This week has gone a lot better, we are still working hard but we have already seen miracles open up in our paths. Monday or Tuesday, I can´t really remember we came up with this lesson plan to go through with all the less active members that have strong testimonies and it has worked miracles. This week we worked with Hermana Baez, Hermana Almada, Hermana Aguirre and Hermana Carmen to try to get them to come back to church. Hermana Baez and her husband were the first members in Encarnacion and quite coming to church about a year or so ago and we are still working hard with them, hopefully someday she will come back to church. Her husband comes about every other week and only to sacrament meeting so we are still working with him also. The other Hermana Almada was baptized in 1982 and hasn´t been to church in 8 years. She stopped coming when her health got really bad about 8 years ago and then just has never come back to so we have been working hard with her. Her daughter is one of the really strong members of the church right now and we just love her (she does our laundry), so she has a great help there from her daughter to be able to come back. The next is Hermana Aguirre, she and her whole family of 6 children were baptized about 3 years ago, they were active for about a year and half and have been inactive for about a year and a half because her husband decided that he wanted to go to a different church that allowed him to drink and so she followed. Now after a year and a half she realizes that she is miserable and she misses the church really bad she just doesn´t have the guts right now to tell her husband that she isn´t going to go to church with them anymore and is going to go to our church. We are still working with her, she has a really strong testimony and I´m pretty sure that she is going to come to church this Sunday. Then the last is Hermana Carmen, she has been out of town for the past week and a half but we finally found her yesterday and we talked and tealked and talked with her. She doesn´t come to church anymore because her grandson (who she raised from age 3) fell away from the church and moved in with some girl and such and so she just feels alone now when she goes to church and so she doesn´t like to walk alone to church. She was one of the first people baptized in this area too and so we are working hard, we are positive that she is coming to church this Sunday so we are really excited. But it was amazing our assistance number last week was 23 or 24 somewhere around there and this week we were at 38 or 39, we were really happy it was nice to see the fruits of our labors. The miracle of this Sunday was Hermana Almada came to church. We were sitting waiting for some of our investigators to show up and then all of a sudden Hermana Almada walked up to the chapel door. We were so excited to see her, most of the people in the ward don´t know her, the branch president thought that she was just visiting her daughter or something and announced that we had a visitor over the pulpit and pointed her out so that was kind of hard for her but all the people that did know her in the ward just were so so so happy, we were really happy. When they walked in the doors her daughter came to us and told us that we just watched a miracle happen. It was the first time that she had walked into the church in 8 years, we were just so happy. After that meeting I went up and talked ot her about her experience and how she liked it and she said that she loved it and was so happy to be back. Then she said "thank you so much girls without you inviting me and inviting me I would have never came, because i just felt like no one cared whether I came or not". So we are watching the miracles happen. We are having a hard time with investigators. We had a couple with baptismal dates but they don´t want to so we are starting again from scratch. We are still working on going through all of our old investigators that are in the area book and finding them and talking to them. It has been nice to go through that and clean it out because a lot of the housing around here is just renting apartments and stuff and so people move a lot and so most of the poeple don´t live in the same place anymore. So we have been working hard, walking a lot, losing a lot of weight. Almost none of my clothes fit me anymore, no one feeds us here and we don´t have time to stop and eat ever so we just take a piece of bread with us or and apple and eat it while we are walking. We are tired and happy with what we have done here.
