muchas gracias a ma, pa, rachel, jmag, gee, sam, mark, and sis. patino for your news from home! sis. patino wins this week´s trivia challenge--a gomeria is where you buy tires for your car.
today is the first day of my second transfer! time on the mission is divided into transfers, or six-week periods. i´ll be with hna rojas, my trainer, for at least two transfers (at least until jan 8th). after that, we could stay together here in tribuno for one or more transfers, or one or both of us will be transfered to a different area.
we had a baptism on saturday--silvia. silvia reminds me a lot of my old roommate jamie. she´s been investigating for several months, had a baptismal date for december, then miraculously decided to move it up. fine with us! the service was very nice and was well attended by ward members. silvia later told us that she was feeling very alone because she is so close with her family, and although they are supportive, they are uninterested. but on sunday, she felt a lot of love and support from the ward and the influence of the holy ghost, and she felt at peace. lesson learned: be friends with new members--they need it!
this last sunday was the ward primary program. i think all ward primary programs are the same--a little entertaining, but rich in doctrine and the spirit as you listen to words of the songs and the kids´ developing testimonies. many songs brought me back to my days in the spanish branch primary, but it was gratifying to now be able to understand the words!
i tried to be festive for thanksgiving--wore fall colors and suggested that we sing one of the thanksgiving-ish hymns to start off our companionship study. but hna rojas didn´t know any of them. i didn´t realize they were so american? no lunch appointment, and i didn´t have time to buy anything traditional for lunch. so it was instant soup and bread and canned pears. it was fun to read about everyone else´s day.
to answer pa´s questions: we get up at 7 am, start our studies at 8:30--1 hour for personal, 1 hour for language and 2 hours for companionship. this is a lot of study time, but will be more condensed after my 12 weeks of training. then it will just be 1 hr personal, 30 min of language and 1 hr of comp. lunch usually is between 1:00-2:30 (or later, if they aren´t ready when we get there...grr.....) and then we work straight until 9:30. like i said, everything is pretty dead until evening (5 or 6ish). and people are generally up until way later than i´m used to. they all think that our wake-up time of 7 am is suuuuuuper early.
had one person show up at our english class this week...the first time we´ve had anyone attend. lots of the members of the ward ask about it, show an interest, say they will invite friends (which is why we have it in the first place...to find more people to teach), but no one comes. i´m not sure it´s worth our time. it´s a hour of valuable evening time that we´re spending just sitting in the ward building. dah. there´s a companionship of elders in the other ward that also meets in our building, and one is from utah (the other from peru), and the plan is that we´ll teach together. tessi, one of our less-actives (we´re teaching her granddaughter, dulce), was the one that showed up last week. we taught her how to pray in english and how to create sentences using "i am..." and "i have..." sheesh. it´s harder to learn english than spanish, i think.
this afternoon we had about 20 solid minutes of hail and wind and thunder. the hail was huge and came down hard and fast. our power went out too and we scurried around trying to get our windows closed in the dark. the power was restored shortly after, but sheesh, what an adventure. it was raining hard when we left our pension and we got soaked as we walked to the cyber to email, but there´s no rain now. the streets were pretty flooded. hna rojas had the idea that we should bring our flip flops and we ending up changing into them because there was so much water in the streets. it´s been hot this week otherwise. don´t really understand the weather here. it changes pretty drastically.
this week was hard because we had a lot of appointments fall through, and two families of progressing investigators now won´t talk to us and we don´t know why. dah. i know everyone has agency, but it´s frustrating to watch people use their agency in unproductive ways. but, we have hope--the whole time we´ve been here, we have been stopping by a part-member family--two teenaged kids were baptized several years ago and are now super innactive. we´ve been working with them to get them back to church and we knew that they had an older sister, veronica, (my age) that was taught by the missionaries before and was interested, but never baptized. she has a crazy work schedule and was never home when we stopped by. but her boyfriend (the dad of her suuuuuuper cute 1-year old) always is around, and will listen in to our lessons. and this week, veronica was in a freak motorcycle accident and broke her arm and now is home all the time and her boyfriend, matias, has lots of questions and appears very interested. stay tuned.
the church is true!!
hermana magnusson
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