9-23-2013 It's Officially Autumn!

Hello!

 

Thank you soooo much for the package!  Everything arrived safely, and I'm excited to try the apple butter!  (I figured i should wait until we go to the store today to try it, because I don't think that apple butter would go well with the tortillas I have...haha so I'll grab some stuff today to try it on!)  And the photos arrived on the same day, it was better than Christmas! :) haha they're fun photos to have, thanks for sending them!

 

This week was a little crazy.  Remember how Hermana Hansen is going to be opening up an area in Gainesville? Wellllll, we usually have transfers Wednesday morning at 9 at the Hurst Stake Center (where we meet every sunday), and we got a call at like 7:20 that morning from our Zone Leaders, who had just talked with the Assitants to the President and they said, "well, Sister hansen's apartment in Gainesville isn't ready yet.  She's living with members on their property in a side house and they're still working on the carpet and cabinets and appliances, so she's not shipping out till Friday" so that was crazy.  Then they called us Thursday morning during our weekly planning session and said "actually, Sister Hansen, we don't know when you're leaving."  SO she's kind of in transfer-limbo right now, which is hard because she doesn't know if she should unpack or just live out of her suitcase or what so that's been a little hectic.  But a fun adventure! 

I learned some Spanglish during Relief Society this week.  Every Spanish verb un-conjugated ends in -ar, -er, or -ir.  (for example, caminar=to walk.  venir=to arrive) so this Hermana was talking about "textear, facebookear, and chatear" that was pretty dope slash super funny. 

 

This same hermana, however also said something really profound: "si hacemos 5 minutos cada dia para lear de las escrituras, este nos traera un eternidad de gozo" which basically means, if we take 5 minutes every day to read the scriptures, this will bring us an eternity of joy.  So true.  And I read in Alma 37: 35 this morning and I'm so thankful for you, Mom and Dad, to have been such a great example to me of having habits to read and pray every day and make time for the gospel in your lives.  You have taught me wisdom in my youth. :)

 

This week we talked with B y A, who are our investigators de oro!  B is always super firm in her faith and belief, she's consistenly reading the Book of Mormon and just all around angelic.  A is hilarious and loves B soooo stinking much it's adorable, but he's a bit of a flojo when it comes to keeping committments like reading and praying.  So B will probably get baptized this Saturday (we have faith!  She wants really bad to get baptized with Alberto, but we're pretty sure he's gonna need a little more time than she'll want to wait...)   And we'll keep talking with A about not praying to his saints....:)

 

The weather here hasn't been too bad.  low 90's is a usual, it rained the other day and that cooled things down.  But the traffic is HORRENDOUS.  Super feo.  Everything is under construction so we never even take the freeway anywhere anymore.  But we survive and we're (mostly) on time to our appointments!

 

here are some pictures of the party!  We had a blast, and it was way fun!  The last picture is of me and mycompanions being goofballs in our matching shirts... :) 

I'm glad to hear that nat's tearing it up on the football field!  and that Mom got to sit next to Ms. Wang at the game. And I'm glad Garrett's homecoming was good!  But not so glad to hear about UT winning...silly utes. We need a cougar win!  next year will be the year, I'm sure...

 

I love being a missionary!!!!  Thanks for the love and support. :)

 

Love,

Hermana Sangre

 

(p.s. B offered the closing prayer at our lesson and she prayed for each of us by name, and she called me Hermana Sangre.  That may or may not have been the coolest thing ever.)

9-16-2013 Sometimes We Prefer to Speak Spanglish!

HELLO!

 

Ok. fun fact: yes, dad, transfers are this week.  Zone Leaders found out last saturday the changes, and they couldn't tell anyone until this morning, and all changes will be made on Wednesday.  So we got our call at 7:20 this morning, and we were basically expecting to stay the same because I still have one more transfer (6 more weeks) of training left to be done.  But alas, the Lord has another plan.  Sister Hansen, my most senior companion trainer is being transfered all the way out to Gainesville to open up a Spanish Area!  We are gonna miss her so much but we're also so stinking excited for her!  She's a little nervous but she's always wanted to serve in an are outside of the "Metroplex" so she's stoked!  So as of Wednesday it will just be me and Sister Gomez as the Spanish Sisters in the Hurst 3rd Barrio.  Loco!

 

Andele pues, this week was absolutely awesome.  Tuesday we had our monthly Zone training and our Zone Leaders Elder Bruggeman (the Hispanos call him Elder B or Elder Boogeyman) and Elder Atak told us what the huge emphasis was in their last meeting with President and we've basically been asked to not go tracting anymore.  (!!!!!!) Instead of knocking doors, we'll be working with the ward and visiting Less Active members, Part Member families, and people we just don't know that are on the ward list.  Of course, we're still going to talk to people we see on the street, but we can no longer just fall back on the plan to knock a few doors in every area we're in.  The work is truly hastening.

