Happy Birthday Katie!

December 8, 2014

Welp, not much really happened this week...it was actually not that great.  The work was a little slow, and the attendance on the part of our investigators was practically nonexistent.  We have some things to improve and to change.  But we´re really excited for the mission choir coming on Wednesday!  We have to wear green, and a girl in the branch offered to make me and my companion matching dresses.  We´re really excited, I hope they turn out well.  Today we went and got our nails done (see pictures below) for my birthday and for the choir.  It´s not exactly the design I had in mind, but it looks nice. 

Last night we went to the Christmas Devotional broadcast from the First Presidency.  That was nice.  Mostly for the music, since that doesn´t get translated.  I love Spanish, and I have almost no problems now understanding it, just that sometimes it´s just nice to hear things in your native language, especially something as nice as Christmas hymns.

I still can´t believe I´m turning 21!  I still feel like maybe I´m turning 16 or 17.  People who meet me still think so too.  The lady who painted our nails thought I was turning 18. >.>  But hey, it´s all good.  It´s still weird to think I´m an adult.  Hm.

Love,
Hermana Iverson

¡Es diciembre! (It´s December!)

December 1, 2014

Studying her scriptures

We also found a baby lizard yesterday...so that was fun

 I´m so excited that it´s December!  It´s the best month of the year, pues.  This month is going to be super great.  Last year the mission put on a Christmas choir that traveled throughout the entire mission, and this year they´re going to do the same thing.  But I´ve been really excited, because I found out they´re scheduled to come to Santa Rosa next Wednesday, on my birthday!  I´m going to see my ñaña, Hermana Whitmore, and I´m going to get to hear a super great Christmas program.  It´s going to be sweet.

This week, I got another card from Sis. Poelman!  It was really cute and pretty, and she mentioned that Jezelle Cutia came home on the 19?  Jezelle´s already home?!  That´s pretty strange.  These missions just keep getting shorter and shorter.  But yeah, I really loved the card.  She got the letter I sent them, so that made me happy.  

Welp, being hermana leader isn´t too different after all.  It´s not exactly like district leader, but I guess you could say that, but it just means that you´re leader over the hermanas.  Like you´re there to help them with anything they need and to help them improve and such.  There are only two companionships of hermanas in the zone, and the other hermana leader is in the other companionship, so we don´t really have to do much.  Just now I´ve had to talk in all the meetings, so that´s a little more stressful.

Not much else going on here.  It´s getting sunnier (and hotter) here, so I´m getting even MORE tanned. You should see my tanline on my feet.  I´ll send a picture next week.  

Love you all, and I´m glad to hear that Thanksgiving went well, if not a little different.  Try not to kill yourself with Christmas!  Send me pictures! I love you all and expect many birthday wishes next week, hehehe jk (kind of)

Love,

Hermana Iverson

A Year in the Mission

November 24, 2014

So it´s been an interesting week.  I finally got my companion, and no, it´s not Hermana Davenport; but I thought that maybe it´d be her as well (but then I remembered that she´s currently studying in college right now, so she wouldn´t be coming back a month before the semester ends).  My companion is...Hermana Macahuachi!  When I started my mission in Rama 1, she was in Rama 2 with Hermana Almeida, the hermana from Uruguay.  She was the first sister missionary I ever lived with or met in the mission.  She´s from Peru, and she´d gone home to have surgery on her knee, and after being home for 7 months she came back last Monday, and I got to be her first companion back.  We´re both really happy, because she´s super sweet and adorable and funny and we get along really well.  Since she´s been gone for so long and I now technically have more time in the mission, I became senior companion for the first time in my entire mission. But it won´t be too bad, because I´m with Hermana Macahuachi so we´re basically like on the same level and she´s just really awesome.

So, all week we had been getting weird phone calls from the zone leaders asking for random things or random questions or whatever, and Thursday we got even more weird phone calls, asking for different papers and if we´d had interviews with Presidente Torres in the last capacitación 2 weeks before.  Finally they called us to tell us to be in our chapel at 4:30pm, and we figured what was going to happen.  Sure enough, we went and saw missionaries from both zones there in Santa Rosa, and Presidente was there interviewing people.  It was a little random, but pretty neat to have an interview with him, since I didn´t have one three weeks ago.

