Oh The Rains Came Down and the Floods Came Up!

 Our Kitchen

 The Laundry Room

 Our Washing Machine

 Welcome to Where I Live!

 View from the Laundry Room

 Our Front Room

 My Desk

 My letter box. Whoever would like to be featured in this beautiful creation only needs to write a heart-felt handwritten letter! What could be more wonderful! But hurry, this limited time opportunity only lasts for the next 14 ish months, or until the box fills. Look to the righthand bar of the blog for addressing information. :)

Me cooking! Haha, I actually am learning to cook lots of stuff. I made a Dominican lentils and rice dish! I was in charge and bought  all the stuff and made it! So proud. And American stuff too. I can be a mom now!

Dominican Serious Faces.  They literally all do this all the time.  It's so funny!

 Our Drying Umbrellas (mine is the striped one)

Me, Perla (age 13, recently baptized), and Hermana Safeer

Oh, the rains came down and the floods came up. . .For six hours. Straight. I didn´t know it could do that. And we're talking the leak-through-a-sturdy-umbrella, soak through-all-your-layers-no-matter-what-you-do kind of rain. Not soft kind. What do you do when that happens?Well, we spent part of it contacting, but couldn´t anymore, so we sat in the lobby of a very nice apartment building. We down-graded to a colmado (shop) for the next two hours because we thought it had let up enough to move. Bad choice. But my personal tradition is that when you get rained into a colmado, there´s only one thing to do. Buy a mas-mas while you wait. So we tried to stave off boredom there for awhile. After deciding that we had to do something, pouring rain or not, we trudged off to a member´s house to pick her up for a lesson. She took one look at us, told us we were crazy, there was no way we could go teach a lesson in weather like this and that we needed to go home. (Everyone just kind of bunkers down when it rains. No one leaves the house, and often they nap) Apparently we need a rain etiquette class. At what point of wet is it rude to try to enter someone´s house? So that was our fairly unproductive day.

Yesterday we spent almost an hour and a half trying to find a member´s house. We finally found it, and had a nice little visit with her and her less-active husband. Then realized that we were late for coordination meeting and were about a twenty minute--at least--walk away from the church. But don´t worry, we found out that in skirts, plastic shoes, full backpacks and carrying Books of Mormon, sloshing through puddles up to our shins, it´s only a thirteen minute run. Good to know.

I just barely had a great chat with a man as I was emailing in this internet place just now. He asked what we were doing and why we were here. Haha, let me tell you...

I got to talk to Stephanie yesterday. Ever since she told us that coffee wasn´t bad for you, we´ve had a hard time getting her there for a lesson. Julie got hurt and had to go to the doctor, and she´s been busy, I guess. It´s been hard for me. She´s gone a little backwards. For a while, I saw a little bit of happiness in her. I love watching her face light up when the spirit testifies to her that she really is a beloved daughter of God. But when she forgets, she´s a hurt, angry girl. Barely older than me. She can´t get baptized. Not anytime soon. But it stopped being about that for me when I just felt the peace that came into her tiny home from reading the Book of Mormon with her. But I know as soon as I leave this area she´s going to get dropped. I just pray and pray and pray that she´ll get found again later, and that she´ll remember just a little bit what happiness felt like. And someday she´ll get the chance. A quote that I love that I heard in the CCM was, ¨the beauty and terror of the plan of salvation is that everyone will get to choose, with total clarity, to exactly what extent they want to be faithful to Jesus Christ.¨ Everyone will get to make a choice with perfect knowledge. I guess my job is just helping provide that choice to others.

I hope Hna Safeer included our contacting helper story. That was a really cool experience, because it was a miraculous answer to a very specific prayer of mine. 

And after possibly bragging last week, I butchered a lesson because I couldn´t remember the irregular past subjunctive conjugations. I was like, Aw, man! I just had to give up and stop trying to say how our lives would be different without all the aspects of the restored gospel. 

I love being a missionary every week just a little bit more. I thought I liked it at first, but the more I´m here, the more I realize how different I feel about it. It´s still getting harder, but at the same time, it gets happier. It´s a happy hard. Haha! I love it. 

Also, everyone re-read Elder Neil L Anderson´s talk from conference. I just read it and it is so good!

Love you all! Thanks for all the pics and the updates! 

Love forever and ever,

Hna Sarah Emily Peck