Monday, July 22, 2013

La mision es lo mejor



Hola,
Como esta familia? Este semana ha sido llena de experiencias espiritual y chistoso.
Okay, all you Spanish speakers can go ahead and critique that sentence but hey, atleast my point is getting across! haha.
Oh, what a week what a week! First of all, it's been raining off and on which has been GREAT.  I don't even mind walking around outside in the rain because it feels so good.  But alas, the rain has ended and this week will be hot and sunny and humid and wonderful. 
We've had to do a lot more walking this week because we are running out of monthly miles on our car.  They put sisters in this area just the transfer before me, so when they were finding housing, apparently they got the wrong apartment complex or something and accidentally got an apartment that is about 10 miles outside of our area.  We work in south Fort Worth but live almost in Arlington, so we have to drive about 40 minutes to our area every day.  It's fine because it's good study time. Hermana Reina helps me with my Spanish during that time.  But it's a little hard because that's an extra 20 miles every day and we only get 1050 every month so we have to be really careful and only work in certain parts of town every day.  Also we can't drive to members houses for dinner because of the lack of miles so members just bring us dinner to the church a lot of times and we eat there.  It's all good though.  I'm definitely grateful that we have a car in this heat!
It's pretty cool because there are 10 missionaries in our ward. 10! That's a lot! 2 comps of elders and of hermanas, all in a Spanish ward haha.  We have to be careful not to sit in groups and talk because it looks intimidating to some people to see a ton of missionaries all in a crowd. It's great though.  Last week at church until about 10 minutes before church, we all had a lot of investigators there so there were more investigators and missionaries than there were members haha.  That's a good problem to have I guess! One of the Elders, our district leader was in my freshman ward at BYU.  It was funny when I first met him because I read his nametag and saw "Elder Newman" and then looked at his face and we both go, woah! no way! So it's been funny to have to call him "elder Newman" now. 
Yesterday at church was fun because I played the piano for Primary.  There is a pretty big primary in our ward.  It's funny because all of the kids are bilingual because of school and a lot know English better than Spanish, so the teachers were trying to get everybody to be quiet and listen and a kid yells out, "Can we just speak English please?" I was like, yes! Thank you! Haha.  That kid read my mind.  But it's good because this week i've actually seen a lot of improvement and can understand people a ton better.  I'm getting used to their speed of talking and their slang and what not. I still can't speak super well but I can understand pretty decent which is great.
Oh yeah, another funny thing about Spanish.  A lot of people here speak Spanglish, so it's funny because someone will be talking and I'll understand what they're saying and they'll say a word and i'll ask my companion what it means, and she'll tell me it was an English word, but they say it in a spanish accent that I don't catch it.  It's funny.  For example, no one ever says "fiesta," everybody always says "party" except they say it with an accent so it sounds kinda like "poorty" and it throws me off every time.  My companions and I have a good snicker every time someone says it.
Our investigators have kind of gotten a little stuck this week.  We're still working hard with them and are trying to figure out what it is exactly that they need.  Most of our investigators are at the point where they know it's all true, they just don't want to do anything about it.  So we've been working and trying to get them to make sacrifices and commit to things.  It was pretty cool this week because we were teaching a girl named Kassi.  She's hispanic, but she prefers English.  We taught the Restoration and when we talked about Joseph Smith and the First Vision, and she said that she had been so confused about religion and everything so one day she prayed, like he did, and the next day we came over, so she's taking that as an answer to her prayers.  Wow! What a miracle.  She has such a strong desire to do what's right and really wants this for her kids.  We have a baptismal date for her so hopefully she continues to progress.
Anyway, I'm running out of time so I'm going to close up but thank you so much for all the letters and love.
Love you!
-Hermana Jones



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