Received Monday, February 24, 2014

QUESTIONS:

When you get "red dotted" does that go for all day? When that happens do you just walk, or can you call a member for a ride? Do you HAVE to stay in the house?  I know it is for your safety.

Usually it's just part of a day. We just can't drive a car ourselves. 

how many sister missionaries are in your mission?

there's just over 300 missionaries here, and I think about 40% are Sisters. 

how was church for you yesterday?

It was good. 3 investigators came. 1 has a baptismal date, she's the wife of a member. 1 is the guy we've been working with to stop smoking, he came for all 3 hours for the first time. and the other is the grandma aged lady we always teach at a members house.

any investigators come to church?

yup

tell about your most tasty dinner appt last week.

the people here are good cooks. at one home she made chicken rolls (I think we called them chicken balls at home) but she made them a little creamier, which was also good. She also had a bowl of a sliced cucumber and carrot sticks, which the kids loved and just gobbled. Lucky taste buds, I guess. Also two different people gave us food yesterday at church to eat throughout the week, and then someone also brought us egg sandwiches this morning (he does that about once a week).

how are your cold symptoms? All gone? 100% better?

Alllll better. 

by the way, I find nothing wrong with eating expired food. I wouldn't if the color was off, or if it smelled bad, so charge on with the cleaning out of your cupboards!

it's mostly eaten by now.

 

What activities are you going to do today? (Jane Colton told me tonight that maybe the YW will play volleyball on Tuesday night.)

I think we are going down to the stake center to play volleyball as well!

It was a good week. I went on exchanges to a spanish speaking are, which was really fun. I was there with a greenie companion, about 3 months out from Utah. He did really well. I feel like my spanish was improving throughout the day, not that I could really say a ton, but I could through in a sentence here or there. Coming out of an appointment with a member we talked to a guy in the elevator who I think they are going to start teaching this week, so they was super cool. I think its great you mention having a missionary son/being a member, that's a good way to do it. Sometimes walking around for me there's no time but to give a card and one sentence testimony, and ask if they'd like to learn, but when there's time to talk to someone a little (like on a bus, etc) I often mention being from California, which makes it easy to segue into being a missionary and the church, etc. Just 1 minutre after talking to that guy in the elelvator while walking to a car there was a hispanic guy I started to try to talk to, but he only spoke spanish, which gave me a perfect chance to throw my companion under the bus and get him talking. He actually really liked being forced to be on the front lines a little more. He talked to that guy a little, he said he was interested, but didn't have a phone, so my comp wanted to ask him his address, but he forgot the word! he ended up saying "tienes un casa?" (Do you have a house?) it was a little funny but worked. The address we got was 3 "Jamiton" which we later together discerned was 3 "Hamilton" street. I'm not sure if that guy was really super interested, but if they do get to teach him it's be super cool. Later that day we had a dinner appointment with a bilingual family, and the Sister missionaries in the ward came too (one of which is a native spanish speaker). My companion took the chance to ask a lot of spanish questions, so he could speak it better. There was 1 question only I knew the answer too, which was funny. The other people could tell him how to say any sentence, but there was one situation they didn't know how to explain the grammar rule he was messing up, they just knew what was right. Since I had learned it in a classroom I wasn't really good at saying things right, but did remember the rule (it was about when you use reflexive verbs, when is the "se" before the verb, and when does it come afterwards). Anyway, it was ironic for the gringo to figure out the answer (it goes afterwards with commands and when the verb is infinitive, otherwise before).
There, you got a missionary story, and a small spanish lesson.

We also had a "mini missionary" for saturday/sunday. He's a youth from another stake in the mission who's preparing for his mission, so he was basically another companion with us for the weekened. Like missionary for a day we did in Arcadia but longer. They get temporarily set apart and everything. It was cool, he was a very excited and confident kid. He got to come to Stake Reporting with us sunday morning, where we (the zone leaders and Sister Training Leaders) in the stake report on how the different units are doing with the stake president and President Packard. it's cool because not many people report right to the stake president. I guess I don't think it's always as effective as it could be though. I'm not always sure what he's really looking for, like what type of info he wants.

Thats basically all for now! Have a great week!