Hello family!
I hope you are all doing well and from your individual email responses it sounds like you are! I'm so glad you all are finding joy in the journey back home. Keep staying close to the Lord and he will take you by the hand to where you need to be. The gospel is such a beautiful blessing and the church and it's organization is a wonderful tool in helping us fulfill life to the fullest. El evangelio de Jesucristo es una bendecion por mi en specifico y estoy muy agadecida por el. Tengo una sonrisa en mi corazon- I have a smile in my heart (:
So this week was interesting because HMN and I are slowly starting to figure out and understand our area. We have to plan differently more than we ever have before and it's been a trying area for me en specifico. So in our 2 area's they are color coded on the maps and we plan by that nightly on where to go and who to see based on the colored areas. The tricky thing is that we can't go to about 95% of the places in our area after dark because it's so dangerous. This week after a lesson with a less active she sat there begging us "hermana's por favor salir la area en la noche" and told us stories about how peligroso it is around cole fax and by her house. She told us that there was a shooting on downing st just last week and that the night before someone came to her house and was banging on her window in the middle of the night. My heart just broke for hermana Esperanza because she's older probably about 60's and lives by her self and can only see through one eye. After we left her house my comp and I felt very impressed to start praying for her safety from now on. I love Esperanza with all my heart and we've only met with her 2 times now. I know that I'm where the Lord wants me to be in spanish speaking because these people just make me to happy and it's been easier for me to understand the gospel and feel the spirit stronger in the spanish language. I can't wait to see how I can use it after the mish because it's so fun.
On that note, with how much I love the language it definitely hasn't been easy for me to grasp it. I can fully communicate back and forth and understand what people are saying in Spanish but I still struggle with the grammar aspect of the language and that is the conjugating part. I'm the worst at it because since I did't get it in the CCM I haven't been speaking with my words conjugated and now I realize how important it is it's kind of smacked me in the face yesterday. I'm just having the hardest time comprehending and remembering to put the different endings into practice when I'm speaking. I was pretty sad yesterday so it was good to have my HMN there for me and listening to me and my struggles. This morning I was still sad in my prayer and just pleaded with Heavenly Father to help me finally grasp the conjugating process and start improving because it's time to. I know he can help me because he helped me pass my radiology exam for dental which I know that I didn't do all by myself. It'll come with time but I'm going to start being more serious and buckle down in my language study time this week to show Heavenly Father how important it is to me. I'm working on the small grammar words and things that go into making my sentences more clear and of course the conjugating process. My meta (goal) is to become so good at spanish that I can use it effectively after my mission. I love the language but the grammar and conjugating is testing my patience! lol
This whole week my comp and I did some finding about 5 hrs every day because we still don't have a lot of people to work with. It's been super difficult to figure out where to go in the evenings here because most of our area we can't even go in after dark... and we can't go home until 8:30 so it's been an interesting experience trying to figure that out nightly. I believe that this is the hardest area out of all the ones in Spanish because we are pretty much starting from the bottom and building the area up. Our main appointments with people cancelled this week. We visited with a guy named gonzolo every other night this past week and tried putting him on a bap date, which he said that he wants to but doesn't know enough yet to be baptized. We are going to continue working with him on that.
Since this week wasn't really exciting and not a lot happened my HMN and I came up with a few things that describe the week we had. 1. Saturday evening while talking to a member in our car we were down town and a guy got out of a car and tried to break into the one parked right infront of us then realized we were sitting in ours and drove away. 2. I got out of our car one evening after we prayed and then heard a loud scream coming from the street where we were going to walk down then we got back in our car and drove home. The STL's helped us get a list of places we shouldn't go at night from the other missionaries that have served in this area. Turned out that we were going to go on the street that was pretty sketch at night. 3. We picked up our couch and moved it outside on our balcony to study language in the Sun on Friday. We ate some frozen yogurt for dinner Friday as well. 4. We celebrated HMN's bday Wednesday and I gave her little sticky notes throughout the day on 1o reasons why we are going to be comadres after the mission (best friends) and she had a good bday. 5. we went' downtown to contact a less active and a guy stopped us and then told us everything about his life in 10min along with how he was in prison and hasn't beat a woman in exactly 750 days. We told him it was nice to meet him then walked back to the car haha Last but not least #6 we now know the difference between what a skunk smells like and marijuana... we smell it at least 15 times a day driving and walking all over Denver. They don't call it the mile high city for no reason! Yuck. That pretty much describes the week we had haha
I love you guys and hope you have a great up coming week! Also, read this scripture together: Mosiah 5:2 it's about true conversion and I put it on my white board on my desk so I can see it every day.
Con amor.
Hermana Angell