THANK YOU for sending those to me. Seriously, pictures are the best thing to get on the mission. As much as I wished I could have been there with all of the cousins too, Im glad that you were able to get down and see so many people! I am glad that we are able to get to see each other more often now. As much as I would have loved to know everyone growing up, now that we are old enough to really form relationships and get to know each other, Im glad that we are able to spend time with each other.
Man. I am so happy for everyone!
And how neat that everyone was able to be there for Josh's wedding! That would have been so neat to see everyone in the Temple together!!! That will be us, one day! For someones wedding, even if it is Keiras haha. She will get everyone at her wedding and that will make up for mission graduation and all that jazz that she now has no siblings to force to sit through those ceremonies haha.
Sounds like you had a great week and like you are in for another week of adventure and fun. I am SO EXCITED for Garret to be able to come home and spend some time with everyone there. How long does he get? I home enough time to really enjoy some of the things about home!
You know what I miss about home? The BEACH. We are going to go to the beach in November when I get home okay? Even if we are in the car feeding birds in sweatshirts, we gotta go!
Man alive.
Well a new area mean new adventures! I didnt end up going very far, in fact I have church in the same building and saw some of the Doylestown ward yesterday which is fun. And as it turns out here in Souderton we have a set of english elders too! Which is GOOD. We need two sets of missionaries here still. The elders have a golden and then one elder that came out just before Sister Sagers and I did.
Yup, my new companion is Sister Sagers, we were in the same MTC district so its way fun to be able to see her in the field. Although its surprising since we only have 3 left and we doubled into Souderton as Sister Training Leaders. So I am guessing we will get two here together and then my last I will get transferred somewhere else and she will die here and train the new sister training leader.
Anyways, enough trunky talk, back to work.
And man there is a lot of it! And lucky us our Relief Society president and ward mission leader are both out of town :) And we and the elders both doubled in, so all 4 new missionaries, dont know where the library is for wifi, or who to see first, and we had to split our area. We took over two sets of elders, one english and one spanish and their boundries are different than having two english sets of missionaries. So we spent the first day or two figuring out how to split our area between the two of us.
Oh joy! With no direction because neither of us knew the area or anything. But its all worked out. We found that we have the area of the ward that neither of the previous elders worked. So its like opening an area, no investigators (they ALL live in the elders area) which is nice for us because its a clean slate, and nice for them because Elder Yates (the golden) will get lots of practice teaching different people and lessons. I hope that they can handle everything, they can with the Lords help, but I hope they dont get over whelmed. Teaching is a good thing, but they also got all of the spanish elders investigators and guess what? NOT a lick of Spanish! We will be relying heavily on the ward members to teach and translate the people the elders were working with so that they dont just drop off the face of the Earth. Or I should say they will be relying heavily on the ward for translators.
What else to tell you? OH the elders apartment we took over, GLORIOUS! The previous elders are angels and cleaned everything! It was clean, not like 'clean for elders' but it was clean! Which is such a treat! We didnt even have to spend the first 48 hours cleaning and being scared of what to find next. They cleaned out the fridge even! Every closet, everything spotless.
It pays to have friends in your district! I will have to thank elder Butler and Elder Paulsen the next time I see them. I was in the same district as them and we knew I was taking over their apartment so I think they made sure to actually clean it knowing the sisters were coming in. ANGELS! Someone should tell their mothers, they would be so proud.
anyhow. We got all settled in, we found out that we are covering all new sets of sisters! Which is exciting, I only know one set that we previously worked with, and I have met maybe 2 of the other sisters, but its a whole new set of sisters so I am excited to get to work with them and get to know each of them.
OH EXCITING NEWS! We now have 2 sets of Spanish Sisters in the mission! We cover one of them, I love Sister Sturgess, shes fantastic. She is finishing training a spanish sister and we are working with them. And I am not sure where the other set ended up. But its way exciting to know we are going to get spanish sisters too! I dont know how many more we will get, but we shall see! And I am glad that President did not call me to learn spanish for the last 3 transfers of my mission, can you imagine? But we are trying to learn some spanish because there is such a big population of spanish speakers here. Its gonna be awesome.
