Conferencia de Zona y Día de Acción de Gracias!

We had a wonderful zone conference on Monday and Tuesday!

We all watched 17 Miracles together on Monday night at the B's and then we had the actual conference Tuesday morning.  We talked a lot about our desires and how if we really love the Lord, we will do everything in our power to be completely obedient.  There is an awesome conference talk about how a lot of times the sacrifices the Lord asks of us are small, not big.  He doesn´t usually ask that we sacrifice our lives, but rather that we read our scriptures daily, and pray sincerely, and other small things like that.

We watched an amazing video clip about a 16 year-old boy named Hector who was a convert to the church and who shares the gospel with EVERYONE.  The ward had a missionary activity and when they went to Hector´s apartment complex, every single person had already been invited to come to church, a church activity, or to meet with the missionaries, and all of them BY HECTOR.  In the video clip, he says a couple really profound things.  First, he was talking about his conversion, and he said that he read the Book of Mormon, prayed, and got an answer. And then he said "If I know it, I have to do it."  That was so amazing to me!  A testimony isn´t really worth anything if we don´t do anything about it.  And if we have that solid testimony, there won´t be any other real option but to do that which we know we ought to do.  The other thing he said was talking about why it´s so easy for him to share the gospel with everyone, even with people he doesn´t know.  He said, "If our Lord said it, you should do it!"  That hit me so hard.  If we really know that Jesus is the Christ, the Savior of the world, well, we should do what He says.  Whatever it is, however difficult of uncomfortable it may be. 

I just finished this morning reading Jesus the Christ.  I absolutely loved every minute and it was wonderful for me to be able to see the perfect example that He was. I love Him.

We´re currently struggling a little bit getting our investigators to keep commitments.  We were talking about it and we´re confused because we can feel the Spirit strongly in our lessons with them and we´re pretty sure they can feel it too, but then they don´t do anything that we invite them to do!  So either they aren´t feeling the Spirit, they don´t recognize that they´re feeling it, or they don´t realize that the committments we leave with them will help them feel the Spirit.  Our goal this week will be to figure out which of those is the problem...

Also, D got baptized on Saturday!! And Dad, you don´t have to worry about me not getting to sing with you guys because every Wednesday at FHE D plays Christmas songs on the piano and has me come over and sing them with him.  I´m probably going to sing O Holy Night at the ward talent show on December 20th and he´s going to accompany me. But his baptism was such an amazing experience and the testimony he shared at the end was incredible.  Too bad NONE of our investigators came...

Transfers are today but we aren´t changing here.  In our district only Elder D left for Madrid, so we´re pretty much the same still.  Hermana F and I decorated our piso super pretty today with snowlakes and a paper chain for Christmas!  It´s so pretty!  I took pictures...but I forgot my camera cord at home so I will send them to you next week.

Today our P-day is cut in half because we´re going to do the rest of it on Thursday!  We´re going up to the B's on Thursday afternoon with all the missionaries and the stake president and his family, and we´ll be there until about 6:00 at night!  We are really excited!

Also, Hermana F wants me to tell you all that it´s her birthday on Friday.  Just so you know. :)  I don´t know what I can do as a surprise seeing as how we have to be within sight and sound of each other 24/7...but I´ll see what I can cook up!

I love you all a ton and hope you have a WONDERFUL Thanksgiving!

Hermana Lara Schaumann

^It's snowing in the Canary Islands!

Picturas! Y Zona Conferencia de Todas las Islas!

Okay, so Lara didn't include a title with her email this week.  So I gave it a shot.  Don't laugh too hard!  


*****************************
Hola todos!!

Knocking on Christopher Columbus' door.  No answer. :)

Making a wish!

Holy Spirit Street

Hna F and Hna S

w/ Nestor Alamo--Spanish writer, lawyer, composer

FHE!

w/ G ready for Halloween!  

