Yes, I'm Still Alive!

Dear Family and Friends,

So much has happened since I last sent a blog message to my mother! We had our Thanksgiving Party, that was super fun. It was a pretty random group of people who showed up. Investigators and Less actives came, recent converts and of course members who don't have much family living close by. It was the strangest food I've had for a Thanksgiving dinner. Of course these was turkey, potatoes, yams, rolls, ham and pie, but I'll bet none of you have ever had rice, beans or tortillas at your Thanksgiving party. It was fun to see everyone interacting with each other and after we had all eaten we played a game of musical chairs. Whenever someone got out they had to say what they were grateful for. People started aplauding after each person, it was so cute!

Missionary work has been pretty good. We started teaching the daughter of a less active wo has MS. We helped her bathe and I braided her hair. She's 32 but she can't do anything for herself. We want to keep seeing her and helping her but her mom makes excuses to not let us in. For this transfere we need lots of miracles. We're teaching lots of really cool couples who have children but aren't married so we're going to need to have lots of weddings. Esmerelda is like the mose amazing member missionary who ever was! She helps us out so much when we need a woman to come with us to a single mans house. She came with us to Ana and Aldo's lesson and became their best friend and even started planning their wedding! We've also started teaching a less active man named Jesus, he hadn't been to church for about 8 months so we stopped by on Saturday and invited him to church and the next day he was there with his (nonmember) wife.........turns out all he needed was an invitation. So we've started teacher her too! (Marta) She's awesome, in a week she has already read the first 7 chapters in the Book of Mormon.

Hermana Murphy went home so I have a new companion now.....well kind of. I'm still in Des Moines with Hermana Hancock and my trainer (Hermana McGuire) is here now. So I'm still in a trio.

It finally snowed yesterday so I got to break out my boots, even though the snow is annoying I'm kinda glad it's here now. I mean c'mon, it would't be winter/Christmas without snow. Yesterday the weather got to single digits and soon it will be below 0. They cancelled our ward yesterday but we were able to go to a later ward and it was in English....weird!

Oh, and I tried shrimp for the first time. I's good! It was a really strange visit, our first lesson with a referral from the English Elders named Fransisco (who reminds me EXACTLY) of Kendall (Empey) the laugh and facial features and everything. you should tell him that if you ever see him. Once again Esmerelda helped us with the appointment, we had to teach him in his bedroom, which had knives laying around everywhere. (It really scared Hermana Hancock) We ate shrimp and this tasty fruit that lokks like a tomato. But we're not going to teach him again because he likes to worship his Saints and doesn't want to change. That's a problem we run into a lot with the Spanish people, they're mostly all Catholic and like to worship the Saints and don't understand why it's not okay.

til next time,

Hermana Hepworth