Hello everyone! Happy Martin Luther King day!! I hope all of you are doing well and all of you are healthy with all of the beautiful snow Utah has been receiving. Thats one things that I’m jealous of, the snow. But not to worry, I’ll be back right in time. These past two weeks have been full of teaching and learning new things. I have learned a lot about the mission these past weeks. Teaching has been coming easier and easier (in Spanish). I got the opportunity to teach a family that was visiting from the states about the restoration of the church this past week in english. That was actually one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in the mission. But of course, after saying a poderoso (powerful) prayer, I was back in the hang of things. Teaching has always been one of my strengths (not to brag). But teaching about the gospel is a little bit out of the box for me. A missionary can think, “how do I teach this to a 14 year old boy who really only has an attention span more than 2 mins when watching soccer games”. What I’ve learned is making the lessons not really lessons at all, but more of conversations or activities with purposes. By practicing every single day, I’ve grown a lot in my Spanish and teaching skills.
We had transfers this past 4th. Don’t worry I’m still here in my beloved San Jeronimo with my sweet companion. Things have been progressing here a lot. We have almost been reaching all of our goals every week! Some of the goals we have are finding 6 new people to teach every week or having 5 investigators come to the church on Sunday. We’ve been doing pretty good so far. I’ve had 5 months just in San Jeronimo and 6 months in the mission. Time has moved by really fast. I feel like I have 6 months, but I feel like those months went by really fast. I think I said this before, but right now I’m one of the “experienced” ones, whatever that means. I still feel really new. My trainer is now reaching 10 months on the mission. I’m just trying to keep my eyes wide open walking forward because I know once I blink I’ll be in a different area. If I blink twice I’ll be back in Utah. I’m really, really putting my all in the mission. All faith and all my love. Its been amazing.
We had a baptism on the 3rd, It went very well. His name is Julian and we’ve been teaching him for many many months, and have extended many many baptism dates. And after changing the dates 8 times, we decided to give him some space so he can think a little more about what he wants. But turns out that all he wanted was his dad (who lives in the states) to see him baptized. That was really special to see a great big family celebrating his baptism. It made me think about when I got baptized (like 2 years ago :D), and the joy i felt now being clean and with all of my family by my side.
I have been working a little more on Facebook. Still getting used to social media in general, because before my mission it was something i had never really used. But thanks to that resource we have on the mission, we have started english classes!! YAYYY. After messaging every investigator, publicizing like crazy, and tagging every member, we received 20 promises from people that would come!! We were so so excited! When we got ready to have the class, we prepared all of our pencils, english books, lined the chairs up, and then waited. And waited a little more… and a little more…. a little more. In the end 3 kids (14, 8, and 5 year old) showed up. The lesson that I learned from that attempt was that I can trust kids a lot more than I can trust adults. But It went beautifully! I loved the class! We’ll be having another one this coming Friday and I hope more people show up. We’ll be trying some other tactics to get people comfortable and interested in coming.
Just a couple of days ago I had an intercambio (exchange). I went to visit Salama for 24 hours with Hermana Orantes (the other “Americana” here in the mission). It was probably one of the most biggest, eye opening, miracles I’ve had on the mission so far. We started our day doing our studies and a little planning and then we hit the road to do some service. We picked some weeds at a members house, and with many hands and helpful tools we got it all done within 1 hour. Afterwards we enjoyed baked chicken soup with rice and chili. It was so delicious. The members told us that because we were from the states they wanted to make us feel at home, so we had a picnic (I guess they’ve seen a lot of Americans have picnics on tv). After we went home and worked hard in our planner, calling people and reaching out to investigator who are new and some who are very very old as well. Then we went knocking. (My least favorite thing to do). But knowing our purpose, we did it anyways. We headed for an area maybe 20 mins from central Salama. We started looking and looking, leaving notes with scriptures on doorsteps. After walking and walking we noticed a mom with her daughter leaving their house, but didn’t feel like it was the right moment to approach them, so we kept walking. We ended up saying 2 prayers out of the 6 that we offered and then ended up leaving the area in a rush because of the amount of drunk males in the area. Right as we were leaving, we (both) felt a gush of disappointment. After all of our efforts, we felt like we didn’t really accomplish anything. We were dismayed and really just wanted to get the heck out of there. After sharing what we felt with each other, we saw the same mom and daughter standing right in front of their house. Both of us felt the impression to talk to them. We walked up and introduced ourselves and started up a conversation. She ended up telling us that they left the house but forgot their keys inside and couldn’t get in. She said that her brother had the keys and was on the way but she didn’t know when and it was starting to get dark. We decided that a prayer was a perfect opportunity in this situation. So Hermana Orantes with all of her faith, started her prayer and prayed that the brother would come home before it got dark. Right after she said that sentence, we heard a motorbike come, stop, and park. We heard keys jingling, and a click. She finished the prayer and we opened our eyes. We noticed that the brother had come right in the middle of the prayer and had opened the door for her. We noticed that she was crying and knew that because of the experiences we had in the area we got to ask for a miracle for her. She gave us the biggest hug ever, which made us feel like our mother was hugging us. That one prayer was a miracle for all of us in that moment.
Right now I’m in Cobán, and don’t have much time to finish everything I wanted to say. But I’ll put lots of videos in the blog. Thank you everyone for reading, you’re all in my prayers!! Love you all! Until next week!
Arianna (Hermana Possie)
Fotos:
- Hna. Orantes and I
- Hna. Andino and I
- On our way to Arinconadas
- Moroni and I
- Julian after his baptism
- My new hairdressers!
- My new friend Max.
- My banana bread