I'm writing this quickly from the B's dining room because today is Day One of ISLAND ZONE CONFERENCE, which is a 2-day affair and it's really exciting!  President J and his wife and all the missionaries from Tenerife are getting here right now, so things are starting up.  We've been mass cooking all day in Hermana B's kitchen.

Quick update--I'm not sick anymore. I spent Monday night at the B's and Tuesday in our piso sleeping and listening to Conference talks, but now I am totally fine and we had a great week!

Y didn't come to church again and we're not sure what to do to help her progress...we'll keep working and see how everything goes.  She did get us a reference when she was at the doctor-- she called us up and told us that she had started talking to a lady in the doctor's office and she wanted us to come by and visit her daughter, which we did last night! Her name (and her daughter's name) is R, and they're from Peru.  They're super great.  The daughter is 20 and is so nice.  We have all the same interests and we really hit it off last night.

Also, J is leaving today for Chile!  I can't believe he's going.  We had a farewell party with him yesterday at M's and it was so fun but so sad.  I also made my first really successful joke in Spanish--I had J and M cracking up.  I was pretty proud of myself. :)

So yeah, there's a line of missionaries waiting for the laptop so just know that I'm doing great and I'm super excited for Zone Conference today and tomorrow!!!

Les quiero un monton!!

Hermana Lara Schaumann

Muchas lecciones y nadie en la capilla...

I believe this could be loosely translated as "Many lessons and nobody in the chapel"


Nov. 11

SO, before anybody freaks out, I'm a little under the weather with a nasty sore throat.  The B's took me to the doctor today and I got on some antibiotics and so I'll be as good as new in no time! 

Apart from that, we had a good week!  Y's phone was still broken so we went by almost every night.  It was so good to see her on a daily basis and really see her progress step by step.  We even made chocolate chip cookies with her and her mom, even though they turned out really sketchy because there are no chocolate chips, the brown sugar is different, and their oven was a six-inch square... but hey!  They were still cookies!

We got a fecha with guy from the Philippines named J for December 14th.  He is so sweet and everything we taught him he would just say, "Wow."  (We teach him in English, which makes it a good deal easier...)

Also, the elders found a homeless guy named D who is AMAZING!  He speaks 6 languages, is an electrical engineer, and plays the piano like nothing I've ever heard in my life.  We happened to run into him on the way home and so we walked all the way home with him in the rain and he told us his life story.  It was so sad but he has got to be one of the strongest, most amazing people I've ever met.  He's getting baptized on November 23rd!

We had a baptism yesterday from the elders and my companion and I had to teach the plan of salvation so I was trying to speak loud even though I'm losing my voice, but then at the end one of the ward members came up to me and told me that my Spanish has improved at least 75% since I got here to the islands.  It made me so happy!

Funny things this week:

C's daughter D was looking at the Liahone we had brought to teach our lesson and there was a picture of Lorenzo Snow and she said "Look, Santa Claus!"  It was so funny we had to bite our lips to keep from laughing.

We showed up like 20 minutes late to a meal appointment with the institute teacher and when we walked in he said "Hermanas, no dessert for you!"  We thought he was serious for a few seconds...

So keep your prayers coming!  We need them!

Hermana Lara Schaumann

Halloween!!

From Nov. 4:


We learned this week that they don´t really celebrate Halloween in Spain.  We saw probably 5 people total dressed up.  It was really sad.  But we made sugar cookies during our mediodia so it was okay. :D

I really have no idea what happened this week...so this letter might be even more random than usual.  We had the HARDEST time having lessons with people.  We called every investigator and contact and less active person we know, but no one had time to meet with us, which was kind of sad.  The cool thing was that we ran into some people who had been looking for us or got blessed in some other way for our diligence. That was really cool. 

