This week was really good

October 20, 2014

This week was really good.  On Wednesday, we did splits with the other hermanas in the zone and I got to visit their sector in Arenillas!  It was really hilly for being in the coast.  The people there are really excited to have hermanas, because there weren´t any before this last transfer 6 weeks ago (oh yeah today starts a new transfer, so we´ll see if there are cambios or not, so far no phone call).  They´re also very generous...for example, about half an hour before we had to go eat lunch in a member´s house, we went to visit some less actives nearby.  They apparently like the hermanas very much and are excited to help them, because they generously offered us lunch.  And by offered I mean they served it on the table and then told us to come and eat, leaving us with no choice.  We couldn´t offend them, so we ate the soup with the plate of rice with a fried egg (rice with fried egg is super good by the way).  Already full, we had to go eat the other hermana´s lunch that she was preparing for us.  It was so sad, because we literally could not eat it.  We were dying.  We managed to make it through the soup, but that second plate, with the rice, and the HUGE chunk of yuca (I seriously hate yuca)---there was no way.  So we managed to talk the hermana into letting us take it with us in little plastic baggies, to "eat for dinner".  It did end up being somebody´s dinner later, but not ours...

Also, we had a baptism this Saturday!  We´ve been working with a little girl in a part-member family who was the only one that needed to get baptized.  Justine is such a sweet little girl.  Her family was inactive, and we´ve been teaching them and helping them come back to church.  Their 14-year-old son got sustained to be ordained to the priesthood yesterday, but they left church an hour early and they couldn´t confer it to him...oops.  But point being, we´re super happy for all of them.

The missionaries are going to put on a Halloween party as a missionary activity in the branch!  We were planning it out and everything yesterday, and we´re really excited for it.  Do you have any ideas for treats we could make?

The only other exciting news I have is that I bought a hammock today for $10!  It´s pretty rad.

I really hope I don´t have cambios today, but we´ll see how things go.  Love you!

Hermana Iverson

sorry I don´t write very often anymore...

October 13, 2014

I think I might just make another bullet list, just because it´s easier:

• Monday night I dyed my hair, since it was getting really light again, but I kind of got a little distracted and let it sit for an extra 20 minutes before I remembered and washed it out.  It was looking pretty much black those first couple of days.  It´s still pretty dark, but looking a little more normal now.
• On Tuesday I got mail!  I got your card that you [from Mom] sent from Alaska!  I really loved it.  It was just what I needed.  I also got Mandy´s wedding announcement, ironically five days after her wedding.  And I got a letter from Jonathan Sevy.  It was nice to have that much mail all at once.
• I learned how to make tortillas this week!  My family´s going to be so happy when I get home and make them for them.  It´s nice having a Central American companion that knows how to cook.
• I finished off the last of my peanut butter stash...send help
• I found out that the word for heart attack in Spanish is "infarto".  Just about died when I heard that. ("He´s dying from infarto!" hehehehe)
• On Friday we went to another baptism in the river in Arenillas.  It was pretty cool.
• Yesterday during sacrament meeting, this old guy just walked into the chapel holding an almost 3-liter bottle of coca cola, saw us sitting nearby, and wordlessly handed it to my companion before walking away to find a seat.  I just started laughing because it was so weird.  I´m still laughing, it was so funny.

Welp, that was just about everything this week.  I love you all very much and I´m sorry if this letter was a little boring.

Love,

Hermana Iverson

Woooo this week was interesting

October 6, 2014

We found an iguana at lunch yesterday, I was terrified to touch it!

Woooo this week was interesting.  Long before Conference started, we got a phone call Tuesday night saying that early the next morning we would have to travel to Guayaquil for my visa.  We left our house at 3:40am and ended up waiting for an hour before we finally got a bus to Guayaquil.  We got there (in 3.5 hours!? crazy fast) and there were a few other missionaries there from my companion´s group (the group that came one cambio before mine).  That´s when we found out that we were actually there for my companion´s visa, not mine.  Don´t know how they got that mixed up.  So my companion goes with the rest of them to get her visa taken care of and comes back within an hour.  As we were waiting to leave, we get a phone call from the nurses saying that we´re to go to the mission office to have an interview with presidente about a medical issue that my companion had told the nurses about.  So we go to the office, wait to talk to him, go in and talk with Presidente, wait for the nurses there in the office to get there, they show up, we wait for them as they wait to talk to Presidente, they talk to him, then one of the nurses goes with my companion to get some blood tests done or something and I wait there with her companion.  We ended up leaving Guayaquil at 5pm and got to Machala at 9pm.  Then we couldn´t find another bus to Santa Rosa, so we had to call a member who has a taxi, and he ended up coming to pick us up.  We got home at 10pm.  A really long day in Guayaquil.
 