Well, I had a big surprise yesterday.  As I was getting ready yesterday morning to leave to pass for our investigators before church, I get a phone call from the zone leaders saying that I am now hermana leader, and that I have to travel to Guayaquil for consejo de lideres right after church, and that I´d have to coordinate with the other hermana leader, Hermana Mojica, the nurse in Arenillas, to go together.  It was kind of insane.  I had to pack for two days and nights, in case we had to spend the night in Arenillas upon arriving from Guayaquil, and after church we had to go to Arenillas to drop off my companion with Hermana Mojica´s companion and from there, we had to run to catch the bus going to Guayaquil that the zone leaders were already on, and then we made the drive to Guayaquil, coming in around 6pm.  Today, we had consejo, my first one.  It was pretty cool.  I liked it.  It was just strange that I was finally there, especially since I had had like zero warning.  So once again, I´m writing in the bus terminal in Guayaquil.  Fun stuff.

Tomorrow I´m going to hit a year in the mission, in total.  I can´t believe that I really already have a year.  It went by so fast.  I hope you all have fun with Thanksgiving this week!  

Love you lots,

Hermana Iverson

Buenos días de Guayaquil...

November 17, 2014

So I´m actually writing you from Guayaquil, because last night my companion had cambios!  We were together for 10 weeks--my second-longest companionship in my entire mission (no one´s beat Hermana Herrera´s record of 12 weeks yet).  She went to Alamos, my first sector that I had in Cuenca!  So I told her to look up a few of my converts there.  Right now, I´m waiting with the enfermeras from the office until my companion comes in.  We have to be at the airport at 1pm, so I don´t know if she´s coming back to the mission after being sent home, or if she´s coming in from Galápagos.  We´ll see.

This week we have (con la ayuda de Dios) two baptisms!  One of them is a 12-year-old girl named Kerly that´s super sweet and has been on our minds my entire time here in Santa Rosa.  She almost got baptized before, but they were having some crises in their family that made it difficult for her to progress.  Now, her mother is more open to the idea of going to church, and yesterday was even all excited to go and got ready on time and went with their neighbors, who are members, and were there 9 o´clock on the dot (punctuality is a rare and precious thing here).  Kerly is really excited to be baptized.  This is exactly what her family needs right now.  This will help her mother have the peace and comfort that she needs during these trials that she´s going through.  The other person getting baptized is a man named José, who is a little confused and facing a lot of tests and temptations.  Both Hermana Gutiérrez and I felt that now is his time that he needs to be baptized, but my new companion and I are going to have to help him to see that.  Pray for him, for both of them, that everything works out well.

This letter I got a letter from Bhargavi!!  It got here super fast.  I really loved it and it made me miss her and all of my friends so I had to kind of stop reading it so it wouldn´t make me trunky hahaha.  But really though, I have the best friends in the world.  I´m so glad and grateful to know such wonderful people and have them in my life.

Well, we were going to go to a wedding today...the elders have a family they´ve been teaching and today the parents are getting married so that they can get baptized this week.  I was really excited to go...but now we won´t get back in time.  Sad.  I donated two rings I had that I wasn´t using for the ceremony, and I was hoping to see...but it´s okay.  I´ll see their baptism at least.

Other than that, it´s been a normal week.  Now I´m just waiting to see who my new companion is!  

Les amo mucho y pienso en ustedes frecuentemente (pero no demasiado, tengo que enfocarme también) y en toda la familia.  Sé que ésta es la Iglesia de Jesucristo y que el Libro de Mormón es verdadero y la palabra de Dios.  Estoy muy agradecida por todo lo que mi Padre Celestial ha hecho para mí, y quiero siempre hacer lo correcto para que vuelva a Su presencia otra vez.

Con mucho amor y cariño,
Hermana Iverson

Just a few things happened this week

November 10, 2014

Just a few things happened this week.  The most eventful thing was that Tuesday was insane.  We had a capacitación (training meeting) with Presidente in Machala, with all four zones here in El Oro.  We found out Monday night that we had to be in Machala seated in the chapel at 7:45am--Machala is about an hour away in bus.  So we woke up super early to get ready and leave to meet the elders to get the bus, and we saw that they had all brought extra backpacks; apparently the zone leaders had told them to bring an overnight bag with extra clothes because we were going to stay the night.  They had forgotten to mention that to us.  We had to rush to the house and pack some stuff really fast and race back to the bus stop, but the elders didn´t wait for us since we were already late.  So we got a bus by ourselves, without knowing where it was that we needed to get off.  We had the streets and we kept asking, but the bus driver wasn´t helping us.  We finally got off who knows where, and asking where these streets were.  Someone tells and we start walking.  And walking.  And walking.  And we never got there and had no idea if we were even close.  We stopped again after walking for 6 blocks to ask where this darn chapel was and found out we were sooooooo far off that it wasn´t even funny.  We finally just got a taxi, and managed to get there just at 8am.  We were a little frustrated, you might say.  The worst part?  We didn´t even stay the night.  After lunch, we got to go back to Santa Rosa.  But the good news is that I saw my trainer, Hermana Herrera!  She´s there in Machala, training again (I have a sister in the mission!).  We were so frazzled trying to get there that it didn´t even occur to me that she being in Machala would mean that I would see her there, so I was pleasantly surprised to see her.  She´s so fantastic.  I really love her.

