Rachel is your Spanish improving with your new companion?
Uh? Probably? I can’t really tell to be honest. The members in the branch say I’m getting better because now when they ask how my Spanish is I say, “Mal.” And apparently before I couldn’t even understand that. Yeah, I’m a genius.
Is it getting easier to focus on the talk around you? Are you able to follow things longer before you tune out? I can understand things pretty well as long as it’s just one person talking, if it’s more than that, game over.
Can you believe it’s been almost 6 months already? Yes and no. Missions are super like crazy wormholes in which time is ridiculously warped. You feel like you’ve always been here, you vaguely remember having a life before, but that was years ago, and at the same time you always feel like you just got here because you still don’t know anything. The really crazy thing is, that as of today, I have less than a year until I go home. Turns out my mission is shorter than Rebekah’s because visitor center calls are one transfer shorter because of the extra week of training in the MTC. My estimated return date is Feb 5. Do you think maybe I can talk president Ellsworth into letting me leave in the middle of a transfer? So I can stay for Christmas, but be home in time for school.
Any-who, I never explained about the cow head because I honestly don’t know what I ate. I don’t think it was brains and it wasn’t eyes… so apparently there’s some meat on the cows head.
I don’t really know what to talk about this week. It was really slow, and pretty much every appointment fell through. One night we literally visited every investigator and did not have a single lesson. I think it’s crazy that Rebekah taught 37 lessons. I taught 11, 6 of which were member presents, which is bad but honestly it used to be worse. When I first got to Mesagrande and was with Sis Fors the most member presents she had had in a week was 4. When she left we were getting between 7-10. I guess Sis Falcon and I just need to find the flow of things with our new companionship. We are supposed to have one baptism a month per companionship but I’m not sure how often that actually happens. In my zone it seems like 1 or 2 companionships will find families and have 14 baptisms and the rest of us are lucky if we have 1. My mission does have a pretty high retention rate with converts though. There’s about a 75% retention rate.
The most exciting thing that happened this week is the Rubio’s family’s cousins, Rene and Sheilah, said they’d get married so they can get baptized! Woot! I was so nervous to talk to them about it but they were right on board. Now we’re just waiting to find out when their families can do it. I also feel awful because I told Gisselle we were going to have to change her baptismal date because we hadn’t been able to teach Alexis at all. Gisselle is only 12 and without support in her family I don’t feel comfortable with her getting baptized 🙁 So she’s pretty bummed out and I hope we’ll be able to help her out soon. Also David is still in Mexico and his baby Darren has been sick a lot so his girlfriend Guadalupe is having a really hard time and we haven’t been able to see her much. Annnd Ana (my only convert) is still in Venezuela so I miss her.
I am going to try to be better about answering everyone’s questions… along with writing more letters. We’ll see how it goes.
Love you,
Rachel
