Dracula Spoke Hungarian

Hellósztok,

Confirmed: DRACULA SPOKE HUNGARIAN.  I have been asking around to see whether or not I am learning Dracula language, and a few Hungarians have told me that the actor who played the vampire in the original Dracula movie was a native Hungarian speaker, and that though Dracula is from Transylvania (currently located in Romania), he is part of the Székely tribe, who speak still speak Hungarian to this day from when Transylvania was still part of Hungary.  Hungary actually used to be a lot bigger than it is now, and almost every Hungarian will tell you, too.  Parts of Austria, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia and Croatia are all former Hungarian lands.  This Dracula accent thing also makes a lot of sense because the Hungarians have a super hard time with the "w" sound - they always replace it with a "v".  It's so funny when they speak English because they all sound like little Draculas!  There is this one man who the Sisters are teaching, and he always says for some reason "so many Jehova Vitnesses!". I think he's trying to relate to us or something, but the funny part is how much he sounds like Count van Count from Sesame Street.

The last week we also tried out a new form of tracting - we brought a church member with us!  Usually just us missionaries go tracting and it can get very tiring, along with not being the most stimulating work.  But Kata (the member we brought) changed/reinvented the whole experience, the whole idea of tracting.  First of all, bless her soul, she has a speech impediment that causes her to speak SO quickly.  Hungarians themselves sometimes have a hard time understanding her.  Hungarian learners are usually caught like deer in the headlights (see a picture below of our investigator, Héri Laci, who is perfectly exhibiting my facial expression when Kata talks to me too quickly).  Kata managed to say during tracting, "We're missionaries. We brought a spiritual message about Jesus Christ," in about 1.2 seconds flat NO JOKE. We ended up being let-in by an old woman, who later during the lesson said to Kata, "My sweet, sweet star. SLOWLY. I can't understand ANYTHING."  But the wonderful thing about Kata is that she has endless energy. We went tracting for three hours straight on Wednesday, and her moral was like that of a missionary's straight out of the MTC (though her feet were hurting her a bit).

On Saturday, during another missionary exchange, Robinson Elder and I went to lunch with Judy and Lotti, and afterward Lotti, our investigator, went tracting with us! She even did a door approach!  She was so brave and awesome for going with us. She gave us some new ideas for interacting with people at the door, and she was surprised at how many people rejected us and asked, "How do you deal with that? I was a telephone salesman for washing appliances one summer, and every time the people would be rude to me, I would just start crying after the phone call."  We thought about it for a minute, and then told her that it's important to remember that when people are rejecting us, they're not so much rejecting us but rather rejecting our message.  In any case, she's a real trooper for sticking around with us.

Norris Elder and I have been studying a lot recently on the subject of Christ's atonement, and how He qualifies us to return to heaven to live with Him, our Heavenly Father and our families forever. First of all, it is important for me to remember, that believing in Christ means that you believe in His claim that he can make you "celestial material". Believing in Christ doesn't just mean that you believe that He exists, but rather that He can transform you into a person who is perfect, sinless, strong beyond measure.  Though "keeping the commandments" is a requirement to dwelling with God forever, this task is pretty much impossible. That's why the Atonement of Jesus Christ is so important and needed, because we never are going to be able to "keep" all the commandments and to "keep" all the covenants we make with God. I'll go into this a bit more next week, but this message has given me a lot of hope for the future and has helped me to be able to actually visualize myself dwelling with God forever.

Love you all so much,

Adam

Héri Laszlo

Judy's for lunch