Hi Ya'll!

Happy Monday to my wonderful family who I love so much! I

Thanks for all your emails! Mondays are seriously like Christmas, and opening each email is like opening a super big box wrapped in shiny paper. Love it. :)

 

So I'm here! And we are on Week 2 of the transfer already, weird! I wonder if I'm going to count my life in transfers when I get home.... me and Sister Jones are clicking, I love working with her so dang much. Our first day together she got really sick, so I studied while she slept and the Zone Leaders came and gave her a blessing. Since then, though, we have been working our tails off and we have seen some wonderful miracles and have hopefully been planting some seeds. There is so much work to do in our ward, and meeting with a full ward council for the first time ever yesterday (I've only been to Ward Council meetings in YSA wards) was an interesting experience. I realized how important home and visitng teaching is - what if one of the temple recommend questions was 'Have you been a faithful home/visiting teacher?' - would that increase home/visiting teaching or decrease temple attendance? Just a random thought I had as I heard the statistics for the ward and heard the bishopric's plea to the auxilary leaders to help people reach out to people.

 

Anyways, I am so happy here, we are being as strictly obedient as possible, we lift and encourage each other and the members, and we talk to lots of people, trying to find those who are prepared to hear the gospel. Really, I had no idea that working so hard and being super exhausted at the end of each day could make me so happy, and I know it's because we are doing what the Savior wants.

 

To describe the details of my new area, I am going to go through the ABC's haha. It was a fun thing I did in Peru to record memories and I thought I'd do it again.

 

A - Allergies! It turns out I am allergic to cats, and LOTS of people out here have cats. So I've been taking an allergy pill every morning so that my nose doesn't become a faucet whenever we go into someone's house.

B- Busy busy busy! We have at least two appointments every day and make two-ish unscheduled visits to less actives or potential investigators.

C - Crawfish! I went to my first crawfish boil, and the members of the ward taught me how to rip open the crawfish and get the meat. Super spicy, super delicious, super barbaric, and super fun.

D - Drinking a ton of water out here is essential! It's only in the 80's so far but the humidity makes it feel like 8000 degrees (Edna Mode anyone?).

E - Elders Asuao and Navitikula are in our ward and in our district, and we work closely with them. Elder Asuao is from American Samoa and is a spiritual giant, and Elder Navi is from Fiji and is a lot of fun and still learning English. We call them the Poly's (polynesians) and I love serving with them - they are hard workers, they have the spirit, and they always encourage us to do our best.

F - Fun! The last P-Day we had with our district before transfers last week was so much fun. I love being a missionary because you have good clean fun and work super hard with some great people. We played ping pong and Uno at the institute building, and it was so nice to just let loose and laugh for a bit with my missioanry family.

 

I'll start up with "G" next week....until then, know that I love all of you so much! Thanks for all your love and support!

Hugs!

-Sister Chausow