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!
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