Wow it sounds like you're having fun on your trip (without me *sniff*). I heard there was a 5.9 earthquake in Washington D.C. yesterday. Did you feel it where you were? It's funny, Hermana Delis says her family spent a few days in New York too. So maybe you saw them. Though even if you did you'd probably never know because I hear there are a lot of people in New York (but I wouldn't know for sure because I've never been). They're from Vienna, VA so if you drive past it maybe you can wave or something. Haha.
This week has been pretty good and interesting since so many of our numbers are 0 (sadly) but we had an amazing number of new investigators - 9! Last week I told you about how we had found 6 on Monday. Since then we were able to find three more! One from stopping by an another old investigator in Harvard, one from inviting someone to listen in a lesson with a member, and one from having another person join us in our second lesson with 2 of the new investigators we found on Monday! So hopefully with these 9 new investigators we'll be able to start increasing some of our other numbers.
Sunday was kind of sad because, though we had 3 people tell us they were coming when we talked with them the day before, and none of them came. And also not very many of the members came. We were combined with the English ward for ward and branch conference and I don't know if they just thought they meant they could take a break from coming or what. When sacrament meeting started there were only 2 people there from the branch (besides the branch presidency), luckily a few more trickled in, but it was still a little sad. Hopefully next week they'll all be back... I'm also starting to realize just how much of a gossip problem the branch has...we had a little confusion with a member coming with us to an appointment and us not having his phone number. We tried for almost an hour to contact him, calling other branch members and trying about 4 or 5 wrong numbers that were in the ward directory and that people had given us but were never able to contact him before the appointment. I'm pretty sure he told the whole branch about it in a way that reflects badly on us. Well at least I heard him telling people so...yeah.There's so much gossip and such a lack of love between the members. I'm still a little afraid to bring investigators in.
On Saturday we had an awesome lesson with Rosa who I talked about last week. She knows the Book of Mormon is true but is so conflicted within herself because she's had so much opposition from her family (she wants to believe that it doesn't matter what church you go to). So we shared Luke 5: 1-11 with her where it talks about Jesus telling the fishermen to launch out into the deep and cast out their nets. She understood exactly what we wanted her to get out of it. In fact I don't think I've ever had an investigator understand anything so well. We would start to say something and then she would finish explaining it for us and automatically apply it to herself. So she understood without us really saying much that sometimes we need to exercise faith and take a step outside our comfort zone. She told us that she knows she needs to move forward with this and that she'd keep fighting for this. She told us she would talk to her husband (Salvador), and would give us an answer about baptism next week. So that lesson went just about as perfectly as we could have hoped. Yay for not having to do anything and letting the spirit do it all!
Some of the cool/interesting/weird things that I've seen/experienced recently out here in the middle of nowhere:
1. Lots and lots of corn
2. I tried goat on Sunday. One of the hermanos in the branch lives on a farm that has goats so he cooked one up and had everyone over after church. It wasn't overly gross or anything...just weird - especially because the big platter with the goat meat had the skull of the goat sitting right on top (and I'm pretty sure all the other goat parts were there too). I tried to pick out some pieces that didn't look like intestines, liver, kidney or anything like that. At one point one of the Hermanos (who was really excited about this whole thing) held up a piece and asked "Does anyone want some tongue?" I'll add that to the list of things I never heard anyone say until I came on my mission. Also there were live goats behind us the whole time which was strange.
3. In Harvard there's a life-size cow statue that we drive past all the time. It's in honor of the "milk days festival". It seems that everything in the whole town is centered around this festival that they hold every year.
Well I hope that you all have a fantastic time this week! I have transfers next week already which is weird so we'll see if anything happens. I don't really think so but you never know.
Love,
Hermana West
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