Our other project of the week, we got ot know our other city that we have in our area. Yeah we have two cities, well one is super city, like downtown Encarnacion and then we have a little town that is super super country called Cambryte or something close to that if you want to look it up on the internet and look at pictures or something. It´s really pretty. and it is quite large. It took us an hour and a half to walk there, a fell hour and a half in a fast walk. All the natives thought we were crazy to be walking that far. We got there went to the city hall to see if we could somehow get a map to be able to find our way around because there are no street names you just have to know where you´re going, so basically the knowledge is passed down from companion to companion, well for us we had no one to pass it down to us so we just have to figure it out for ourselves. So we got to the city hall the printed us off a map and then this nice guy sat and told us all the neighboor names and where all the points of interest are and such so that we could better find our way around. It was really nice of him. Then we headed off to find our branch president´s house, got a little lost, walked like 20 minutes past their house had to turn around and walk back, it was really funny. They finally had to send their son to find us. Then we had one ofthe most delicious meals i have eaten here, like it was so so so good, it might be the fact that we have been eating bread and apples for the past week and we were actually eating real food but it was so good!!! Our branch president´s wife is basically amazing. She took us around the all hte active members houses in the area and some of the less actives and some of the people that were investigators before. This is a funny story. So our brach president´s wife (Hermana Garay) has a 4 year old daughter that is super super super attached to her, like more attached than I have ever seen any child to a parent. Well when we were getting ready to leave the house after lunch Hermana Said that she was going to go take a shower, I was like what we need ot leave we have a lot to do, but then her son pulled us into the kitchen and told us that she was hiding in the bathroom and that we needed to get Barbie (the 4 year old) to take us upstairs to show us her toys and then Heramana Garay was going to go wait out on the street. Well we talked Barbie into taking us upstairs and then we said we had to leave, Brian was there (the 18 year old son of Hermana Garay) and siad that their mom was still in the shower so Barbie could hear, then we headed out. We found Hermana Garay hiding behind a bush and she said ok girls ready to run, and so we took off running, ran about a block where we were sure Barbie couldn´t see us anymore and then went off to learn about the area San Miguel. The area is beautiful. It´s a little hard because it is so far away from our house and such, but there are a ton of investigators and less actives out there, and we can´t be out there after dark because it is a little dangerous after dark, like most of our area. Really at night we can only be in like a 10 block radius of our apartment at night, the rest of our area is dangerous at night. We went to a members house the other night that we thought was okay to go to at night and after the lesson two of their sons walked us out of their neighborhood and so now we know that we can´t go there at night. The branch is super protective of us I think because our investigators that live in those areas say that it isn´t even close to dangerous at night but we are following the counsel of our branch presidency and the members because they know what is best for us. So at night we do a lot of wandering among the same 10 blocks because all are apartments and we can´t get into them without someone telling the guard that we can come in. But we are working on it, we have learned that street contacts are really important in this area because without them we wouldn´t get to talk to anyone that lives in the apartment complexes.
My companion is great, I´m loving having to speak Spanish all day everyday, my Spanish has gotten really good in the past 2 weeks because i have to speak it all the time. I never thought I would be told this but a lot of the members think that I have been out a year or more and when I tell them 3 months that are surprised, I tell you the gift of tongues is real because 2 weeks ago I couldn´t talk to anyone but I have to hear, one person can´t do all the work here because there is way too much work here for one person to do it!!! My companion is such a hard working, we are funny because we push each other really hard because both of us think the other is a harder worker then we really are and so I won´t stop because I think Hermana Quartino doesn´t want to quite and then Hermana Quartino won´t quite because she thinks I don´t want to quite so we just go and go and go and go. But we have a lot of fun, the mission president has given me the challenge and getting her speaking good English because she only has this change to learn better, she already speaks really really well but she just needs vocabulary and pronuncion help and so thats what I´m doing. She was baptized 7 years ago and so never got to be part of primary so I have been teaching her primary songs in English and she loves it!! So we have alot of fun, I suspect that she is going to be my favorite companion of my mission because she is just awesome, completely obedient in everything, loves to work hard, and knows what her purpose is here. I don´t know if I said this in my last email but she is so strong. Her dad died when she was out for 6 months and she stayed out, she is just amazing, I don´t think I would have the strength to do that, I actually know I wouldn´t. She is amazing!!!
Well that's about it for now, the work is moving on, this is hard, the mission president wrote me an email today and said to be patient and that everything will work out and that he knows that this area is for me and Hermana Quartino! We love the work here, it´s beautiful and it is not hot here!!! . . . YET!!!
