What a Week!

~Hermana Frieszell and I divided our stories in half this week, so you’re getting part of her letter too!
~Hermana Frieszell says:
So great news. Aurora agreed to be baptized! Aurora is a sweet, shy young mother with a 2 year old boy and a new born baby girl. We have been teaching her for sometime. Well we were teaching her and then we thought she dropped us but it turns out that she was just having her baby. So we went back and she still wanted to learn. We have been teaching her for a few weeks now and on Thursday we went and taught her and asked her if she would be baptized. She was a little hesitant as she didn’t know if she would be ready by the 16th but we had her pray right there and she said she felt a good, thumping of her heart. She is so great. We still weren’t able to get her to church but as soon as she goes 3 times she will be baptized.
So we had an amazing week. We taught 22 lessons without even trying and got 10 new investigators and 4 people at church, and 3 baptismal dates.



We are still struggling with getting people to go to church. It seems to be the biggest challenge. However, yesterday we had a pleasant surprise when a family, Cecilia and Juan we are teaching showed up at church. They didn’t seem very likely to come but the member that came with us was very good at talking them into it and they showed up. They have 4 kids and one on the way. The little girl that is 9 is so cute. She was so excited to be there. She had her book of Mormon and it was all used and was so excited to show us that she had it. They also brought their 11 year old cousin and she didn’t understand Spanish very well and wasn’t a very good influence and so they were all like “it was boring.” But that’s just because they had gone to the church of the woodlands and they play video games and have piano lessons there. So lame! That’s not church. But we were so excited to get them to church finally.

With transfer, on Tuesday we got to be a 3-some for a day. Sister Christenson, an English sister who’s companion was going home so she had no companion for that day so she hung out with us. It was fun to be a 3-some. Kind of like a party.

~End of Hermana Frieszell’s thoughts for this letter!
~ME! From here down is Ailsa again!
We've got one lady we're teaching now, Maria Erica, I might have already talked about her a little, she was a referral from one of the members in the English speaking ward, she cleans the building where he works and she had been really impressed by him speaking such good Spanish when he is clearly and very white-bread blue-eyed Texan. Anyway, she had a copy of the book of Mormon in English and we came by to give her one in Spanish and started teaching her. She's SO cute. We can't get her to come to church though (that's always the hardest thing to pull off it seems) she had a wedding this Sunday. She's so sweet though. She doesn't have a very firm base for religious knowledge we think, as she was very surprised when we told her that we were supposed to go to church on Sunday, she seemed to think it was just optional "Extra-credit" or whatever. She asks a lot of questions though, which is good, but it's not like contentious, it's more like genuine curiosity and then once we've explained it so she can understand she doesn't argue the way some people do, she just kind of nods and says "okay."

It might be a bit of journey with her though. She says that God has never answered any of her prayers. We're going to have to talk about that.

We've got two kids we're working with, Daniel and Jennifer Varrera. There's also Orfelda, their mother. She's sais she wants us to teach and baptize her children, and we think she wants to get baptized too. She didn't outright say so, but she says she wants to hear all the lessons too. We think she'd be way into the idea of joining the church except that she's got NO religious background at all. We mentioned a couple of stories from the Bible and she hadn't heard of any of them (Moses/Noah/Joseph/Jesushad12apostlesreally?) but if we could just help her get over her fears about organized 'church' and get her to sacrament meeting she'd LOVE it. Her next/door neighbor and friend Alma Martinez is a less active who I've mentioned before, but she's not been much help getting her friend to church as she rarely goes herself. Still, we're hoping to help them out and get them at church and baptized before the end of this transfer.
Yes, I know Laney-boo is still a rat, she sounds like she’s getting more and more drama-queen-esque as she gets older. Yes, I suppose absence does make the heart grow fonder. She’s so adorably primadona. Tell her she is a GREAT artist, and that she’s only going to get better as she keeps practicing and develops patience. (I can imagine her rolling her eyes here and saying “Yeah, whatever.” Like the fourteen-year-old she thinks she is).
I’m glad my cute little car is better! And tell Jensen that there’s already a picture of Elder Hackett in the batch I sent you. There’s the silly one of the three Elders posing, the short one with the blonde hair is Elder Herrman, the one in the middle with his jacket off is Elder Homer, and the dark-haired one being silly on the end is Elder Hackett. But I DO love that line about the barber. I will use it. Later. Elder Hackett was transferred on Wednesday though, so I probably won’t see him for a while. He was very excited to go back to “Exile” as he calls it. See, here in my zone, we’re right in the middle of everything. We hang out with the Assistants to the President and go down to the office every other day. The President’s house and the Temple are both close by. We’re right in the middle of EVERYTHING, so we see the other missionaries a lot. But there are some missionaries who get sent out to lonelier parts of the mission. Were, it’s pretty much just you and some other mu-cha-cha wandering around the desert looking for people to teach. Elder Hackett likes this set-up a bit more. Still he’s fairly new out here (He’ll probably go home shortly before I do) so I’ll probably see him again sometime.
Pulga is “fun”. I suggested palm reading and card tricks and the other missionaries quoted that “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” scripture at me.
I heard that Lawyer’s in Love song in the store this morning and thought of Daddy. Our leaders are getting “slightly” better. (Worse if you ask Hermana Frieszell). But I really miss my own leaders sometimes. I feel like we’ve got a really good ward/stake. People listen. It’s not just that they’re speaking another language, at least not any more, because I basically am Bi-lingual at this point, I’m just “shy” in Spanish more so than English. (And my spelling and grammatical skills in both languages seem to be getting worse as my communication/understanding skills get better.) They’re just… I don’t know. I can tell they’re trying and they DO care and maybe that’s all that’s important. They just don’t trust us very much. They should have been really excited about us getting a Baptismal date this week and all, but instead he just demanded to know if we’d thought to ask if she and her husband are legally married. I wanted to say “Duh.”. That’s one of the biggest problems that we have here, yes, we’re not stupid, we make sure about papers and all of that before we extend the invitation to be baptized. We didn’t say that though, we just nodded and said “Si, por la ley.” Meaning they’re legally married, and then he continued to chew us out for a few minutes about how we have to make sure every time that they’re married. Sometimes they just treat us like we’ve got no idea what we’re doing.
Anyway, I miss daddy-Bishop-sir and his unparallel leadership abilities.
Well, once more… some stories are better told in person. I really want to talk about this one, but I just don’t feel comfortable with it yet. Let’s just say I have to eat my flippant words about demonic possession among the people I’m serving. I didn’t think this was going to be a regular thing out here. In fact it never even crossed my mind that I might see and hear things like this with my own eyes… Anyway, I don’t have much time. Maybe I’ll wait until I can talk about it on the phone with you VERY soon!
Happy Mother’s day soon!!!
Alright, now, my hand-written letter this week is going to be really short. More like a PS, but I wanted to send you something cool. At least, I think it’s cool. It’s my correlation sheet from this last week and it is AWESOME. Me and Hermana Frieszell tried REALLY hard this week to make our goal of getting 20 lessons this week. We ended up with 22. Next week we’re going for 25. As a result, the rest of our numbers went up too. So, I just wanted you to see a brief outline of some of the main people we’re working with right now.
I LOVE you!
Hermana Lillywhite