Speak English, Called Spanish, Teaching in Arabic

Dearest Family,

 

How is everyone doing? I miss your faces and things..

 

Life is going good here in the great San Antonio Area. Let me sum it up.

 

I was with Sister Christianson in the Monte Vista Spanish Area last week on exchanges. It was a BLAST! I didn't understand a whole lot, but Sister Christianson who as been down in Del Rio for 4.5 months speaking Spanish said that she still didn't get much more than me. I feel like I'm ready for a Spanish area. My mouth is aching to speak Spanish like a native. Probably won't ever be able to speak quite like the natives, but I can always try :)

 

Sister Christianson said that they always see miracles on their exchanges, so we were watching for them. There was one door that we knocked on, and a Hispanic looking women opened the door with two dark curly haired little girls. Sister Christianson asked "English or Spanish?" the Women responded "Arabic." ...uhh...we did not get trained for that! But we were able to talk to her about mormon.org and asked if she had a computer. "Laptop?" she asked and she invited us to come in. We got on Mormon.org only to find that there is not Arabic on it. She had her daughter run next door and she brought back a man who spoke Arabic and English. He was a translator for three months, so his English was not super well, but we asked if she wanted to learn more, and she said that she did. And so we started teaching the first lesson. With an Arabic translator. Speak English, called Spanish, teaching in Arabic. Cool. We're not actually sure how much of the first lesson went through to her since the translator was struggling to understand us, but she seemed to be interested. Mostly she wanted to talk about how different the U.S. from her home.

 

After quite some time and a few wide-eyed stares at each other, Sister Christianson asked me, "what should we do?" I responded, "they need to know about the first vision." And so we started to lead into it. We talked about the many churches. It was translated. We talked about Joseph's family and his confusion. It was translated. We showed a picture of the first vision from my picture book. It started to get translated. The man who was interpreting for us, who stated he was not religious, started to tell the women about the vision in the middle of my saying it, then turned and looked at me and the picture and said "wait, did this really happen?!" Sister Christianson and I nodded. We finished the vision and he took the picture and showed it to the women explaining what had happened to Joseph. He turned to look at us again "this is very weird to us" he said. "Things like this don't happen normally where we are from." Us either friend.

 

We set up an appointment for them again on Saturday. It'll be exciting to see what happened. We called the mission office and found out they already had an Arabic Book of Mormon waiting for us. Weird. God is so smart. I wonder why they don't have Arabic missionaries here. I've heard there's quite the population of them in San Antonio. Interesting.

 

Right before our exchange, Sister Young and I taught our YSA fhe. It was a missionary night and it went really well. We're trying to get the members involved in Preach My Gospel more. It all comes down to their testimonies.In order to do that, we had a Preach My Gospel activity with some of our memebers preparng to go on missions and some others we've been working with. We assigned each of them a section from the first lesson and gave them a few minutes for them to read through it and prepare. Then we taught a first lesson. It was neat for each of the members break out and teach. After we talked about bearing our testimonies and how they can strengthen each other.We had them all pair up and share their testimony of something. It was WAY neat. And so I issue you a challenge. Everyone who is reading this, find a way to share your testimony with three people this week. Family, member or nonmember. Try it, you'll like it!

 

We also have been teaching Conner, I mentioned him last week. He's the boyfriend of one of our members. He has been our most proactive investigator. He asked us a lot of questions about being a missionary his first lesson. He's already been challenged to be baptized and serve a mission by the Bishop. We'll see. Right now he's mostly hesitant because his parents aren't happy about him taking the lessons. It's rough.

 

Sister Monica Rogers, the Sister I told y'all about a few weeks back who was helping us with activity ideas is moving to Idaho. And so we've inherited he food. And dishes. And other goodness. We won't have to shop for weeks now!

 

Well family. I miss y'all lots. Any mail is good.

Take care!

 

Hermana Cheyenne