Neither Yerlandy nor Luis are going to get baptized this week.  We´re thinking maybe in 2 weeks more.  When we set that date with them, it fely good, but since then both of their schedules have been super complicated and we haven´t had a real solid lesson with them.  We all but dragged them to the YSA Halloween dance (because of transportation issues, not because they didn´t want to come), and they had a really good time, I think.  We´re going to see them tonight, which will be good.  Please keep praying for them!  We had a little bit of a panic because Yerlandy wasn´t answering her phone on Saturday and then she didn´t come to church on Sunday and all of yesterday she still didn´t answer her phone.  So finally we went to her house and basially rang the doorbell until she answered.  We went in and just talked to her for a while about her life and her concerns and everything and we found out that her mom just lost her job and that her phone broke, so that was why she hadn´t been answering.  We were worried that something had happened and she didn´t want to talk to us but she still likes us!  YAY!  And when we asked her about getting baptized she said that she feels comfortable and good in the church but she´s still not sure that it´s the true church or that she´s ready to commit to being baptized.  So we´re going to keep working with her until she feels convinced!  And also Luis´s brother just moved here from Cuba, so we should be able to start teaching him soon as well! 

Also, Orlando seems to have lost a little bit of his enthusiasm this week to learn from us...but he sounded eager to meet with us yesterday when we talked to him so hopefully he will be reading and progressing again!

Some funny things this week:

(Man Hermana Fowers and I have SO many funny things happen to us)

On Wednesday the Buhlers were in Madrid but Hermana Buhler gave us money to go buy croissants for our chicken salad sandwiches that we had after district meeting.  So we left half an hour early to go buy them.  We went to one bakery and bought everything she had, and she called ahead to another bakery just down the street to ask them to get croissants ready for us, So we went RUNNING down the street to the other bakery to pick up the croissants to go to district meeting...but when we got there the lady had JUST put them into the oven and we had to stand there waiting for 20 minutes to get the croissants.  She FINALLY gave them to us and we went running down the street with 6 bags of croissants as fast as we could to the church and so man people were laughing at us.  We finally got to district meeting 25 minutes late...but there were croissants!

We were waiting for a bus and an African man walked by and I said "Hola" to him and he said "buenas tardes" in response but he was African and had a really weird accent so it took me a minute to figure out what he had said. After another few seconds Hermana Fowers turned to me and said, "Did he just say ´plan of salvation´???"  She was totally convinced that he had, it was hilarious.

Also yesterday on the way to Yerlandy´s we got completely drenched in the rain.  It´s funny because it hardly ever rains in Las Palmas, but all this past week it´s rained at least a little.  It was pouring though yesterday for over a hour, and when we got to her house she just started laughing because we were thoroughly soaked. :)

New scripture and quote I found this week:

D&C 123: 12-17

And quote by Elder Maxwell:

“One’s life … cannot be both faith-filled and stress-free. …

“Therefore, how can you and I really expect to glide naively through life, as if to say, ‘Lord, give me experience, but not grief, not sorrow, not pain, not opposition, not betrayal, and certainly not to be forsaken. Keep from me, Lord, all those experiences which made Thee what Thou art! Then let me come and dwell with Thee and fully share Thy joy!’ …

“Real faith … is required to endure this necessary but painful developmental process.”

Also I finally listened to Priesthood Session!  President Uchtdorf´s talk goes up there on one of the best talks I´ve ever heard for me.  I absolutely loved it!

Thank you for all your prayers and support! LOVE YOU

Hermana Lara Schaumann

El obispado, galletas, mi mitad-cumpleaños, y la mejor llamada de mi vida

From Oct. 28th:

(Or translated, the bishopric, cookies, my half-birthday, and the best call of my life) 

We are officially the WARD of Las Palmas!!!  We got a bishopric yesterday and it´s so exciting! I don´t really know our new bishop at all, but one of his counselors is a really awesome young and recently married RM from El Salvador who we have come to lessons with us a lot.  He´s great, and I know that the new bishopric will do a wonderful job!