Love you all
Hermana Hubbard
Our other project of the week, we got ot know our other city that we have in our area. Yeah we have two cities, well one is super city, like downtown Encarnacion and then we have a little town that is super super country called Cambryte or something close to that if you want to look it up on the internet and look at pictures or something. It´s really pretty. and it is quite large. It took us an hour and a half to walk there, a fell hour and a half in a fast walk. All the natives thought we were crazy to be walking that far. We got there went to the city hall to see if we could somehow get a map to be able to find our way around because there are no street names you just have to know where you´re going, so basically the knowledge is passed down from companion to companion, well for us we had no one to pass it down to us so we just have to figure it out for ourselves. So we got to the city hall the printed us off a map and then this nice guy sat and told us all the neighboor names and where all the points of interest are and such so that we could better find our way around. It was really nice of him. Then we headed off to find our branch president´s house, got a little lost, walked like 20 minutes past their house had to turn around and walk back, it was really funny. They finally had to send their son to find us. Then we had one ofthe most delicious meals i have eaten here, like it was so so so good, it might be the fact that we have been eating bread and apples for the past week and we were actually eating real food but it was so good!!! Our branch president´s wife is basically amazing. She took us around the all hte active members houses in the area and some of the less actives and some of the people that were investigators before. This is a funny story. So our brach president´s wife (Hermana Garay) has a 4 year old daughter that is super super super attached to her, like more attached than I have ever seen any child to a parent. Well when we were getting ready to leave the house after lunch Hermana Said that she was going to go take a shower, I was like what we need ot leave we have a lot to do, but then her son pulled us into the kitchen and told us that she was hiding in the bathroom and that we needed to get Barbie (the 4 year old) to take us upstairs to show us her toys and then Heramana Garay was going to go wait out on the street. Well we talked Barbie into taking us upstairs and then we said we had to leave, Brian was there (the 18 year old son of Hermana Garay) and siad that their mom was still in the shower so Barbie could hear, then we headed out. We found Hermana Garay hiding behind a bush and she said ok girls ready to run, and so we took off running, ran about a block where we were sure Barbie couldn´t see us anymore and then went off to learn about the area San Miguel. The area is beautiful. It´s a little hard because it is so far away from our house and such, but there are a ton of investigators and less actives out there, and we can´t be out there after dark because it is a little dangerous after dark, like most of our area. Really at night we can only be in like a 10 block radius of our apartment at night, the rest of our area is dangerous at night. We went to a members house the other night that we thought was okay to go to at night and after the lesson two of their sons walked us out of their neighborhood and so now we know that we can´t go there at night. The branch is super protective of us I think because our investigators that live in those areas say that it isn´t even close to dangerous at night but we are following the counsel of our branch presidency and the members because they know what is best for us. So at night we do a lot of wandering among the same 10 blocks because all are apartments and we can´t get into them without someone telling the guard that we can come in. But we are working on it, we have learned that street contacts are really important in this area because without them we wouldn´t get to talk to anyone that lives in the apartment complexes.
My companion is great, I´m loving having to speak Spanish all day everyday, my Spanish has gotten really good in the past 2 weeks because i have to speak it all the time. I never thought I would be told this but a lot of the members think that I have been out a year or more and when I tell them 3 months that are surprised, I tell you the gift of tongues is real because 2 weeks ago I couldn´t talk to anyone but I have to hear, one person can´t do all the work here because there is way too much work here for one person to do it!!! My companion is such a hard working, we are funny because we push each other really hard because both of us think the other is a harder worker then we really are and so I won´t stop because I think Hermana Quartino doesn´t want to quite and then Hermana Quartino won´t quite because she thinks I don´t want to quite so we just go and go and go and go. But we have a lot of fun, the mission president has given me the challenge and getting her speaking good English because she only has this change to learn better, she already speaks really really well but she just needs vocabulary and pronuncion help and so thats what I´m doing. She was baptized 7 years ago and so never got to be part of primary so I have been teaching her primary songs in English and she loves it!! So we have alot of fun, I suspect that she is going to be my favorite companion of my mission because she is just awesome, completely obedient in everything, loves to work hard, and knows what her purpose is here. I don´t know if I said this in my last email but she is so strong. Her dad died when she was out for 6 months and she stayed out, she is just amazing, I don´t think I would have the strength to do that, I actually know I wouldn´t. She is amazing!!!
Well that's about it for now, the work is moving on, this is hard, the mission president wrote me an email today and said to be patient and that everything will work out and that he knows that this area is for me and Hermana Quartino! We love the work here, it´s beautiful and it is not hot here!!! . . . YET!!!
Love you all
Hermana Hubbard
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