 

AND Elder Anderson from the 12 came! It was so exciting!  There were probably 500+ missionaries there (Fort Worth and Dallas Missions) and we all got to shake his hand.  He seriously is a prophet of God.  He instructed us on many things, including the commandment (basically) for us to get to know the Bible better, he said, "Be familiar with the New Testament--especially here." Which is perfect because in my studies lately I've been reading a chapter in the Book of Mormon and then a chapter in the New Testament.  He also emphasized the fact that we should never compare ourselves to other people, "You just keep working with yourself and don't compare yourself to others, focus on yourself and helping others."

 

Other quotes from is address to us:

"Don't ever underestimate the power of your testimony.  If you don't know what to speak about, speak about Christ.  If you've already done that, speak about Joseph Smith, and do it with a smile."

"We want you to become great missionaries, yes, but more importantly than that, we want you to become great disciples of Jesus Christ."

"The sting of death, sin, and not being what we should be are swallowed up in Christ."

He is an prophet of God.

 

And we had our Fiesta friday!  It was SOOOO  FUN!  and the food was so ridiculously delicious.  I love hispanic food.  All the kids danced with their little traditional mexican dresses and we drank horchata and agua de jamaica and had tamales and rice and beans and pandulce and i just about died.  We decided to wear our matching blue shirts and we looked pretty darn adorable, if I might say so myself. :)  I love this barrio so much!  They are so fun and cool. 

 

It's only like 97 usually, so kind of cooling down, but it should be some thunder storms this week, we're excited :)

 

It sounds like y'all had a lovely week this week!  I'm glad Carrie and Lyss could go to an exciting game to see Nat be a stud quarterback like always!  (I send my love to them as well!)  I don't know Sister Ram, but Hermana Hansen does!  Hopefully I'll get to serve with her! :)  I'm glad to hear that Karenna is going to Caleb's concerts haha tell her hi for me!  And say hi to garrett Jones for me! Hopfully he'll get to adjust quickly, or he'll just hang out with the Elders, like Mario in our barrio does (Mario just got back from his mission, but you'd think he was still an Elder since he goes out with our Zone Leaders like every day!)  Keep running, Dad and Jake!  I'm sure y'all will be prepared as ever for that marathon.  SooOOOOO much respect.  Say hello to Michelle and Josh for me, I'm so excited for them! 

 

Thanks for sending me the t-shirt sizes!  And I'll be looking for those pictures, thanks so much for sending them!

 

I love being a missionary.

:)

Love,

Hermana Kate

9-9-2013: Que pasa calabaza!

Que pasa calabaza!

 

This week was awesome, as usual.  Nice and hot, staying around 99 to 102 on the daily, so that's always nice.  I would try to sympathize with the "Heat Wave" in Foster City buuuuut low 90's is heavenly over here...hahaha :)

 

I've told y'all about A, right? He's the 5 year old that is basically the coolest kid ever and we have dinner with his family basically every Thursday.  (cada jueves es el dia de Adrian!)  And Hermana makes the most delicious y picosa comida ever.  It's not TERRIBLY pica (spicy) but it's more than I'm used to, and it's soooooo good!  Isn't there a saying that spicy food makes your spanish better? I'd say it's pretty dang true.  Like a few weeks ago, we had hamburgers, but Mexican style because there were jalapenos in the patty and we put homemade salsa with the ketchup.  Pretty legit.

 

We also have been helping Hermana V for the past week a little bit, she's in the relief society presidency and we're having a ward party this friday (i've heard Spanish Barrios have the craaaaaziest fiestas! I'm sooooo excited) and so we were helping her make papel picado for some decorations as service, and we loooove this Hermana because she's this cool Grandma and just makes us all this gourmet food and delicious strawberry lemonade and basically just pampers us and pretends to talk gringa spanish.  She's a funny lady.  AND she gives us referrals like every time we go over there so that's pretty awesome.

 

So fun fact, there are 100million different churches here.  We drive past like 20 during our 5 minute drive to church.  SO you know how some churches have those little billboard/signs where they have a scripture and the name of the church or whatever they want, right? So we saw a sign that said the following, "After School Child Care" with the quotation marks and everything.  Note for the future anyone who's making signs for anything: NEVER put quotation marks around anything if you want it to sound legit.  We think it's so funny, but then again we're missionaries and we're weird like that...asi es.

