Tough Week

Hey Family,

Thanks for all the emails! I opened up my email and had so many its great to have two weeks of things to read through. Sorry if you were worried last week when you didn't get an email on time. Hopefully by now you have gotten my letter that I wrote from the hospital. Everything is back to normal now, Hermana Venegas is feeling great and she gets to stay so that is great. These last few weeks have been sort of hard, not going to lie. The main thing was that my companion was sick and I had to sleep several nights in the hospital with her. But that aside, we still had sort of a rough week. We had a lot of investigators not show up for appointments, we had every appointment cancel one day and we've had several of our investigators out of town and a few days where we were knocking/yelling, haha, and we just weren't finding anyone that was interested. It is the hardest thing to teach someone the first lesson and feel the spirit so strongly and then have them not show interest anymore. You can see it in their eyes, you know they feel the spirit and they like the sound of the message, especially when we talk about the first vision but then I think they stop to think for about it and logic sets in and they realize that this is so new and so different than anything they have ever heard and they get scared or something I don't know what it is. I know they must think we are crazy, when we talk to them and tell them that there is a living prophet on the earth today or that the true church has been restored. When we are contacting people and they look at you like you are crazy sometimes I just want to say, "I know we sound crazy, I know this is so different than anything you have ever heard but we're not crazy! Just give it a chance". The other problem here is that people many people say that they are catholic even if they don't actually go to church. Lots of people do go to church, there are so many churches here, most of them I have never heard of. So people probably think we are just one of the many churches that someone just started.

We have found some really awesome people to teach. One woman we are teaching is named Emma. She is from Dominican Republic. We knocked her door about a week and a half ago. All we said was good morning and we are missionaries and she let us right in, went and got the keys to her gate and told us to sit down. This never happens! She said some Elders came by two years ago and they gave her a Book of Mormon and set up an appointment to come back and teach her but her husband was dying of Leukemia and she was at the hospital a lot and so when they came by she was probably never home. She was pretty busy and so were we so it was about a week before we could go back and see her. We taught her the first lesson and the spirit was so strong, stronger than I have felt it yet when we've been teaching. She is Jehovist Witness and this is all very new to her but I can tell she likes it and she feels the spirit she very happily accepted a Book of Mormon. She told us before we left that she had always heard a lot of stuff about our church but now she understood a lot more and one thing she said was that she had always heard that our church looked down upon women a lot but she was so excited to see that here were two sister missionaries teaching the doctrines of the church and that really impressed her. We asked her if we could do anything else for her and she said we had already done so much and she said she would be thinking about this (meaning the lesson) all day! We are going back to teach her tonight and I just pray so hard that she reads the Book of Mormon and loves it. She's so great.

We are still teaching Feni, but we are done with all the lessons so we are going to watch a movie with her about eternal families but after that we will have to start thinking of other things to teach her. We are pray so hard everyday that her husband will soften his heart and marry her. She wants it more than anything.

We are teaching a woman named Ana and we are going to set a new baptismal date for her. She had one for the 12th of December but she had a lot of things left to be taught and she works out of town for this older woman and she goes and she cleans her house and takes care of her and she randomly gets called so sometimes we have appointments and she had to go to work so she is really hard to get a hold of. She is going to Florida for a month in January so we are hoping to have a baptism date for the 26th or the 2nd.

Everything else is good. Knocking is slow, we have had a lot of investigators that aren't home for their appointments but thats okay hopefully when we talk to people of give them a pass along card one day they'll be interested.

Thanks for all the emails. It was so good to hear from you all. I will try and write you all an email or a letter. It's weird to think that it's Christmas time back home, it doesn't feel like it barely at all here. I'll try and send you all something for christmas, to be honest there isn't really anything here that is different from the states except that its way more expensive. Everything by us is like walmart, K-Mart etc. So I don't really know what to send you all. But I'll try and think of something and it will get there late. Sounds like you've been super busy with things, like choir concerts I can't believe how many Abby has. I always thought that was crazy for Ensemble and its nothing compared to what Abby does. I can't believe it was so cold there! It's usually in the eighties here. The highest it has been is about 95 but its been rainy the last few days I actually wore a sweater to church yesterday and it was only 76. But I was freezing with all the fans on full blast in the chapel. I was going to send you pictures of my apartment and of my companion but I forgot my camera cord so I'll send them next week. The apartment is pretty nice we are upstairs and we go out on the roof to wash our clothes and hang them up to dry and our Duenos told us we are welcome to have fruit from their trees. We have star fruit (like in Hawaii) and Avocado trees and Guava trees but those aren't ripe yet. Food here is pretty heavy. Lots of meat and beans and rice. The rice is not just rice though, they feed you like a whole plate full and it is rice with all sorts of stuff in it like beans, and chunks of bacon or other type of meat, sometimes there is just chunks of fat, which I pick out. I had a pastel at the ward christmas party the other day. Not my favorite, it is not a pastry as you would think, it's like a tamale but the masa is mixed with mashed up unripe plantanes. It is sort of a slimy mushy texture and it is grey/green. Hopefully I'll get used to it but I just couldn't finish it. We mostly eat at home anyway so I just eat like I would at school. We are super careful to because Hermana Venegas has to be careful with food. Well I should go, love you all tons!
Good luck with everything. Love you!