to keep all documents for 20 years. Unfortunately, the basement was dark and dank and moldy and many of the documents were absolutely horridly moldy and rank. It was not pleasant to have to sort through all those!! We also disassembled and moved a large bookcase to the new chapel only to discover that there is no room for it there, so we had to take it back. Moving is always fun! *sarcasm* :)

There were also two very, very strange incidents this week. The first happened while Elder Bartholomew and I were home, completely alone. As we were sitting talking, all of the lights went out. That's normal enough, I suppose, to have a power outage. But then, about 5 seconds after the power went out, we heard the sound of running water coming from the other end of the apartment. We ran into the bathroom, fearing a flood only to find the faucet of our bathroom sink running full blast. It was pretty creepy!!

Then, a couple of days later, I was going through my cassette tapes trying to find one in particular. I was holding my cassette tape player in my left hand while searching through tapes with my right hand. All of a sudden, and without me leaving the room or anybody entering it, I just couldn't find the cassette player. I searched all over, but it seemed to have disappeared. What's even weirder is that I found myself holding, in its place, a stick of deodorant that wasn't my brand. Nor was it the brand used by any of the four of us living in our apartment. That freaked me out almost more than the water!! After an hour of searching (no joke), I finally found the tape player at the bottom of my laundry basket, which was completely full. We never could figure out where the deodorant came from.

Well, I suppose that last story demonstrates just how exciting my life really is (ie not extremely much). In fact, the highlight of my week was probably what we did this morning -- audits. Yes, today was my first day doing branch audits. We started with three of the Bucharest branches today. It was a very interesting and informative experience! Two of them went really well, though the third one was rather interesting as the branch is without a clerk and all the finances are done by an over-worked branch president. Over the next month and a half we will be going on audit tours and visiting every branch in the mission -- including Chisinau (in Moldova) next week. Thus, I am really interested to see how other branches measure up.

As for my health, as much as I would like to actually be losing weight, as Elena believes, I am afraid to say that I am actually continuing to pack on the pounds. Lets just say that in Pitesti, I weighed 64 kg and I now weigh 70. I'll let you do the math on that one. All told, she is just being silly and you have no reason to worry at all about my health. I haven't been even slightly sick since the pneumonia episode, and I am eating regular meals.

Well, I don't really have very much more to write. In Alexandria, things are going pretty well. They are getting all of their apartment things settled and established, and they have found a lot of people to teach. I believe they have 4 or 5 people set up for baptism already. It is really exciting, of course.

Well, I have to go, but I love you very much. I know that Jesus Christ is my Redeemer, and I am thankful for the time I have to show my love for Him by serving others.

Know how much I love you all,
Elder Walker