 

Also, my studies brought me across a beloved scripture that I'm sure is Dad's favorite: Alma 19 verse 5.  :)

This week we met this really cute couple named O and M and they're so cool! It turns out they have family in Mexico that are LDS and we taught them the first lesson and they're like "yeah, this all makes sense!" and so we set a baptismal date for October 21st!  They basically have the cutest family ever and so we're really excited to keep visiting with them.  It's actually a bit of a miracle that we found them, we were looking through an old list of potential people to visit, and we saw this lady that used to live in their house, knocked on their door, and even though it was a different family than we expected, we found this super golden family to teach!

 

AND 3 of our favorite less active families came to church yesterday!  We were soooo happy :)

 

That Applesauce y'all made sounds delicious!  I want to learn how to do stuff like that some day, that sounds fun!  And way to go Aragon on the game with Jefferson, it sounds like a good start to the season, and that will be fun that Aunt Lys and Aunt Carrie will be able to see Nat play this week.  And good thing BYU finally won a game, especially against Texas!  (don't worry, I haven't been converted to any of this longhorn business.  Hispanics only watch futbol, not football.)  And that's so fun that Jody and Melia were in town por un ratito!  I'm glad they're all doing well :)

Send my love to everyone!

 

I love being a missionary, thanks for all your love and support!

 

Love,

Hermana Sangre

PS:  Here's a couple of pics w/Elder Hardy--thanks to his companions for the photo bombs.  ;)

 

 

9-4-2013: Stinking Holidays! ;)

Hello Family!

Sorry, the library was closed yesterday so we couldn't email until today.  Stinking holidays! :)

Ok. Where do I start?? This week was crazy!  Elder Pandulce/Van Dusen left this week so our 10 missionary ward is now a 9 missionary ward.  We also found out that Elder Neil L. Anderson from the quorum of the 12 is going to visit our mission and he's holding the meeting in the Colleyville Stake Center, which is just like 20 minutes away from us!  (We're thinking that if we wear our matching shirts again we can get a picture with Elder Anderson.... :)  AND it's our entire mission PLUS the Dallas mission that's invited! That's going to be like 500+ missionaries all in one spot.  Besides the MTC, that's basically not heard of, so we're pretty stoked.

This week we met this really cool lady named N.  She's a refferral from Church Headquarters, so we didn't really know what to expect when we knocked on her door.  But when she first started talking, we weren't sure if she was already a member or not, but then she invited us inside and we talked with her more and decided that she's just really cool.  Slash we shared Moroni 10:4-5 with her and she looooves talking about the Holy Spirit, and she said that sometimes she has some friends over and they love the Holy Spirit so much that they start speaking in tongues...We set up a return appointment with her to more fully explain the Restoration of the Gospel, and she then advised us to come fasting and praying so that we can have a "speaking in tongues" experience....We're excited to see her tonight, but we hope she doesn't go completely insane while we're there.

We're also teaching such a cool couple (they're actually married, which is like impossible to find around here apparently!) and they fed us last night when we were over there teaching them some of the Commandments, and it was basically vegetable soup with an entire fish in it.  Not bits of fish, an entire fish--Scales and bones and everything.  Not gonna lie, it looked pretty nasty.  BUT, I ate it!  I thought you'd be proud of me.  It might take me a few days/weeks to recover emotionally and mentally, but I feel like a champion now. And that was the first meal that I ate where I really felt like I had to force it down, everything else here is delcious!  People tend to just make rice cooked in some sort of oil, some type of meat (usually chicken) and then refried beans (usually pinto, but refried black beans are the bomb!).  Then they just set out a bunch of corn tortillas on the table and you can like spoon everything into a tortilla to have 100 mini tacos and it's basically heaven.  We haven't had the chance to do a lot of cooking or learning how to make anything yet, but we might ask Hermano B (one of the really cool less actives that love us and is an amaaaazing cook from Puerto Rico) to teach us how to cook and teach us spanish at the same time for language study or something soon :)

We were able to stop by S's and she's just crazy busy, but still so awesome and excited for the gospel!  We're still teaching her, it will just take some time.

Have I mentioned that it's flipping hot here? We were tracting in 109* weather the other day.  I felt like a boss. (we didn't stay out longer than 10 minutes at a time before we got back into our car, so don't worry, no heat strokes or anything)

We also had a New Missionary/Trainers follow up meeting last friday and I got to see all the missionaries that came out to the field at the same time as me--including Elder Hardy!  I have a picture with him that i'll forward later.  It's supes presh.

