Snowday!

Querida fambly,
Home sounds so lovely! I was warned repeated that I was going to get really homesick for the holidays, but so far, I’m very much fine. I miss you guys, and it sounds like you’re having a wonderful Christmas season, but so am I! I do wish I could see little baby Bella playing with the Christmas tree. You should probably send me some videos of Christmasness at home si quieran. I love that Laney used the line from Miss Congeniality, that is so her. The treats you’re making sound amazing! Yummy, yummy… Mexican dulces, are NOT that great, but luckily, they recognize that and usually will finish meals with more Americanized desert or fruit. Which is good. Because you can’t eat rice pudding or tamarindo for every meal, and not enough people know how to make flaun(sp?). I don’t think I spelled that right, but you know what I mean.
Poor daddy, I’ve been kind of sick too. I think it might be allergies, actually. I’ve never had them before, but apparently a lot of people develop them when they move here. I love your paragraph on Jensen, it so embodies her completely. Excellent writing. I’m glad she’s being cute and taking care of herself. Gina-ga-bobbin, you’re probably going to have to reteach me a ton of Kung Fu. I remember very little, it’s a problem.
I’m glad you liked my card mommy! I wanted to wish you a happy Birthday in time, so I hope it got there fast… I also meant to write you a happy birthday note before, but I forgot, because I’m silly. So… HAPPY BIRTHDAY! YAY!
Everything sounds lovely and homey… They keep us very occupied during the holidays, I think as a way to put off any homesickness that might arise, especially among the newbies. So, this week—today, actually, we’ve got an activity and a conference with ALL the sisters, which means we’re probably going to have to do some P-day stuff, like shopping, tomorrow. We’ve also got service tomorrow, interviews & probably planning on Wednesday, and then… guess what I get to do on Thursday?
TEMPLE DAY! What a great present for me. I am so excited that we get to go to the temple for my birthday… I had pretty much forgotten all about it. So, before, the exciting thing about Thursday was that we get to go to the temple. I just now, as I was writing this, remembered that it’s also when I turn 22. Crazy. I feel old. I also look, dress and talk like a tex-mex church-lady. Gosh. I sure grew up interesting.
Friday, we’ve got Navidad en El Barrio (Christmas in the Neighbourhood) Barrio is also the word we use for ward, but this isn’t actually a church thing. It’s a community service project that we get to take part in… Next week is more or less normal I think (Which is good, cause I’d like to teach a little this month) and then the week after that, we’ve got two pdays… regular and then mission p-day, and then temple as a mission, then another community service thing and then Christmas.
Crazy month.
They don’t want to give us any time to think about anything, I think. Which is probably really good.
Alright… well, news and stories. I’ll just do highlights: Last P-day, we went to go do our Laundry at Ashley’s place, and when we came over, she was sleeping on the couch and then she told us about her night/early Monday morning. She’d gotten a call from a co-worker at about 2 in the morning and he asked her to please come pick him up because he was drunk out of his mind and couldn’t drive home. She’s pretty sure he didn’t even mean to call her—probably thought he was talking to someone else—but she went to rescue him anyway, and after she’d loaded him in the passenger seat she was like, “Okay, where do you live?”
His response, before he passed out was, “I don’t know… Houston?”
So, she took him home, tucked him into her bed, read him a scripture, which he didn’t remember, and then slept on the couch until we showed up a few hours later.
Just… just imagine, waking up hung over to find yourself in a strange house where two missionaries are sitting cross legged in the living room studying “El Libro de Mormon” & “La Santa Biblia”. Maybe it’s mean, but I kinda wanted to mess with him and just speak Spanish for a while, for an added measure of surreality. I didn’t though, I was very polite and we introduced ourselves formally after he finally woke up a few hours later. We talked to him a lot about missionary work and the gospel while Ashley got herself ready for work. They left the house together after Ashley’s mom got home, and apparently talked about the gospel the whole way home. He admitted that he is looking for the truth, and that he thinks everything we were talking about was interesting and he would like to know more. He’s gringo though, so we can’t teach him… but I now his missionaries and they’re great, so I don’t mind giving him away to them.
We spent the rest of P-day waiting for our Laundry to get done and watching “The Book of Mormon Movie” which Ashley had on VHS.
Oh. My. Chispas. Y. Hijole.