This week we had an AWESOME district meeting in which the Buhlers taught about good teaching skills.  It was so powerful, especially since just the day before Hermana Fowers and I had been trying to figure out what we needed to do to have better lessons.  We ended up having a really good, really basic lesson with Orlando about the Book of Mormon and the importance of the message of THIS gospel, and the next time we met with him, we could just see that the spirit in him had changed.  He had read the chapter we had left for him to read, he was praying, and he just had a new enthusiasm that hadn´t been there before to learn about the gospel.

We also had a wonderful lesson with the Buhlers and Yerlandy and Isora about the commandments to pray, read the scriptures, and keep the Sabbath Day holy. Hermana Buhler said in district meeting that one of the things we really lacked in lessons was enthusiasm, and Elder Buhler said that when we extend commitments, we need to help the investigators see why that specific commitment will help them come closer to Christ.  Then we had that lesson with them, and I was focusing really hard on doing those things.  And the lesson was AMAZING.  We talked about the commandments, about why we have them, and about what they help us do.  We talked about Christ´s love for us, and about how those three things especially draw us nearer to His love.  I felt the Spirit so strongly and as I bore my testimony, I almost started crying (which DOES NOT happen to me in lessons.)

Also, I received the best phone call of my life in which Yerlandy CALLED ME.  Those of you who don´t live in Spain, you don´t understand how big of a deal that is. There´s something here called "saldo" which is minutes on your phone, and NO ONE has saldo. Our investigators never EVER call us because no one has enough money to put minutes on their phone or respond to text messages. So the fact that Yerlandy called me was in and of itself a miracle because that means she used her priceless saldo to call us.  But even better than that was the context of the call.  I answered and she said, "Hey, I just got back from working with my mom and I´m going to read the Book of Mormon.  I really want to study about baptism.  Is there a specific chapter I should read that talks about baptism?  I almost fell over right there on the spot, but I somehow managed to fumble around in my bag and tell her the page number of Mosiah 18.  That was so awesome to me!  She´s not entirely sure that the church is true, or that she feels completely ready to get baptized, but I know she will feel that by her fecha on the 9th because she´s doing her part!  She is putting in the effort to read and to pray and that is how she will get an answer.  It was amazing for me to get that call because that is exactly the recipe for how to receive a testimony. I´m SO excited to see how she continues to progress.

Luis was super busy this week because his brother came from Cuba to visit, but he´s been reading and praying still and Yerlandy said yesterday that he´s more prepared than she is to get baptized.

Other things this week...our chapel got robbed!  We´re pretty sure someone came in while we were doing our FHE in the chapel and hid in a storage closet until we left and locked up, then they went through and broke a few things and stole a computer and got out the back where they had to climb over a wall.  It was crazy and that day we couldn´t go into the church because the police had to come do an inspection, but nothing´s too badly damaged and a lot of the technology stuff like the video conference cameras and the projecter were untouched. (That day was also coincidentally my half-birthday and Hermana Fowers sang me happy half-birthday in Spanish on the bus.)

Also on Friday we were really bored waiting for the bus and so we ran over to the store and bought a sleeve of cookies which we shared with all our investigators and menos activos the rest of the day.  It was really funny because Hermana Fowers had them in her bag and at the end of the lesson she would just pull them out and everyone´s faces were so confused because they had been expecting her to pull out scriptures or something and it was cookies instead. 

And last night we went to the coolest FHE with Raquel and Franklyn, who are a married couple in their 40s or 50s and don´t have any kids.  So once a week they have an FHE with all the YSAs who are the only members in their families.  There were at least 5 YSAs there, and they have them rotate in teaching the lesson.  I loved seeing them do that, because it´s so important that those recent converts have FHE every week and even if they can´t do it with their own family, they can do it with this part of their ward family!  Most of the ones there got baptized within the last 2 years, and the lesson was very profound and spiritual and incredibly powerful.  That house was filled with love for the Lord and for one another.  I absolutely loved being able to go there yesterday.

