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This is Elder Abbott, with the early morning email from soon to be sunny Deva, Romania! It's 7:48 and with me here is Elder Hyatt, my trusted colleague. In the news this week we have one announced baptismal time: Giorgiana, an investigator with the other elders, will be baptized at 6 PM this upcoming Saturday, the 24th, at Number 4 on Decebal Boulevard. This will be a great day for her. Giuliano, another baptismal candidate, will be deciding on his baptismal date later today. In other news, Râzvan, a new investigator, is deeply in love with the Book of Mormon. He says "anything that comes from God is good." Way to put it, Râzvan. English classes have again commenced. The missionaries are seeing much more success in this session, as evidenced by the fact that over 5 times as many people came to class on the first day for this course than the last course, where there were only 2 advanced students. On a national scale, the Romania Moldova Mission is flourishing, and had 2 baptisms this week, with 4 planned for this next week. It is expecting an increase in missionaries over the next few months, and has set a goal to build a stake by July of 2014, or earlier. This is Elder Abbott, and we'll get back to you, after these messages from... Elder Abbott.

Hey everyone! This was a good week. Elder Hyatt and I found some flyers advertising free Book of Mormons a few weeks ago and this week we started putting up the new version of the flyer that we made, with little rip off tabs for people to take and ask us for free Book of Mormons. It's awesome, because this contacting method has given us the opportunity to know that the people we talk to are at least interested enough in new scriptures to talk to us! All of our new investigators from this last week came from the flyers. We've actually only had one person call us (Râzvan), but he's awesome. He's a guy who loves reading spiritual stuff (he receives little magazines with spiritual thoughts for every day of the month, which I thought was a cool idea, from America), and already loves the Book of Mormon. We gave him a book on Saturday and then met with him on Sunday, and he said he had looked through it and it looked cool, then basically taught us the importance of scripture and why the Book of Mormon is important. He's a pretty awesome guy and we're meeting with him on Wednesday or Thursday. Most of our contacts from the flyers came from people asking us if they could meet with us while we were putting up flyers. As we would be posting a flyer, someone would say "hey, what're you doing?" We then would get the opportunity to explain, and we met with several people this week setting up that way. Over all, it's been a huge success so far, and we still have plenty of flyers to put up (we made over 100).

One of the ladies we talked to from the flyers was Doamna Dobodca, a woman who speaks German. I mean she can speak German. We literally couldn't get her to stop. Ha it was super funny, actually. We met her on the street and after explaining a little she asked if we speak German. We said the only three words we know (Das Buch Mormon = The Book of Mormon), and after that she immediately believed we were German. It took us half a lesson to finally prove to her that we do speak Romanian, and that we don't speak any German at all. It was amazing that we managed to talk to her for that long while she was just speaking German. Between the similarities to Romanian and English, and then the random Romanian words she threw in we could actually understand generally what she was talking about. It was a really funny lesson and we have a return date for her this week as well.

We also met Kati and Adra, two girls who are pretty interested in the Book of Mormon, as well as their friends Sabrina and Daniela, who are less interested. Kati stopped us on the street while we were putting up flyers and asked us for a free book. By that time we had run out of free books to give, so she said she'd find us another time. We saw her again in the Parculeţ (little park) the next day with 3 friends, and talked to them. We gave her a Book of Mormon, but unfortunately didn't have one for Adra. They're both interested though, which is good.

Basically this activity was just super awesome all around! This week was great for me and I hope it was good for all of you! Love you all!

Cu multe Dragoşti, Elder Michael Abbott

And we're back! In other news, the sidewalk on Strada 1 Decembrie has been fixed, along with the sidewalk on Decebal Boulevard we expect more construction on the East side of the city for the next few months...