HOW DID THAT GET FUNDING?! HOW DID A COUPLE OF HALF DECENT ACTORS PARTICIPATE IN THAT, I ASK YOU!? Who is… responsible? I must, have them brought before me forthwith.
Alright, so Kirby is always fun, and there was something weirdly appropriate about him as Sam, but mostly it was just WRONG. And Pilote (I don’t know the actor’s name, but he’s Pilote from El Cordero de Dios) is such a good guy, why was he involved?! Nephi’s a good looking man and all, but geez… the whole thing was just so… It was just wrong. I felt like I’d been battered and assaulted after it was over. I really lament the possibility that any non-member ever saw that.
Because, let’s be honest… It’s kind of fun to go all MST3000 and watch bad church movies with active members, but people can NOT think that, THAT is what the Book of Mormon is like. Nephi was so whiney. Huge. But he acted like a little girl, and his nasty brothers were so unbelievable… And acting was bad. The writing was AWFUL. The sets—well, it was Utah, so it wasn’t bad except for being recognizable. Artistically, I just had a huge problem with it. I would have done everything differently. Every single shot, from the beginning to the end. Different angle, different actors, different costumes, different… all of it. The daughter of Ishmael… hijole, let’s just not get into the romance. Let’s not. That was uncomfortable.
Aside from all that, I liked it.
Actually, it did help me appreciate the awesomeness that is the book of Mormon in comparison to the horridness of the movie in which they tried so hard to depict some of it. Which, is good, because it got me all geared up for Zone Conference last week, which was all about The Book of Mormon, and how great it is.
I’ve NEVER read the book of Mormon like this before. Before my mission, I loved it, and I loved reading my scriptures, but now, I just eat it up. I’m actually depressed sometimes when I have to spot reading. I’m almost to the war chapters in Alma. And I can’t believe how enthralling the story is. I’ve always understood it, I think, but sometimes the strange words were awkward, distracting, but I’m so used to it now that it just doesn’t bother me. I’m so into it. Jensen. One day, when we are both insanely wealthy and eccentric geniuses, we shall have another go at cinematic depiction of some of these stories. It shall be awesome. Work on sketches and story-board. NOW!
So yeah, Zone Meeting was amazing. It was all about using the Book of Mormon more in our teaching.
We have a new baptismal date… Lauren is a cute little girl who we just met last week. She’s got friends in the ward, but she doesn’t speak Spanish. She wants to go to the Spanish ward anyway though, because her mother does speak Spanish and her mother will probably start coming to the Spanish ward. It’s not a problem in the young women classes, since there’s minimal Spanish among the younger people, but in Sacrament meeting, she needed me to translate. It was intense. I just had to lean over with my mouth by her ear, tune into whatever was being said at the pulpit and go into this kind of trance, just filtering the Spanish in through one ear and letting it come out in English. It was very cool, but I’m not sure how well I did. I didn’t really have time to think about it, I just had to talk. No time for correction/etc.
There were a couple of moments when I’d miss a word because they’d talk quietly, or someone would cough or a young child would start screaming and I’d usually get totally derailed and just have to try and pick up the strain again… I’m pretty sure there were a couple of moments like this, “I know that Jesus Christ is my Savoir and that he died for my sins, and I know that God—BABY screaming, that was a baby screaming, sorry, what’s she saying?! Oh, yeah—we are all God’s children and the Gospel is…” and I’d just say the interruptions like a talking subtitler or something. Hilarious. Lauren seemed to find it pretty amusing too.
She’s so great. Her parents want us to teach her because she’s supposedly a ‘problem child’. She’s twelve though, and adorable and very nice. I think she’s just been through a lot. She’s moved all over the place. When I first met her, I remembered this line from Jane Eyre, when Mr. Rochester says something about Jane being like a little bird that is afraid to move too suddenly for fear of being struck, or something like that. That’s Lauren. She’s very still.
We’re working with her mom too. She thinks that she’s already been baptized. We’ve yet to explain that without the Priesthood… No vale. Next lesson: Authority/The Book of Mormon is so great.
It snowed on Friday! I’ve got pictures of me being dorky in the snow. And some video of how Texas looks like Utah sometimes. It’ll be part of my Merry Chirstmas stuff that I send to people.
Well, I’d better say goodbye, we’ve got to get going so we can make it down to the mission home for the activity. I corazon all of you.
Missing you, and giving lots of cyberoisty hugs! Paz & Amor a vosotros.
Hermana Lillywhite