Week 31

This week has been so ridiculously crazy. Ok, so that other elder left to another city, just as all the excitement/headaches started to happen. 

We took the old missionaries to the airport to leave, only to find out that we needed a paper with our presidents stamp and signature to use the card to pay for all the missionaries luggage. My comp is a champ and worked all the angles to get them out of Romania. Then we had a flight bag guy, who decided that you couldn't have a carry on or be just a little overweight in your luggage. So he  TOOK their boarding passes till the missionaries payed, which they couldn't do until we had the card thing figured out. He wouldn't even take their bags, so there was a chance that they wouldn't get their bags on the flight as the conveyor belt line would take 20 minutes to get to the plane and the plane was leaving in 25 minutes. 

Finally after all that was done we went back to the office to prepare for the day. One thing I forgot to mention, we needed to be up at 3 am to do all of this so they could leave by 6. Elder P and I decided that it would be better if we stayed up the whole night to get stuff done, because we would be more tired if we went to sleep for a little while and woke up really really early. Isn't the mind of an elder great? 

The day before we had picked up all the new missionaries at the airport. That was such a cool experience. They were so bewildered and sooo sleep deprived. But we got them all into the country safely. 

The next problem happened on Thursday. Usually we get new missionaries into a health appointment the day they get in (Tuesday, they will then go to the visa office on Wednesday and leave that evening), but we couldn't schedule 13 missionaries into one evening. So Thursday (they had to stay all Wednesday) they all come in and get their checkups done and we book it over to the visa office cause it closes in 2 hours. The first sister gets up and fills it out with only a few problems. I took half the group to KFC (ya we got those) to get some food while Elder P stayed behind with the other group and to help them. Once they were done, we were supposed to switch. Shortly after getting food I got a call from Elder P saying that they were done for the day...after 15 minutes. There was no way we went through 7 missionaries in 15 minutes. Come to find out that the  way has been changed and the application for visas now got super complicated. I have no idea how to do it now or when or the why or anything. So we wasted the time of 26 missionaries,  but it will be a fun adventure finding out how to do this whole visa thing all over again (not that I ever figured out the first way...). From the sound of it new missionaries will have to be interrogated ..in Romanian. 

So I just got back from the visa office, trying to get the H's new visas for the rest of their time here in the country. We found out that a receipt is not a proof of purchase...forehead smack. So we need to figure that out in 8 days before the H's need to leave the country and then come back on a temporary visa thingy...Double forehead smack. But hopefully all goes well, after that we will start the health care for all missionaries. 

Elder Ormsby