Mis amigos!
It was another great week here in the DR.
My comp turned 20 this week! It turns out to be ridiculously hard to surprise someone who is always with you and who you share a phone with. Her official birthday gift from me is going to be a Japanese Book of Mormon once the Elders get it ordered in, but she found out about that. And the other main thing we did to celebrate was food. I made her apple cinnamon pancakes in the morning and we got lunch at a panadería (bakery) we've both been dying to visit all transfer because it smells amazing whenever we walk by. And for dinner we got lucky and one of the people we were teaching decided to make us food while we taught her husband. He has lots of questions so she apparently realized how long the lesson would take and cooked the whole time so she could feed us at the end. And it turned out to be Hermana Fernández's favorite food.
I was trying hard to make her birthday really fun, especially cuz it's her only one on the mission. I think it worked pretty well.
The fruit of the week was a limoncillo, which looks like a tiny lime and is really only a large seed with a teeny bit of fruit surrounding it, then the skin. You bite it just a little to break the skin, then you put the seed in your mouth and suck the fruit off. Not very filling but possibly my favorite of the fruits I've tried. Which by that I just mean it was really good cuz I've had so many good fruits that I can't pick a favorite.
We had interviews this week! I love my mission president and it was awesome to talk with him and receive counsel as well as just get pumped up by a great friend. El Presidente Breton is such an awesome mission president!
This week we had one of the most spiritual Restoration lessons I've ever had, and it was over the phone. When we called the guy a few days later for another lesson, we asked him if he prayed and he said yes and that he could tell it was true. So we changed our plan, taught lesson three, and invited him to get baptized. He was hesitant to commit at first because he understands that baptism is a sacred covenant with God and didn't feel ready. We set the date for a month out to give him time to prepare. Our next lesson with him was on the Book of Mormon and he was like, "I need to study this book," so excited to have more access to the word of God so he could read it and pray about it. This guy's fuego.
ALSO we've got a friend who's a little crazy and needs to change a lot of things in his life in order to be baptized. He has expressed some interest in baptism but also doesn't seem very willing to change his ways. We're working with him. He's come to church twice now, and we had a lesson about the importance of going to church. He told us he wasn't coming this week because "this Sunday is for me". He was headed to the beach with some friends to relax and we could not talk him out of it. Because we know him pretty well we threw everything at him, and the funny thing is that he agreed with every single thing we said, then was like, "Yeah, I'm not going." He basically said we'd never be able to convince him. We kept praying that he would change his mind but I had kind of just given up on him being at church this Sunday. Then he came! We were shocked. We asked him what made him change his mind and he said his friends had to cancel the trip. I love God's sense of humor sometimes.
I've heard about humanitarian groups before who go to another country for a few weeks and build a school. There's one in our area right now! Like thirty gringos have arrived. And I didn't realize that they would be so church based. I thought this type of thing was more of a service project, but it's big on missionary work too. The gringos ran Sacrament meeting yesterday, and I was impressed that a couple of sixteen year olds gave talks in Spanish. Terrible Spanish, but they did it. Then later in the day they went on missionary visits with us and some other members in the ward, to visit inactive members.
It's really fun to have a bunch of Americans around. They're gonna be here for two weeks and they're doing a bunch of activities that we get to be involved in as missionaries because they are missionary related. I'm so excited for the other activities! The youth are so much fun and they have strong testimonies. I'm trying to learn all of their names and I'm making good progress.
Another fun thing with that is that they asked us to translate the lesson in young womens for all the gringas. And I DID IT! I didn't know I was good enough at Spanish to translate Dominican Spanish for an hour straight, and translate all the youths' comments back into Spanish so the girls in our ward could understand. Basicamente, the gift of tongues is real.
This whole transfer has been amazing. Today's the last day of it, and I get to stay in Las Antillas with my new comp Hermana Anderson. I'm so excited to work with her! I'm really gonna miss Hermana Fernandez cuz she has been a fantastic comp and taught me so much—about how the DR works, about Spanish, about how to teach with the Spirit. We've had so much fun together. I met Hermana Anderson at an activity with all the sisters in the mission that we had a few weeks ago and she is really fun too so I think this next transfer's gonna be just as good!
Hermana Cazier
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