We had the Halloween party this last Friday!  We had some issues with the budget that was a little stressful, but at the end we managed to get everything done.  We had told people it would be starting at 6pm so that by 7pm they would start showing up and we could get started, but it was 7:30 and we were really nervous that no one was going to come.  It was nearly 8pm when there was finally enough people to start.  We´ve decided that we´re going to tell people 4pm for the next activity so that we can actually get started on time.  But it was really fun!  We had a few games planned that were really fun, and there was music, and candy, and cake (that we made super last minute that afternoon, but turned out okay), and some chicken sandwiches that a sister made as a refreshment.  It was a success.  We´re going to get started early planning for Christmas...

Also, funny story.  Yesterday in Relief Society, I started dozing off by accident since I was really tired (bad sleep the night before).  Just as I´m really relaxed, my companion chucks her little hymnbook at me from two chairs away.  I woke with a start, nearly jumping out of my chair, and we both start laughing super hard as quietly as we can.  After two minutes of hardcore laughing, the teacher finally stops and asks us what the big joke is.  My companion had to tell her what happened.  It was so funny.  Moral of the story:  don´t fall asleep in church, or you´ll get hymnals thrown at you.

Other than that, not much else happened.  Just that in exactly one month from today is my birthday!  I can´t believe I´m almost 21.  I still feel like a teenager.

welp take care folks!

Love,
Hermana Iverson

buenas de Ecuador

November 3, 2014

Well first of all, I didn´t get to write last week what we did for P-day.  We had gone to the house of some members for lunch, and they basically live in a school, where they provide lunch for the faculty--it was a little confusing.  But we played in the jungle gym, and we went to the back where they had tire swings.  That was really fun.  I finally got on one and they were pushing me really high and it was really exciting.  Also, last week I was so excited, I finally learned the words to the song "La Cucaracha"!  I´m so excited to shock and amaze everyone when I get home.  A lot of people don´t even realize that there are words haha.

This week, we were working really hard to find new investigators and to invite more people to be baptized.  Something that we tried was to turn it into a competition--whoever invited less people to be baptized in one day had to buy ice cream for the winner.  I kind of bought a lot of ice cream for my companion this week...got to shape things up.  We´ve also been working with these family history pamphlets that are really neat, where you can fill out your information and also put the information for your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.  I´ve really enjoyed that.  

Halloween was very uneventful and disappointing.  They do less than nothing here.  It was very sad.  I at least wore my orange shirt with black...I also ate one candy when we got back to the house.  So sad. *sniff*  But hey, at least we have the ward activity this week that we´re organizing!  It´s gonna be really fun.  Here, they celebrate more Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).  It´s not like what we learned in school, here it´s more that people travel to where their family members who have passed away are buried and go to pray at their grave to honor them, or something like that.  It happened to be Sunday, so a lot of people were traveling that day, making it hard to bring them to church.

Other than that, we just ate a lot of fish this week.  Like, almost every day.  It was ridiculous. 

Love,
Hermana Iverson

A short note

October 27, 2014

Welp, I forgot to mention last week that a member gifted us some big, really nice maps of Ecuador!  So now I have a super cool map to hang up when I get home.  Also, last week I also learned how to make arroz con leche.

This week the only big news is that we both got sick, starting on Tuesday.  I had a killer headache the first day, general fatigue the second day with a slight headache, and the third day onward I´ve had a runny nose.  The third day my companion started to get really sick.  It´s not been a super fun week in our house. 

This weekend was district conference (=stake conference, but it´s not a stake yet).  The mission president, Presidente Torres, came with his counselors and spoke.  It was really neat.  There were more people than general conference.  They literally ran out of room to put chairs to seat all the people.  It was great.  I also found a new hermana that just arrived whom I had talked to on facebook when I was home, telling her about the mission and stuff, and I had found out that she knew Raquel!  They were in the same ward when they were little.  I saw her there!  I also found an elder that´s in Raquel´s ward, an elder Forrest.

well just ran out of time I´ll write more next week. :( love you,

Hermana Iverson