Books and Puddles...

Dear Everyone,

How has the week gone for all of you?  We have had a good one here in Jacinto City.  It has been a little rainy...a little cold...but there's never a dull day in the mission field, right?  haha.

We had President's interviews this week.  With the new curriculum, we went from having interviews with him once a transfer (every six weeks) to once every three months.  so it felt like it had been forever since i'd been in interviews with him.  We spent most of it talking about the cyst the size of a grapefruit that had been surgically removed from one of the english sister's ovary.  nice.  Nothing like talking about ovaries to bond you to your mission President.  Hahahaha!  He and I always seem to have interesting conversations...haha.  I think it's probably my bad because he always asks what he can do for me and I always say nothing and so then it leaves him looking for something to talk about I guess. haha.  he's so funny.  But he's such a great guy, and he has really changed this mission.  We think that underneath his business exterior, he must be getting pretty trunky, because he goes home in june.

So, in all this rain, Gibson and I have been driving around a lot, visiting less actives and recent converts, and we've had some quality conversation time to really get to know each other.  What do a librarian and an english-major talk about you ask?  Books of course!  We had to make a list (i call it a "trunky list") of all the books we've told each other about so that we can read them when we get home.  and then we got laughing really really hard because we started to recognize a pattern in the books that we read...and that pattern was a little bit too illuminating into the secret desires/fears of our hearts...so that was funny.  (secret marriage mom!  you know i told her about it!)

Hermana Gibson is so funny because she always gets laughing really hard at sad things.  We just about died over the area book because some previous missionary had written about an investigator that, "he expressed sadness about his lack of Christmas memories as a child."  and Gibson just put her hand over her heart and said "that is so sad..." and then she just broke apart laughing.  She's hilarious.  Gibson and her dry comments are killing me.  During the lessons she'll just mutter something like "semantics" out of the corner of her mouth as someone brings up a completely erroneous doubt.  It's genious.  And so hard not to laugh at her at times like that!

We met a really cool girl this week!  in face we're going to teach her right after this.  she accepted baptism on the first lesson!  She's sixteen and her name is Ariatna.  More on that later.

We also accidentally dropped our phone in a puddle and it got ruined so we've been trying everything from sticking it in the freezer to leaving it in rice overnight and we finally gave up and called the mission office for a new one and right afterwards we decided to try charging it and ta da!  on it went!  we called back and they told us sorry, but they'd already called the phone company and it was going to be shut off... so after all that we're phoneless again.

the moral of the story is, sleep with your phone!  (mom, i knew we were right after all)

I'm out of time but i love y'all and have a good week!

p.s. I forgot:  I had a cool story I wanted to tell.  We're teaching a man named Manuel that has a lot of problems and was really badly hurt emotionally by his wife years ago.  He has TONS of questions and he kinda gets in his own way of learning sometimes - our lessons with him are so intense - i always come out sweating!  But he told us last night that he's been changing since he has been meeting with us.  He said that before, if a woman had approached him just wanting to talk to him, he would have cussed her out and told her to get away.  Then he said, "now God has sent me TWO women to teach me His ways."  haha he said "why couldn't I have gotten the boy missionaries that I always see here at the church?
...God just wanted me to listen to women I guess."  haha. (he was laughing and so were we) It was actually really cool.  He said that now he doens't have harsh feelings towards women in general anymore.  He's learning that we sincerely do want to help him.