At noon Seda and President Helelyan showed up—actually he showed up first to tell us that he had found an internet provider for us. And Seda was planning to take me to buy a stove. So the four of us took off and went to the internet place first. They will install the our hook up tomorrow. Then we went to the stove place, and bought a stove, just like that. The stove fellow gave me a new year discount of about 10,000 dram and insisted that I needed the model with a rotisserie feature in the oven, at no extra cost. He tied it to the top of an old car and we all drove home together (free delivery includes the buyers & their entourage), whereupon he untied it, set it by the front door of the building and drove off. Elder Blunck & Pres. Helelyan toted it upstairs, and we were soon joined by Seda’s husband who works as an electrician at the school nearby. He and President had to run off to buy a fitting, but that gave Seda & me time to peel off all the labels.
I then learned how to buy a chicken. (It’s intimidating because you have to ask the chicken clerk to give you the one you want out of a big bucket of chickens—and how do I know which one I want or how long they’ve been sitting there?) When you get it home cutting up a chicken is a whole nother thing when it still has feet and a head. Actually I didn’t see the head until I started to cut off the feet, & let me tell you it was startling.
I figured it would work well to just cut up some vegetables, stuff the poor little chicken with a lemon and some bay leaves, wrap it all in foil & bake it. I learned the hard way how this new oven works. It’s both gas and electric. The electric version doesn’t get hot enough to melt butter, so I switched to gas and promptly burned all the vegetables due to the fact that it’s a very small oven & I had the pan too close to the gas. I’m not sure there’s a thermostat, although I had asked & asked, & I think that they thought a rotisserie was enough of luxury, so what on earth was I babbling about. I’m really not very confident about trying to bake cookies or rolls. They’ll either burn on the top or the bottom. But if these people can cook with their stoves, I’d jolly well better learn to cook on my deluxe model.
So what does all this have to do with missionary work? First of all, we have to live, & I’m trying to have it not take up the whole day. But the huge part of my day, and all day tomorrow, will be to try to prepare to teach Moses Chapter One in Armenian. I will be kind of like a trained speaking monkey, and have to read most of it, and understand very little of what I’m saying—except I know the lesson in English, and I believe what I’m teaching and love it, and the members are so sweet. They’ll be patient with me, and they’ll think I actually can understand Armenian. Not only am I having to write the whole thing down in Armenian, but I’m having to switch from the Armenian printed alphabet, which I was barely confident in, to the handwriting style, which has enough differences to drive me crazy. For instance the printed “z” looks just like the handwritten “g”—so I can’t get away with handwriting z’s for g’s. And President Helelyan has instructed us to use the blackboard every time. Thank goodness I only teach once a month. (Except he wants me to be prepared every week in case someone doesn’t show up.)
And it’s a no water day, which means I have a kitchen full of greasy dishes. (The meal turned out ok—the chicken was very fresh & tender.) I’ll have to wash things in the bathtub, tomorrow , where I can get hot water. What does all this have to do with missionary work??? I ask myself this question 50 times a day. (I’ve asked it twice already in this post.) The answer is “baby steps”—we’re building relationships with people, we spend a lot of time walking, and we both are conscious of trying to have loving countenances which will somehow spread the Spirit into the hearts of the people we pass by, (it’s really hard even to learn people’s names, & who they’re related to & when you speak one word of Armenian to them—like hello—they assume you can understand everything they say, and chatter away—-and then you learn later that they’ve been telling you that they want you to get them a new pair of trousers, or that their son is in jail, no the hospital, no really jail. They have names like Gago—-or maybe it’s Guga, or Goga, it’s all strange on the tongue, & easy to forget from one minute to the next) but somehow it’s all doing us more good than anyone else, and we’re very grateful for the experience.