November 4, 2013 {Kaitlyn}

Hello hello :) :),

Wow, today was such an exciting day with all the emails. Josh sent me a picture and guess who it was?? Mitchell and Matt Conley, my buddies from BYU. Oh man, all three of them are goofballs so they will have lots of fun together. I get the most random emails sometimes because EVERYBODY is on a mission so then we just guess on the emails of all our friends. anyway, Josh seems to be doing great! How fun!! :)

Super sad to hear about Larry Krout! How did he pass away? It must've been sudden because I haven't heard anything about that.  Give there family my love. I guess maybe it was a good thing that Jamyn didn't go on her mish then? That's good to hear that her husband seems to be a super nice man. How sad!

As far as my week goes, it was WONDERFUL! :) It started off with a nice lunch at the GOLDEEEN CORAAAL as Emmet would say. I guess it's tradition for Emmet to take all the newbees to the Golden Coral. Emmet is a cute old man in our ward. He's white but he speaks Spanish so he attends our ward. The Golden Coral according to Emmet is the star next to Kolob. Hahaha that should say enough about him. He's wonderful! Funniest man alive.

Next we had a pretty neat experience. We work in the apartment complex called "The Nottingham Green" and it is the most diverse place you'll ever see. We run into tonss of Arabians. Well, there is this one lady in specific that we have seen like 5 times. She doesn't speak a lick of English, but she always smiles and stops to try to talk to us. She points to our tags and says "Jesus, I love Jesus." Well, with that being said we decided after seeing her so many times that we wanted to get her a Book of Mormon in Arabic for her. Miracle of the week, the second we came into NG she was there walking with her son. We quickly pulled over and jumped out of the car to give her the Book. She invited us in but we had another meeting to be to. We decided to stop by on Sunday to teach her though, and she was darling. She brough us out Mountain Dew's on a platter. Then she was skyping her sister and just was smiling as she told her sister about us. We couldn't really teach her, but we did invite the spirit in her house. We got lds.org pulled up for her to read, and we sang the classic "I am a Child of God." Someday she'll be baptize :) Someday when I learn arabic I'll teach her the rest of what we believe. So far I know how to say Jesus Christ, Book of Mormon, Hello/Goodbye, and count to 5. :) It's a start right?? Haha

Next exciting thing was the Noche de Hogar(family night) with Maria and Javier. It went WONDERFULLY! We taught L3 (the gospel) with Senor Huevo (our good little friend Mr. Egg). It's a fun little object lesson that we like to use for teaching lesson 3. Well, as nervous as we were to teach in front of all these people, (especially our Ward mission Leader, the intimidating one) it ended up going perfectly! At the end everybody shared what they remembered about their baptisms. Hermana Ramirez shared hers and it was absolutely perfect for Maria. She went through the exact things that Maria is struggling with right now, which is that ALL her family is catholic. Well, little did Hermana Ramirez know that she was sharing exactly what Maria needed to hear. Truly it was such a miracle! Javier by the end was so cute saying that he wished he could be baptized again! It is AMAZING where he has come. If you don't remember Javier is the one that is a member, but really had know idea what baptism even meant at that point. His testimony is UNBELIEVABLE, and it has been so fun to work with those two. It'll be perfect, because one year after Maria's baptism they can go through the temple and that'll be right when I get home! I'll just fly straight to Virginia :) AHHH they're just the cutest little couple ever. This week has been full of MIRACLES with them!

I hope that those stories made a little bit of sense. It's hard because I feel like to share one part of the story I have to share it all, but then it becomes FAR to long. Just trust me when I say that MIRACLES happen thousands of times a day. The experiences I am having here are STUNNING. I am so grateful to be a representative of our Lord and Savior for these short 18 months. I can't believe that 5 months have already passed! Ahhh I am so grateful for the experience to be here in Virginia, and still look forward to Argentina. Although... my ward mission leader is from there and he has me pretty nervous for their now. He said they have no patience there, and that they talk a million miles and hour. He's so mean to me... telling me all the things I don't want to hear! ;) Goofball. Hahaha Who know's when I'll get there... but the time will come!

Love you all so much! Hope all is going well :) It's so fun to hear about how you're all doing. Keep up the great work back there in good ole UTAH :) LOVE AND MISS YOU ALL TONS AND TONS!