Saturday morning we had a baptism!  Luis Chamba, a 16-year-old kid that we taught, got baptized before conference.  It was really great and everything went well.  We had a chocolate cake that we had made and it was super yummy.

General Conference was much better this time around!  We got to see Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday.  I was so happy.  It was so neat that that elder from Uruguay spoke, and in Spanish!  It really threw me off because all of a sudden there wasn´t anyone translating for him, but it was still in Spanish.  I was very nicely surprised to see that now people are giving talks in their native language.  Also, I think it was Sunday...afternoon?  I can´t remember, but on Sunday there was an elder Carlos A. Godoy that spoke in Portuguese, and I was really excited to see him because he spoke to us in the MTC almost a year ago, and I had really really enjoyed his talk.  I didn´t get to see the very end of the Sunday afternoon session, because there were a bunch of kids playing in the back of the room that were being really loud and disruptive, so we took them to the nursery with another hermana to play and keep them occupied.  So I missed Elder Bednar´s talk to nonmembers, and I really wanted to see that.  Could you send me his talk, as well as Elder Godoy´s?  There were more I wanted but I can´t remember now, I left my notebook in the house.

It was neat, because I got to see more people from Rama 1 again.  I got to take a picture with one of my favorite families from that branch, the familia Suri.  They were always really good friends with us, and they invited me to come over for lunch one day, but that´s the other zone now...so it´s a little harder to do that now. :(  I also saw one of my converts, Elvia Ramirez.  I had heard she was less active, but she just showed up to the last session of Conference!  She also slept through all of it, but she always slept through church when we were teaching her.  She´s a little older...but hey, at least she went!

Today I´ve been doing a lot of reflecting, since it´s been 2 years today since they changed the age to go on a mission.  I feel like that was the day that changed my life.  If they still hadn´t changed it, I would probably still be waiting for my mission call right now.  I´m so grateful for the chance I´ve had to leave earlier on my mission, and for the people I´ve met in this last year.  This Thursday will mark a year since I left on my mission.  I may not have a year in total, but oh well.  At least I´m here.

I love you mom and I´ll talk to you soon!

Love,

Hermana Iverson

A bullet-list for Mom and Dad

September 29, 2014

I´m gonna bullet-list it, because I´m short on time:

• my camera/memory cards are going nutzo--last week, the one I was using locked up the photos in a private file and I don´t know how to change it back, and this week after taking a bunch of photos of a really cool baptism IN A RIVER, the card decided it had a virus or something and now won´t open period.  We really really really need those photos.  Gahhhhhhh.
• in other news, we had a baptism in a river!  It was like a last minute thing, because she almost got baptized two weeks ago with the elders, but we passed by on Thursday and asked why she didn´t get baptized, and we talked to her for a while, and she agreed to get baptized that Saturday, two days later.  It was a really neat experience.  I´m excited for her (her name is Genesis).
• there was also a District Youth Conference (they aren´t big enough to be a Stake) on Saturday, so I ended up seeing a lot of the youth from Rama 1, with whom we were really good friends with, and it was soooooo nice to see them.  The young women were all really excited to see me, and I saw some of the other members that we were really close with.  I was sooooo happy to see all of them. :)
• What are the report dates for Jonathan Sevy and Jacob (primo)?  I want to mark them on my little calendar.
• This is for both you and Dad: What is your testimony of keeping the Sabbath Day?  What testimony do you have of the blessings you´ve received from keeping it?
• last night we had a family home evening, and it ended up being almost all just youth, and we played a game that I taught them that I learned as a kid called "down by the banks" and my conclusion is that it does not matter where you go that game will always be popular
• tell dad I promise I´ll write him next week, I always get far behind
• love you

Katie

sorry I haven´t sent y´all an email in a while...

September 22, 2014

Welp, this week...I can´t remember what happened.  Today was fun!  And at the same time not... :/

First, the fun part: we went to visit the mayor´s house/farm!  There´s a member in the ward who´s kind of famous, as in everybody knows him (everyone calls him "Cholo" it´s so funny to me hehe), who works as a gardener there and he invited us there to visit.  We got a tour of the grounds and saw some llamas that were just hanging out in a little forest in the back, we got to explore the cacao orchard that was behind the grove thing and ate some of the cacao (when you crack it open, there are a bunch of seeds covered in this white stuff that you can eat, and later they use those seeds to make chocolate and stuff), said hi to the monkey, had the tour guide hit on my companion big time (it was really funny and really awkward at the same time), and after we left, we had a little picnic with the member that accompanied us.  So that was pretty neat!