I will habla espanol when I get home. Emphasis on the 'HA'bla! Such a gringa!
Dont they know I tried spanish already? It was a bad idea! Luckily sister Sagers knows some basic vocab... okay not very much at all. We have had a few people call us, attempted to communicate and they havent called us back :( We got the spanish elders phone... and their car! Which is nice because I dont have to worry about walking for the few days while it gets fixed :) But sad for the elders in Doylestown because they do have to worry about walking for those few days... sorry elders!
well. Nothing much else. OH here is my new address for everyone:
199 W. Vine St. Apt 3
Hatfield, PA 19440
We live close to the road so I would suggest sending boxes to the mission office. I will be down at the mission office on July 25th so if you get it there by next week I should be able to get it from them. We go down the last friday of every month for Leadership Council, which I am already excited for! Its always so uplifting and just what I need that week!
Anyhow. Well, thats my week in an email. And I dont think we get as much time to email here so emails might be a little shorter than they have been lately.
OH but neat experience yesterday:
We were contacting some potential investigators in an apartment complex where we had a few names and people to find. We walked around the corner to find this person, well call her Julie, cause thats her name.
So Julie is not home, but a few of her neighbors are in the courtyard talking loudly about the door to door salesmen that came through the day before or something. We look at each other and ask: "do you think thats for our benefit?" ... and it totally was. Then we ask, do we go and talk to them? and in a moment of bold sauce we decide yes and I start walking over to them before I chicken out.
I ask them if they know their neighbor and if Julie still lives there, they say yeah but it doesnt look like she is home. So we explain who we are and why we are looking for her, and most of them try to look busy (which doesnt work when you are sitting out on lawn chairs on a Sunday evening shooting the breeze by the way). But one of them was semi interested. So we show them all Philadelphia Temple pass along cards (my FAVORITE ones to use) and talk about how we are sealed for time and all eternity in Temples, and not just married for time like we are in other places. 3 tell us they arent interested, but the 4th one seems semi interested. So we talk to her and tell her about what we do, ask if we can come back and talk to her and she says well you can talk to me for 10 minutes but then Im going inside.
We then tell her some of the main points of the restoration of the gospel and give her a pamphlet, which lead to questions and discussion and giving her a Book of Mormon and a card that sister Sagers has which guides the reader to find the answers to 23 hard questions that can be found in the Book of Mormon. Then she voluntarily gives us her phone number, address and we set up an tentative appointment to check back with her in two weeks and see what she has been able to read and think about the Book of Mormon.
It was pretty neat! And all because her rude neighbors decided to talk loudly about salesmen and I wanted them to know that we werent sales men! Plus they were sitting close enough that they all heard what we were talking about. It was great!
Then as we walked back to our car we stopped and talked to these two Vietnamese ladies and gave them a Temple card and asked if we could bring them a book in Vietnamese, and they said yes, voluntarily gave us their phone number and address. Oh we also talked to an older Vietnamese man who didnt speak much english at all who said he wanted to come to church next week. I would be surprised if he came, but miracles are happening so who knows! He was watering his flowers and pretended to water me with his watering can, luckily he didnt get me wet but he tried! Stinker!
Anyhow. Opening an area is awesome, lots of walking, being lost, and talking to everyone. (by the way how did missionaries survive without GPS? I would DIE! But that goes for real life too, I get lost finding things at home, but I think my skills have increased since being here. Anyhow.)
Love you LOTS! Thanks for all of the pictures! we are loving life and working hard. Exchanges will start this week and then we are doing two a week on average, which is hard with opening an area but I hope the sisters are willing to help us talk to everyone! Pray for us to be guided to find those who are ready and those who may be looking already. This is gonna be awesome!
LOVE YOU!
Love, Sister Kindra Wilson
No comments:
Post a Comment