I really love being here right now.  I LOVE my companion and Las Palmas and I love the Lord.  We´ve been listening to priesthood session for our companionship study and I just listened this morning to President Uchtdorf´s talk.  I felt like it was written just for me (minus the references to the priesthood!)  We probably won´t get our new conference Liahona for a really long time, so for the moment I´ll have to content myself with listening from my comp´s iPod. :)

Please keep up your prayers.  We can see the miracles they work every day!

¡Los quiero mucho!

Hermana Lara Schaumann

Siete Meses, Gelato, Y Fechas

I somehow didn't post the last four weeks, so I am trying to catch up.  What a slacker mom!  

From Oct. 21st

First off, yesterday was my 7 MONTH MARK in the mission. I cannot believe I have already been out so long.  It´s really amazing to me how fast it´s going.  I´m very nearly halfway done.  YIKES!

So my new companion, Hermana Fowers, is awesome!  She´s also 20 and was studying Elementary Education at USU before she came here. She didn´t know ANY Spanish before she came here, so she´s struggling with that a little bit, but she is an awesome missionary and has a lot of love and good ideas for the people here. I´ve also learned since she got here that I´ve pretty much forgotten how to speak English.  (Not that Hermana Floyd and I were as good as we should have been about speaking Spanish during the day.)  We were reading in the missionary handbook and I just started to say the words in a Spanish accent without thinking about it.  After it came out of my mouth, my brain was throwing up a little red flag, like "something wasn´t right about that" and Hermana Fowers was just staring at me trying not to laugh.  It was so funny. 

This week was good but also kind of rough.  I feel like our investigators are just vanishing by the dozens... mostly because they´re finding new jobs and they have to work every second of every day. The work schedules people have here are definitely illegal in the US. So many people work "interna" which means they live with an old person and take care of him or her 24/7, and they get maybe 2 afternoons off every month.  I don´t understand how they´re still alive, honestly, working that much all the time. 

The highlight of this week was teaching Luis and Yerlandy. We set a baptismal fecha (DATE, I mean DATE) with them for November 9th, and I´m very confident that they´ll both get baptized that day. They have such strong desires to really know for themselves and we can´t argue with that.  They keep asking questions about the requirements to get baptized and Luis told us that his concern in getting baptized would be that his work schedule might not permit him to go to all the activities and be as active and involved as he would want to be.  We promised him that he will be able to do all that the Lord expects of him because the Lord wants him to get baptized and to be a member of this church.  He came to church yesterday and said that he felt really good there and that he really liked it!

Also we had the coolest experience in which what I thought was just me having a sweet tooth turned out to be a spiritual prompting!  I have mentioned previously a wonderful gelato place by our piso that we go to sometimes.  Well, this week we were coming back for mediodia and the bus dropped us off only a couple blocks from there.  So I turned to my companion and asked if she wanted to start our mediodia with going to get gelato.  So we walked in, we looked at all the flavors, and I started to order mine when I realized that the server girl was staring intently at my left shoulder and not hearing a word I said.  Suddenly she looked up and said "Oh, sorry, I wasn´t listening--I was reading."  I smiled and asked if she had been reading my chapa.  She said yes, and then I explained that we were missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  She started to ask us more about our church and when we had established that we were Christian, she asked what made our church different from the others.  I explained to her that we have a living prophet today just like in the Bible and that he speaks to us the words of God. She started asking all sorts of questions about how we know that he´s a prophet of God and everything.  She asked if we were in a hurry and we said no, and so she invited us to sit down at the counter and keep talking to her about our church.  We left her with a Restoration pamphlet and the Book of Mormon, and we´re probably going to see her on Thursday!  That experience really strengthened my testimony that when we are working hard and we have the desire to do as the Lord wants us to do, He truly guides our steps and places people in our path!  So now, we might make gelato stops a little more often. ;) 

Keep praying for Luis and Yerlandy, especially, to receive a sure confirmation that what they are doing is right. 

¡Que disfruten su semana y que tengan mucho exito en todo que hagan!