week 14

Jan 4, 2016

First time sick since she left. I’m hoping she used all the herbs and oils and vitamins I sent with her! I’m sure she is pretty self-sufficient and can take care of illness herself, but I still would like to have more information about the whole thing and give her tips on how to get her immune system up to full speed again. Once a mom, always a mom! Blythe is doing well – loving and serving and teaching – and we are so happy for her!

Well, this has been an interesting week. We got to see Lori on New Years Eve and she seems to be doing a little better. She’s been having kind of a rough time, but we took her some Martinelli’s and talked to her for a minute. We had an early curfew that night, so we had a zone activity, and that was super fun. I’d had a headache and stuffiness Wed. and Thur. but was doing OK. Fri. morning we woke up and Sister Hollenbeck was super sick and was throwing up. I felt OK, just the headache, but by about 11 I felt pretty sick with the same thing she had. We couldn’t go out, and it was frustrating to have to stay in the apartment, but we were just too sick. We had two companionships of elders come over that night so they could give us blessings.

Two really cool things happened this week. We were walking around the apartment complex in our area and were on our way to see stop by to see Joanie. We passed this apartment where this lady was outside on the porch. We’d seen her a couple days before briefly and we just said “hi.” She instantly said “Come in, come in” and we went in and talked to her for quite a while. She is from Iran and came over for a few months to see her son, who lives over here and who we actually saw several nights ago. She doesn’t speak English great, but enough. She speaks Farsi. She has a daughter with some sort of disability. She told us all about the different parts of Iran and told us about the cultures (There are a lot! I had no idea about the diversity there!) and the different languages, and about her family. Then she talked about the Christian churches they have there, and she asked if we were from the church, pointing to our tags, and we said “yes.” And she said, “I want to go to church with you, not this week, but next week.” And we said, “We would love for you to come to church and we’d love to have you there.” and then we talked for a little longer. She should be coming next Sunday! I am super excited about her. It was just so cool. We didn’t ask to come in, we didn’t invite her to church, she just said she wanted to herself.

The other thing that happened was when we were tracting. We knocked on this one door, even though it had a sales lock on the outside (but there wasn’t a sign out front), and this little Hispanic lady answers the door. She said, “You are Mormons?” and we said “yes”, and she just said, “Ohhh! I am Jehovah’s Witness! You are my sisters! And she gave us big hugs and invited us in and gave us soda. We talked for quite a while. She spoke very little English, and my Spanish is pretty sad. Sister Hollenbeck speaks a little, and we could generally get what she was saying, but I could only catch bits and pieces. We told her there are sisters who spoke much better Spanish, so we’ll refer her to them, but it was just really awesome.

Something funny that I’ve been forgetting to say is that we got a sort of referral for Justin Bieber! Francsca told us that he’s been going to really popular restaurant/bar that is up in the canyon and that he’s been driving either a red or a yellow Ferrari. We about died after that.

Anyway, love you all!
Sister W.