Hola
hola hola!!!
Okay first of all,
disclaimer, if you emailed me this week, there's a good chance I won't respond
since it's CHRISTMAS and we've got things to do and places to be! But I read
your email and I loved it and responded via positive emotions sent to wherever you
are.
On that note...
Feliz Navidad!!! This
has been a super fun, crazy, busy pre-Christmas week! On Monday night, we went
to the Fry family's house for a Christmas caroling Family Home Evening
activity! There were several families there from the ward and we went around
and caroled to some of the Fry's neighbors. Then afterwards, we all went back
to the Fry's house to eat and sing songs and things. It was fun getting to know
their Spanish neighbors and show them that missionaries aren't scary!
On Tuesday we taught
Andrés in the morning, did our studies, then went to eat at the house of a
family from the American branch. It was so fun! We ate such American food
(chicken, mashed potatoes, and salad, with ice cream for dessert) and we
understood perfectly the conversation at dinner. It's the little things, haha.
We also had brought a spiritual thought, but it was super awkward, because
we're used to teaching in Spanish so we just didn't really know what to say.
We'll have to work on that. After dinner, Sister Fuhrner drove us to the train station and we
got on a train to SEVILLA! We
got to the Sevilla train station with a few other hermanas and then all were in
one of the hermanas' pisos in Sevilla for a while while we waited for some
other hermanas to get out of a meeting. We played mafia and then went with
Hermana Encarnación and her companion, hermana Tanner, to the piso of the
sister training leaders in Sevilla to sleep. It was fun to see Hermana Encarnación
again!
On Wednesday we woke
up, got ready, and went to the bus stop to take the bus to the church in
Sevilla. It was funny though, there were like 8 or 10 elders already at the bus
stop waiting so when the bus came, we kind of took over the bus. The Sevilla
church is BEAUTIFUL. It was so fun to see missionaries from my old district in
Málaga who came to the conference--half the mission was there. We started with
a talent show, which had skits and musical numbers and things. The best act was
probably one where they sat the missionaries from other countries (like Norway,
Portugal, Sweden, Czech Republic, and Germany) in a line on the stage. The
American missionary at one end said a word in english, then the microphone got
passed down the line and each missionary said the word in their native language--it
ended in German, which was always really funny. Hermana Bockova told us
afterwards that a lot of the words they were saying don't actually exist in
Czech, so she was just saying random Czech words when it was her turn since no
one else spoke Czech haha.
After the talent show
we went to carol at Carrefour, then came back to eat and have zone meeting.
Then President and Hermana Andersen spoke to us---they focused on developing
charity and making Jesus Christ the center of every message we share. We all
got a present from President and Hermana Andersen--a cool book of all the
folletos bound together, a temple reccomend holder with the name of the mission
on it, and a FACE SHEET with all the missionaries' pictures and names on it.
I've been waiting for this face sheet since I first saw Hermana Johnson's back
at the end of August, so I was a little excited to finally get one, to say the
least. And then we had to BOOK IT, because it was already 5:20 and there were
12 of us who had a train that was going to leave at 5:45! We fit a few too many
people into the mission van and made it to the station right as our train was
pulling up.
We went to bed on
Wednesday night completely exhausted, woke up on Thursday to do weekly
planning, then got on ANOTHER train to Jerez for intercambios! I was super
excited for these intercambios because one of the sister training leaders in
Jerez is the one and only HERMANA JOHNSON! On Thursday night I was with Hermana
Villegas. It was actually weirdly normal speaking Spanish with her all night,
and we spent a long time following up on future investigators and things. On
Friday morning we ate pancakes with buttermilk syrup which were glorious, then
me and Hermana Johnson went and knocked doors on a (long) street. We found a
few people who said they would like missionaries to come back in the future, so
that was good. Plus of course it was just awesome to be with Hermana Johnson
again for a few hours!
On Sunday the American
branch and the Spanish ward both only had sacrament meeting (the first hour of
church). The American branch program was complete with two harps, so it was
pretty fancy. The Spanish ward was good too. We had taught the primary kids the
song "La Nochebuena" and they actually sounded pretty good! Also, the
president of the branch and his wife gave us a big thing of American food
(cereal, peanut butter...) which was amazing. We don't need fresh-baked
cookies, we just want peanut butter! After church we did our studies and then
the Fry's picked us up to take us to their house for Christmas eve! They
invited us four Hermanas from the ward and were so nice and invited the elders
in our district too, since they don't have a lot of members in their branch and
didn't have anywhere to go for Christmas eve. We were there with Brother and
Sister Fry, their son (who was visiting from school), and the six of us. We
sang Christmas songs and read the Christmas story in the Bible, then ate some
AMAZING cinnamon rolls. The Frys were also cute and got us American food--pop
tarts, flavor blasted goldfish, more cereal... basically, the best Christmas
presents ever. Then we played Jenga with this giant set of Jenga that the Frys
got at Costco. And of course, enjoyed their soft carpet!
Merry Christmas!!
Love, Hermana Walker
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