January 10, 2011

hey there-
so glad to hear from you!!! sounds like you are all doin so good and are burried in the snow, ah i miss the snow!!!! just melting here, the sun is SUPER strong!!! but you would be proud i am using my sunscreen everyday so no worries haha.

well another week eh!!!! mission accomplished.... on the mission.... my companion can officially ride a bike!!!! yehaw!!! we had our first adventure away from in front of the house yesterday and she is champ and we used them again this morning and she did great, only a few falls. we were going and i can ususally hear the sqeeking of her bike behind me and all of a sudden it just stopped so i looked back and somehow she had ridden straight into a huge meadow type thing with huge weeds.... hahahaha. have no idea how it happened. she looked at the bike as if it had controled itself into the weeds, just made me laugh. but ya she is a champ and we are going to get a ton more accomplished with the bikes again. we celebrated her year mark in the mission this week and i made her a banana cream pie... yummmmm, lasted for a day. oh and guess what! we still have stinkin fleas!!! he came and sprayed again on sat, but they say that some houses just have problems with fleas, so we will see, it was good for a week or so, he may just have to come and spray every couple of weeks.

well we found a ton of new people to teach last week and went to revisit all of them this week and unfortunately only we able to actually have appointments with a few. the people are really unpredictable. they say you can come back a certain day and time and then arent there. they arent much for schedules but its all good, always gotta have a ¨plan de respalda, ¨ just gets really frustrating. that is one thing about the culture that is really different. we are very much about schedules and here its like when they are free great, they will talk to you, but if not, even if they said they could initially, forget it, find them when they have time. but really its all good, its what i am here to do so i cant complain, talk to those who will receive us. this week we went back to teach one of our investigators for our third visit, his name is Mauro and he is 18. he was amazing, was progressing and understanding, and i mean really understanding what we were teaching, we were stoked. many people listen but dont understand, but he listened, understood and really got what we were teaching. in our last visit he talked about how he was going to reserve a time to set aside when everything was peaceful in his house and no one was around so he could really pray. so we went back to see how it all went and to have another lesson and got a bit of a slap in the face. he prayed, he felt the spirit, and was scared to go any further because he didnt want to change anything in his life, but knew he needed to. so he told us that it wasn´t his time to build a relationship with Christ, that in the future but for now he wasnt ready. we fought it and fought it, but really he had made up his mind and told us that he knows where the future will take him. man i have been sad about losing people before but this really crushed me. i felt like we really connected with him and the spirit was so strong in our lessons, he felt empty in the life he had and it was all changing but well, he made his choice. so anyway that was sad but on we go eh.

we met this awesome man named Diamantino yesterday, super old, but he was stellar. he had so many amazing questions and really listened and was thrilled to learn about the gospel, was just one of those people that was immediately nice. he lives with his wife some of his kids and grandkids so we hope that we can end up teaching them all, teaching families is the greatest, especially when can accept that they can live together forever. funny story with him we were setting an appointment and he was talking to my companion and i was getting my agenda out and thought i could sneak a piece of granola bar in my mouth but just then he looked and me and was like, ¨well are you going to share?¨ I thought he was joking but he held out his hand and so i offered him the rest of it in the opened wrapper and he was dead serious!!! he took my granola bar and ate it hahaha. random but great.

well i best be going, enjoy this weeks adventures, i love you to pieces, keep healthy and safe. Love you to the moon and back-Jess