The not so fun part: Afterwards, we came back to print out our emails and I checked to make sure if I still had my photos (last week I realized after writing that all of my photos had disappeared and someone told me they were just in a hidden file that I couldn´t open on my camera--luckily they were right), and when I saw they were still there, somehow all of the photos that I had taken in the last week--including all of the photos I took today of our outing--actually did get erased.  So I can´t even send you photos of the stuff we did today.  I´m still annoyed about that.  Then later we went to go to the other zone to go grocery shopping and print photos, but since my sd card has gone psycho this week it wouldn´t open right away and apparently we didn´t have time to print photos anymore.  I was even more annoyed.  But oh well, I´ll be fine.  Hopefully I´ll be able to next week...

Other than that, I´ve been enjoying the usually cool weather here.  Oh, on Saturday I got to see two members from Rama 1 that were really special for me and Hermana Herrera when we were there: first I saw the husband of a family that used to give us lunch on Tuesdays that we were really close with (we passed his parked car and I suddenly heard someone yell "Hermana Iverson!"  I was really confused until I saw him sitting there in the car we were just passing haha).  About an hour later we went to eat lunch in the restaurant of one of the members, which is where we happened to eat that day, and her sister who is in Rama 1 happened to be there that day too!  She lived in Los Ceibos where Hermana Herrera and I worked, and she told me that of allllllll the many people that we taught and baptized in that sector, only one of them is still active in the church.  That was kind of sad...but it was really nice to see her! :P

I´m so glad you saw Raquel!  [Katie's cousin] Tell her I say hi and that I´m proud of her for giving her whole talk in English.  She told me a month ago that she was worried about going home because she literally hasn´t spoken in English her entire mission.  I was even worried for her myself haha.

Love you all,
Hermana Iverson

Back in Santa Rosa

September 15, 2014

Welp, I had an interesting week as well.  First of all, no, I´m not in Guayaquil; just whenever we have cambios we always have to travel there before going to our new sector--even if it would just be much faster to just go straight there.  I had to pack up all of my stuff in about an hour and a half, two hours and then travel back to Guayaquil--for the third time that day.  By the time my companion (for a day) and I got there, we were so exhausted it wasn´t even funny.  We then had to somehow carry all of our luggage alone between the two of us because the asistentes weren´t there to pick us up.  We were dying, running all over the bus terminal with all of our stuff to find the place where the missionaries always go but couldn´t find because we got turned around where we got dropped off.  Then we couldn´t call them because our phone was beyond dead and we didn´t have a charger (we always borrowed from the other hermanas...kind of makes you think of the 5 foolish virgins who didn´t bring enough oil), and they showed up an hour after we got there.  I was literally falling asleep standing up.  It was awful.  Welp, we spent the night in the house of some hermanas there in Guayaquil, and the next morning we went back and found out where we were going: I was going back to Santa Rosa, while my companion was going to open a sector in Arenillas, a town about half an hour away from Santa Rosa that´s usually just had elders.  So now I´m in Santa Rosa, but in Rama (branch) 3, when before I was in Rama1.  I´m with Hermana Gutiérrez, who is from Honduras and was actually here in Rama 3 when I was in Rama 1.  She came back about a month ago.  She´s a really great missionary and I´m excited to be her companion.  Right now it´s still the cool season here, so I got here and was shocked that it could actually be cool here.  About an hour ago it was actually kind of raining.  I´m wearing a sweater today.  It´s super weird.  And then there are days like yesterday where the sun was absolutely burning us at 8 o´clock in the morning.  That´s what you get.  But I guess next month it´s supposed to start getting really hot again, so we´ll see how that goes...

My foot´s doing alright...the week before last my ankle would just hurt if I walked too much, but it wasn´t like unbearable.  More just that it was a little annoying.  But after I got to Santa Rosa, it started to get swollen--like REALLY swollen.  I think it´s because it´s hotter here.  But now it doesn´t get so bad.  I went to a doctor on Friday and he took an x-ray and said that the fracture is almost completely healed back to normal, that the bone didn´t heal funny.  So that was a relief.  It still kind of hurts to walk for a while, but I´m supposed to be resting for an hour in the afternoon every day, so it works out.

Hermana Iverson 

A quick note...

September 8, 2014

hey mom I can´t write you right now we´ve literally had cambios all day like i´ve gone to guayaquil and back to cuenca and I have to pack all my stuff and go back to guayaquil I´m gonna try and get permission to write tomorrow im sorry love you talk to you soon

katie