I hope Brother Mc"Man vs. Wild"s road kill recipe won the Labor Day cook off, that sounds very much like our Texans would loooooove that.  And Mom's canned peaches, those two things sound like the perfect Texas lunch!  We didn't do anything special for Labor Day, it was just a regular p-day, but our Spanish ward is having our first big party next week so I'm pretty darn stoked for that! 

Glad to hear everyone's doing well, and I love that picture of Dad's garden, nice job!

I love you all so much!

Love,

Hermana Blood

8-26-2013: In the Hurst Zone, your last name must sound Hispanic.

Hello Family!

Mom--thank you sooooooooooo much for the package! I got it and everything is perfection.  I'm stoked to wear my BYU shirt to the P-day activity at the church (basketball and writing letters basically)  and I even already wore one of my skirts!

This week has basically flown by like you would not believe!  Because in my first few weeks we had a gazillion meetings, we didn't have District Meeting until this past week and I have come to the realization that my District is pretty dope.  Pretty much everyone in our District has a Hispanic sounding name--Me, Hermana SANGRE, then our District Leader is Elder MADERA (wood), There's Elder Pandulce (Pandulce is like a mexican sweet bread dessert thingy, but his real name is Van Dusen), Elder Atake (Like, Attack? Except for he actually spells it Atak...) and of course hma Gomez is really hispanic.  There's also an Elder whose last name is Brueggeman, but Hispanos don't know how to pronounce that so they just call him Elder B.

But I have a pretty fun story about our slightly awkward but super hilarious District Leader.  So he I guess served in Fort Worth a few transfers ago, but then the Elders got white-washed (when 2 brand new missionaries come into an area) out by Sister Gomez (my companion!) and her trainer.  So H. Gomez was in the apartment that once was inhabited by Elder Wood/Madera, and while she was looking through her desk one day, she found this giant picture of Elder Wood's face (I guess his brother got married so they printed out a picture of his face for the wedding and sent it to him on his mission or something like that).  She of course had never met him before, so she just thought it was weird and ignored it.  2 transfers later, she found out she would train (that's me!) and so she goes to a new trainers meeting where Elder Wood is also at.  She kept thinking to herself, "Man, that Elder looks really familiar.  How do I know him??" Then she got back to her apartment and while packing she realized that he was familiar because she had found that picture of his face at the bottom of her desk drawer!  So she brought it with her to Hurst, here, so that she could give it to him, and of course she told me and Hermana Hansen about it and we busted up laughing the first day.  SO we had a Zone training meeting thing and she brought the picture, and just left it on her desk, waiting for Elder Madera/Wood to come and shake our hands.  I don't think the color of red that his face turned is even on the rainbow....It was soooo funny!  So now if we think someone looks familiar, we wonder if we secretly have a giant picture of their face in our apartment...

S is doing ok, we haven't had a chance to talk with her lately because she's been pretty busy, but I know she's ready for baptism.  The problem is that Satan also knows that and is working pretty hard on her and her inactive husband, but we're being patient and doing all we can to be there for her.  We're waiting for once her kids are in school so that we can drop by and see if we can have another lesson with her and her husband at the B's house.  (BTW, The B family is the coolest family on the history of the planet and their testimony and faith is beyond incredible.)  They were the family we visited on my first day, and when Hermano asked me how my spanish was, I said "I can learn better than I can speak" instead of "I can understand better than I can speak"....whoops!  But they are so loving and just awesome.  And I feel like Hermano was a gourmet chef or something in another life because their food is amazing! 

I love the Hispanos in our ward.  They are basically the best. Sometimes we have to play piano in primary for a second because nobody knows how to play piano here, so we get to hang out with our favorite kid, A L, for a second.  He literally answers every single question and sings "A Child's Prayer" at the top of his lungs.  He's the coolest 5-year old in the history of ever and I just want to be his best friend.   And I still love my trio!  We seriously feel like we've known each other forever and we also have really great teaching unity.  I don't know what I'm going to do if I'm ever in a normal companionship, I only have ever known trios!

Spanish Slang for today: "Andele pues" which means, "oh, it's all good" or "anyways" sort of...I think that's what it means at least....haha I love asking what everything means!

[more family specific stuff...]

The work is progressing here in the Hurst 3rd ward and we love how down with missionary work this ward is, they give us referrals and ask to go on exchanges with us and they are just rockstars!  I'm loving it here and I hear it starts "cooling down" to the mid-80's within the next few weeks, so I'm going to have to break out my down comforter and wool tights or something... :) Chistes chistes...

Thanks for all the love and support!  I can really feel your love and prayers out here in the field.

Love,

Hermana Sangre