Maywood: Semana 2 ‏ 2/17/10

Hola Familia!

My P-day was changed to today for this week so i could go to the temple. We go once every two transfers with our zone. It is so beautiful! I loved it. The only hard thing was having to get up at five this morning to get there in time for the seven thirty session. The traffic here really is ridiculous. Yesterday I went to the mission home for 13 day training, a one time training you do after having been in the mission for 13 days, and it took us almost two hours to get there, and it is probably about the same distance as our house to the Salt lake Temple.

I have been loving LA and especially Maywood. The first couple days here it was freezing cold and raining, but the last few days and today have felt like our summers. I'm even starting to get a tan. It is so sunny and beautiful. We have been riding bikes a lot. We also have a car, but we have a mileage allottment of 600 miles, so we have to balance out our driving and our bike riding. I am so happy i get to ride my bike.

Maywood apparently from what I've heard is a lot like mexico. It really does feel like a different country- all of the signs and billboards are in Spanish, and some of the houses are hot pink or teal or any and every color imaginable. Riding around on our bikes this weekend wasfun, because we rode past so many parties. They really know how to through parties here, just from what we've seen riding past. They blast Latin music, have Christmas lights up, baloons out, bounce houses, and is always smells like the most amazing food ever. I really want to come back some day after my mission just to see what a party would be like. I love how much the latin culture truly loves and enjoys life. The people are so nice, even when they don't want to hear about our message.

I still haven't eaten anything spicy, most of the people are from el salvador and guatemala and don't use all of the chilis. It is really funny to me because I have had a few people ask me if I have Latin roots. Its actually probably about fifty fifty, some people just talk to my companion at first and ask things like "does she know spanish?" or refer to me as a "guerrita" which kind of just means cute white girl. They are very open about referring to people by their appearance- when they are describing someone who is fat they will always say things like "oh, el gordito?" gordo is fat, so gordito is like a nice way of saying fat.

There is so much diversity here in LA and i love it. I went on splits for the day to an area called Vernon, and it is a little bit more urban and diverse, but it was so interesting to meet the different people. There was one place we went though with these really creepy trashy apartments, and we got up to a door and I just felt this really heavy, sick feeling, and we could hear people inside but we just decided to leave a passalong card and leave.

On the other end, i had a really neat experience with the spirit the other day when I was teaching a man who wasn't completely interested, but we could tell that what we were telling him about the nature of God really clicked with him, and I felt prompted to tell him that we have families here because that is how they were patterned before, and that God really is our Heavenly Father and he can feel our pain, and we can feel and comprehend a little bit of his pain, because he really did sacrifice his son for us, and we can imagine to a small degree what that was like because we have the opportunity of having families. Well, it sounded better and made more sense, but it was actually a concept that I hadn't really thought about before either. We have pain sometimes so that we can comprehend the pain the God and Jesus Christ have gone through for us and we can appreciate it more.

I love how much the spirit is teaching me as I serve and learn how to teach. One of the sisters in our zone has this really neat quote by president hinkley where he talks about how more sister missionaries are going out than ever before, and it's not because they just can't get married, it is because the Lord is preparing the future mothers of the next and greatest generation of missionaries, or something to that affect. It was a really neat quote. I know that there are great and powerful reasons that I am here, and this is the best place for me to learn and grow.

Another interesting thing about Maywood is there are street vendors eveywhere- they are always pushing carts or baby strollers around the neighborhood and yelling. There are also so many ice cream trucks everywhere. When I was in Vernon with Hermana Garcia we were out teaching a family in their front yard on their lawn chairs and we got to the really spiritually part of the restoration with the first vision and an icecream truck came right next to the house and just stayed there, blasting its music for over five minutes. It was incessant- but we were still able to keep teaching them. Hermana Salazar has a theory that Satan will always try to stop you from teaching the part about the first vision because it is so powerful.

It is interesting adapting to all of the different types of teaching situations. The hardest ones are when we are knocking doors, because almost every house has a metal screen door in front of it and you can't see in, and some peole won't open it so you can't see them but you have to talk to them and try to teach them through the screen door.

The work is going really well, we have a lot of really great investigators. We usually plan for an average of about six lessons a day, which apparently is a lot compared to the rest of the mission. In the latin areas it is easy to get in the house and teach them, but it is challenging getting them to keep commitments. Do any of you returned missionaries have any advice or suggestions for me? I know that a lot of it has to be learned from experience. It is hard figuring out how to really help motivate people to change their lives, but I know that the Lord is helping me learn.

My companion has been a really great help. She is very dedicated and motivated, and works really hard. She makes me learn the hard way sometimes, but it good for me and keeps me humble. It was a little hard for a little while because we have pretty similar personalities and were clashing just a little bit, but we had a really good talk and figured things out and I know that we are going to continue to grow and make a really good team.

My time is running out,

I love you all! I'll write again Monday.

Hermana Dansie