week 3

Oct 19, 2015

Our girlie has now been in California for nearly three weeks and left our home almost five weeks ago. It is going by so fast. We mailed her a ukulele this week, have to say Amazon Prime is AMAZING. Click, click and two days later it is delivered to her. Her mission president served for a long time in Tonga and Hawaii and he has created a Polynesian feel to the mission. They have ukulele lessons on P-Day at the mission home and she was dying to participate. Now we need to put a package together with pictures from home, piles of drawings from Annesley, more of her facial lotion, and her nutritional supplements. She must be being diligent about taking them if she is already in need of replacements. We are SO happy for her and are enjoying being a missionary family. It is wonderful to hear our children praying for their sister with fervency, faith, and heart. It is wonderful to think of her throughout the day and imagine what she is doing. It is wonderful to think carefully about what we should say to her each week in our letters. Since she only has a few minutes to read our emails, we want to make sure we share the things that will help her the most.

I have really enjoyed this week, though it’s been a little hard. We were not able to make much progress with anyone and spent a great deal of time trying to get in contact with people with less success than we hoped. But this upcoming week should be better. We were able to make contact with our referral, though it took most of the week and were even able to set an appointment! We had an awesome visit with Eileen M. (who married the Muslim man, Max) and her mom, Bernice. They both are exceptional seamstresses and make amazing things. We asked them about it and they showed a ton of their things and got super excited. Eileen made her tribal wedding dress for the Muslim wedding and it is amazing! She showed us this gorgeous quilt Bernice made her. It is the most beautiful quilt I’ve ever seen with vibrant aqua blues and greens and every square has these beautiful embroidered flowers of various kinds. SOOOOO pretty!!!! Then we were able to slip in President Uchtdorf’s talk about our desire to create and make it a very natural part of the conversation and showed the video to go with it.

We were not able to teach Joanie again. Her son has a mental illness, as I think I mentioned, and his meds were switched and were not working. This week has been crazy for them trying to get that fixed, but we stopped by to see her on Friday and it happened to be her birthday. We couldn’t stay long, but we’re keeping in contact. Should happen this week.

On Saturday we went on exchange with the Sister Training Leaders and for the first time that week we had absolutely nothing to do. I was staying in our area so I was in charge of knowing where to go, what to do, etc. and we had contacted the LAs and none of our potentials could meet with us. We actually ended up getting quite a few contacts and were able to get in contact with Samantha B., an LA who is good friends with Liz S. (our referral)! Super exciting! We actually talked to her dad, a non-member, who was working on his rose bush. He was really abrupt, and not terribly sociable, which is interesting since his job is a salesmen. I’ve since been told he’s very outgoing at work, but as soon as he gets home he’s a hermit. The funny thing, though, he was wearing flip flops and his toenails were totally painted in stripes. As soon as we were gone we just died!!

We have a few possible potentials among the friends of the YW within the ward. (Tell me if I’ve told you about the Mausses yet.) One sounds like we might get a whole family. One of the other friend’s parents are staunch Catholic and don’t want her learning about the church. The mom said (not to us) that she sees how happy her daughter is when she’s learning about the church so she’s going to shut it down now, because she knows that if her daughter goes she’ll get baptized because she’s so happy there. It’s very unfortunate because the girl is quite miserable at home and school and loves the gospel.

Sister W.