It was a wonderful Christmas week. It began with our zone pday which was awesome! This really rich family, the Bothwell's, have a huge house and they invited all of us missionaries into their home for a Christmas zone pday! They have a pool table, an air hockey table and a fuse ball table, so they had all these tournaments set up and a taco bar. It was so much fun and so nice of them! Me and one of the Spanish Sisters, Hermana Garcia Valle, were teamed up for pool and we were actually the best sisters. So I have a new found talent hahah.
Christmas Eve was awesome! We had the usual district meeting and lunch and we went to a Methodist church's family Christmas service which was awesome. And we went and visited Sister Ashworth and spoke with her for a while. Her son really likes us, and he respects us, which is good because he's completely less active and needs more direction in his life.
Then we had dinner at the McArthur's which was craziness but so much fun! And after that we walked next door to the Quispe's, who LOVE the elders, and we met up with the elders so our district could all go caroling. I wish we had gone caroling more often! People were WAY more receptive to us and it definitely brightened their nights. One person said, "I've never actually seen Christmas carolers!" Funny. So that was awesome. Oh and I opened my Christmas pjs and those were awesome.
Then was Christmas. The highlight was being able to skype the family. Loved it. It was so awesome to have Briggs and Whitney and Erica along with all the nieces singing! That was definitely one of my favorite things. Thank you Aunt Mary!
We visited the old folk's home on Christmas and gave them all beanies that this lady gave to us. It was really sweet.
The next day was crazy. We went to this community center to see if there was service we could do, but they are closed until January 2. So we'll be back there this week. And then we went to a different, much nicer, nursing home to visit this lady in the ward. It was so sad. I'm pretty sure she has Parkinson's disease which was sad to see and she does not like being in the nursing home. The sweet thing is that she loves birds, she has all of these beautiful glass bird figurines and two bird feeders outside of her window. I hope we brighten her day some. She can't talk too much, it's a struggle. But we sang for her and she smiled a little.
We tracted for days. Oh and I contacted in Spanish three different times. It was a struggle, that's all I have to say. And probably really embarrassing... Oh well, at least I tried. We finished the night with our english class for the Persians. Shahrad's English is slow going, but we told him to label all of the appliances in the house. We're finally having a lesson with his family this week! Wish us luck.
On Friday we met this wonderful lady. She fell asleep reading her bible and we knocked on her door. She didn't answer, she just called through the door and asked who it was, and we said "We're missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ..." She swung the door open and said, "Come in, come in!" She's this TINY little black lady from Liberia who looked so cute and open. We talked to her for a bit, getting to know her. She asked if we fasted and prayed in our church and answered and she asked us other questions etc. Well we set up an appointment with her again on Saturday because one of the recent converts in the ward is also from Liberia so we'd thought we'd come back with her.
So we went back to Tus's house (that's her name) with Annie, the lady in our ward and it went so well! Annie's testimony was so unbelievable sincere and heartfelt. Her conversion story is cool. The only issue is that Tus is getting baptized in another church on January 14th... We told her to read the Book of the Mormon. I have faith that if she keeps her commitments then she will indeed feel the Holy Ghost testify of truth.
That's all that was really wonderful this.
Love y'all
Jocelyn
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