The man in charge of S & I asked Ron and I to go to some wards nearby and encourage Institute attendance. Ron was working on a talk that we have to give at a Seminary meeting next Saturday, so I decided to work on this project. I started a nice talk quoting the Dedicatory Prayer of Hungary but severely condensed it when I decided it would be nice to do the whole talk in Magyar…. (and on advice from our former tutor, Kyle, to keep it brief!)… After getting it to about 5 sentences, I tried my hand at translating according to a “formula” that we got from Kyle and another tutor. Then I took it upstairs to one of the office missionaries. He almost transformed it completely.
Then Friday night at the Gofri (Waffle) Night Party, the sister missionaries were there to give a spiritual thought. Sister M (from Las Vegas, a darling home-schooled girl, who went to George Wythe for a while and graduated at age 20 from BYU) had a new companion, sister T, a native Hungarian who is serving her FOURTH mini-mission! Also a darling person…the only LDS member of her family.) I decided that I needed them to look over my translation again – so we invited them to dinner on Saturday night. We also had Sister H for dinner.
After dinner, Sister T made more changes on my talk and had me read it out loud to her. She corrected my pronunciation on several things (how about most things?). So Sister M showed me how to do a video on my iPad and we video taped Sister T giving my talk, nice and slowly, so I could practice using an authentic accent. Pretty cool use of the iPad – huh?? (Sister M left her iPad, graduation present, home like she was supposed to… BTW, she has a Russian minor and got sent to Hungary; maybe she will meet someone who speaks Russian…)
So this morning Sister H, Felsted Elder and I left for the Pest Ward at 8:15 AM. (It is across the Danube River.) And, believe it or not, I read my little announcement all in Magyar! (They might have needed a translation for it??) Then we immediately left that ward and drove back to the Mission Home to do the whole thing again for the Buda Ward. Only this time it was harder – bad day for me. It was WARD CONFERENCE and the Stake Presidency was there, plus all the missionaries that we know. At least the Mission President and his wife were somewhere else. But I got through it and a few people came up to me and thanked me… (very sweet people)…
The Buda Ward is conducted all in 100% Magyar and we were exhausted after just Sacrament Meeting straining to hear a word or two that we might recognize. But then, we went to the Gospel Principle class and, of course, they asked us to introduce ourselves. Ron stood up – since he has memorized some of this information in Magyar – but froze and was frustrated. He finally said some stuff in English… We are working hard on the language and have hired a local YSA to help us once a week.
Even though we could not understand much, when the Bishop spoke, the Spirit was very strong. (We actually could understand more of his words and the missionaries said that is because he is American and has an American accent. He was a missionary to Hungary and married a Hungarian woman and lives and works here now. He is very young, about 30?)
Our Hungarian Mission 
I admire you so much! It’s so hard to learn new “stuff.” Prayers and hugs! Thanks for the posts!
Love,
Sister Porter
Thanks! We need all the prayers and hugs we can get!