 |
| Last week in the CCM. Elders are on a spiritual high! |
Wow ok...so where to start...this has probably been the most INSANE week of my entire life!! No, not probably, it has!
Let me start with Travel Day- haha!
I swear I’m cursed! (see week 1) We were supposed to be at reception at 6:00am
and the van was leaving at 6:30. Hermana
Tate set our alarm for 5 so we would have time to finish packing and get
ready. So I go to bed and next thing I
know I hear someone knocking on our door, then Hermana Tate jumps out of bed
and looks at the clock and its 6:25!! She set our alarm for 5 pm! So basically
it was a freakin mad dash but we made it. After that everything went super smooth, other
than the fact that we all looked like stinky zombies all day. When we got
there we went to this orientation meeting, then had dinner with President and
Sister Ames (brisket…yum). We stayed the night at this member’s house that
lives in a castle! I stayed in the
"Italy" room. I won’t see a house like that for awhile. The
next day we went to the church, had a meeting, got our comps, and then went out
to teach! Super insane day!!
 |
| The newly arrived sisters at the Texas Fort Worth Mission home |
In the first 5
days of me being here, Sister Black and I (well mostly Sis Black) have been
able to commit the whole M... family to baptism, get 2 new investigators, and
one of them, (this cute mom named Sara) said she is open to being baptized!
Incredible!! The baptism date is not until June, but they came to church
and everything yesterday which is a really big deal! So if they keep progressing like this we may
bump it up! Normally
Sundays are days of rest right? NOT on missions, its like the opposite!
What else…we went contacting for only an hour and a half and found 3 people who were genuinely interested in our message. We have a return appt with one and got the phone #s of the others. And we’ve been able to teach what seems like a million other lessons! Maybe I had a distorted view of what missionary life would be like here. I thought it was going to be doors slammed in our faces all day, but this is awesome!:)
Sis Black is from Oregon and she is
awesome! She goes home in August, so I
will most likely be her last companion. She’s really nice. She knows so
much about the language and the culture. I’m really glad she’s my trainer! She’s very open to new ideas and very
accepting of me and my silliness! I’m
still working on getting her crazy side out...everyone has to have one right? I’ll go crazy if I never have any way to get
my weirdness out!
First awkward mission story; we were
teaching the M.. family, and usually before lessons we talk for a little
about their lives. People LOVE talking about their lives, and since I
pretty much never know what anyone is talking about unless its related to the
gospel, I just nod and laugh and say "Si" to everything. So
I thought Pureza was just telling me whatever about her life, so I was just
laughing and nodding like I always do, but then I looked over at Hermana Black
who was trying to get my attention. She
was totally giving me the "shut up “eye, so just sat back and let her talk.
Then afterwards I was like "what the heck happened in there?"
and she said "she was telling about how her nephew almost committed
suicide and you were laughing and smiling!" Ahaaahh!!! In my defense,
her face did not imply what she was talking about!
I think I had pretty much the most
memorable Easter of all time. I should have known it would be interesting
when our investigator Y.. invited us to her sister’s house for a BBQ, but I
had no idea! We showed up to Lupe's (her sister who’s kind of a
member) house and she had just moved into this trailer park area and there were
a million tiny ninos running around everywhere. Then Lupe told us to come
in and she had us start filling these hollow eggs shells with confetti and
flour because she said she wanted to start a war with them! haha! As we
are doing that we hear the rain start. I had NO idea how crazy the storms
are in Texas! One second it was this perfect sunny day then the next...Notebook
rain scene…crazy downpour complete with lightning and everything! So for
my Easter I had a BBQ during a lightning storm on the porch of a trailer home:)
Oh, and they had to move the kid’s Easter egg hunt inside, which was super
fun to watch.
So mostly everything is great, but
there are a few things that I’m going to have to get used to. For one, I’m learning that being a Spanish
speaking missionary, while it has some definite perks, also has its
disadvantages. Pretty much it means that our living conditions are not
great at all. We live and work where the
Hispanics are, which definitely aren’t the nicer parts of town. Our apartment sucks, straight up…really
gross. We have started naming the
cockroaches that live with us. So far there’s
Alfredo, Bill and Carl.
President Ames is
pretty much THE BEST! We get interviews with him every 2 transfers.
Randomly
on my first day all the other missionaries kept telling me that I reminded them
of Sister Ames..HUGE compliment!:)
 |
| President and Sister Ames |
I really love my ward! It’s a massive ward, and the awesome thing is
that we get to go to YWS and its all in English! It’s frustrating though because
most of the people in my ward speak English, but they encourage us to speak only
Spanish with them. So it’s like, I could totally get to know them and
talk with them, but I want to be obedient.
It’s a weird situation.
It’s hard to get used to not being
able to talk with anyone! It’s tough being a Spanish speaking missionary
in America, because I really really want to teach the gospel to people, and I
see so many English speakers all around me that I wish I could teach so badly! But they have other missionaries for that.
So for now I bear my testimony as much as I can in our lessons, but that’s
about it. I have NO idea how to carry on
a normal conversation with people in Spanish! Only five weeks of language
training in the MTC is not much. Ahh
gift of tongues...it will come:)
I definitely get lonely sometimes.
I’m sure it will get better once I start learning the language, but I
miss having someone I can laugh with and relate too. I guess I just need
to get over myself, because that’s not why I’m here but for now I feel a little
bit like I’m losing my personality.
About a billion other things have
probably happened this week that I have already forgotten about, but I think that’s
good enough for today:) We are going shopping today! Food was a struggle last week. I lived on eggos and pop tarts because we had
no idea how old all of the other stuff was.
I love all you guys so much! I’m
realizing now that I still have a lot more to learn about this gospel, but I do
know one thing for sure, this gospel is true and it brings happiness!
.
No comments:
Post a Comment