Week 31 – Celebrate! It’s Baba Marta time!
February 20, 2023
Week 33 – All aboard the Baba Bus
March 14, 2023Week 31 – Celebrate! It’s Baba Marta time!
February 20, 2023Week 33 – All aboard the Baba Bus
March 14, 2023Adventures Ahead! Hey everyone, I’ve had a week full of adventures, and the next 6 weeks are going to be crazy!
Burgas is a small town on the far side of Bulgaria. It’s far away from the capital, Sofia, where the mission home is as well as most other missionaries. Sofia is where we go to have the Zone Conference, a big meeting with all the missionaries in the mission, where we get to learn from President Koivisto and the other mission leaders.
It’s quite the hassle to move all the missionaries to Sofia. We currently have missionaries in Plovdiv, Varna, and Burgas, though he have lost a few missionaries this week, so Varna will be losing all except for two of its missionaries.
This past week we had the opportunity to go to Sofia, it was a long 6 hour train ride. We were privileged to have Elder De Feo of the Europe Area Presidency here as well! He taught at our Zone Conference and ministered to missionaries here. Truly an honor to get to meet and learn from a man so connected with the Holy Ghost.
While in Sofia, we missionaries visited the national history museum, which was really awesome. I learned a lot about Bulgarian history and culture, plus we saw some pretty cool things, including original Greek pottery, Roman armor, and relics from the Ottoman empire.
We spent the rest of the day playing Basketball 🙂
In addition to the Zone Conference, I spent a day with the ZL’s, on exchanges, where we “trade” companions for the day. It was a great opportunity to get to know them, best practices for missionary work, and get to explore the city of Sofia more.
During the week of the zone conference, we stayed at some of the Turkish missionaries apartments.
All the Turkish missionaries live in Sofia for the time being. It was great to get to know them some more, they are very kind for letting us stay there!
On Thursday, we returned home to Burgas, another long train ride. Exhausted, we collapsed.
The next day, we had another service project lined up!
We would be helping clean up some parks in Burgas, particularly where the Trains ran through. There were quite a few piles building up. We met a lot of really cool people that were with that group, including some Americans.
An amazing day.
Saturday we saw some miracles. We had FOUR lessons throughout the day, two of which were with NEW people. It was incredible. Every lesson went amazing, we are officially teaching those two new people, and the weather was beautiful.
We even saw some blooming trees. Friends, God is good. He works miracles and his work is moving forward. We saw divine help and preparation in everything we did.
It was an incredible day.
Bulgarians celebrate everything.
Firstly, Baba Marta, the celebration of March and spring! You’ll see a lot of these red and white bracelets people wear, those are called Мартеници (Martenisti)
They’re kind of like valentines, you give them to people and they wear them all throughout March, until the see the first stork of the season.
Some people also do the first budding tree. Anyways, when you see the stork or the first flowers, you tie the bracelet to a tree!
This is an awesome tradition, I encourage everyone to participate, they are really easy to make or find online.
Second, the celebration of Bulgarian Independence day is huge! They realllllyyyy like this day. It’s called 3-ти Март. (treTEA maRT) And it’s the day that Bulgarians liberated themselves from the ottoman empire. (With some help from the Russians) Anyway, it’s a huge symbol for the people, and they go hard. Also, there are like 8 more Holidays but we will come to those later.
Also! We saw this really cool sand art of Baba Marta dolls. (Big win)
We got Bulgarian Donuts by the sea. (Bigger win)
and got to clean the church with our favorite members (Biggest win)
Well, here’s the big news: Transfers are happening yet again… And my companion Elder Robinson is heading to Sofia. He was called to be the next AP!
And if you do the math, that means I get a new companion to accompany me in Burgas.
You know and love him, the Elder that will be joining me is Elder Grayson!
Anyways, I hope you all have a great week, I encourage you to look for the hand of God in your life this week, and write it down! That’s been an amazing blessing that I have been trying to keep up with this past week.
3 Comments
Our martenisti don’t seem to be working! We are still getting snow and rain… No blossoms yet!
Do Bulgarians celebrate flooding going away? I would like to celebrate that soon!
You are so amazing. What great adventures and wonderful blessings coming because of your faithfulness.