Monday, August 11, 2014

Welcome to Cartegena!

Hello! It's been a long week since I last wrote. On the 5th I left Madrid for Malaga (where the mission home is) and then went from Malaga to Cartegena (where my area is). I was pretty much constantly traveling, but it's alright, cuz I'm here!
My trainer is H. Herrera, who's from Ecuador. She´s hilarious. But she only speaks Spanish. We communicate well though, so its alright.
There's another hermana, H. Brown. She leaves in 2 weeks to go home cuz it's the end of her mission. It's weird for both of us haha.
I really like my area. We're in the city of Cartegena, but we're only in charge of 2 or 3 streets. However, we have ELEVEN pueblos ( or small suburb/towns) that we are also in charge of and have investigators in. Every day we take the train or the busto some small, run down town in the middle of nowhere to see investigators (people who are interested in the church).
The Ward (congregation) here is amazing! They´re so welcoming and love the Hermanas. There's about 170 members, and it's one of the biggest wards in my mission. In fact, there are THREE pairs of missionaries in this one ward. We have visited members a lot, and they always feed us and send food home with us.
I'm not kidding. One member gives us a melon every time (in Spain they don't differentiate between types of melon, it's all just melon). Another recent convert is from a tribe in Africa where it's very rude not to give gifts to visitors. So we're just checking up on him to see how he's doing, and out he comes with two HUGE bags of food! We had to carry them between the three of us cuz they were so heavy. There was a ton of fruit and an entire frozen chicken. And get this, last week he gave the Hermanas a chicken as well! We now have two whole chickens in the freezer.
So. If anyone has recipes for how to cook whole chickens, I would greatly appreciate it! There's a store next to us, so we can buy potatoes or anything like that. (PS if you do send recipes, it would be great if you could convert the temperature to Celsius haha). But on the bright side, I never am hungry, cuz the members always feed us! It´s a great system.
Oh, and on my first day here, I committed someone to baptism! It was great. Hopefully this coming week it´ll happen, but we'll see.
So, I've enjoyed being here. The language is a struggle, but as long as I'm looking at the speaker, I can understand what they're saying. I don't know much about the area here, but I think it's good. H. Brown said that you see more miracles at the beginning of your mission than at any other time, and I think it's because newbies rely on the Lord. Without the Lord or my companions, I literally couldn't survive here! It sounds dramatic, but it's not at all haha, I am completely incompetent without them. Eventually I'll be more capable, but right now, I'm just relying on the Lord.
Well, I miss everyone! Thanks so much for your letters, it's great to here from you.
Hermana Jones

(PS this picture is my new area and H. Herrera! The two Elders in the background are Assistants to the President, we needed them to hold the map haha)

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