Merry Christmas! (and you will never guess where I am...)

December 22, 2014

wow so this week has been super crazy.  Where do I begin...well Tuesday morning we were told that the entire zone had to be in Guayaquil by 8pm with a change of clothes and our temple recommends.  So we spent the afternoon traveling and spent the night in Guayaquil because Wednesday we all got to go through the temple!  It was a really neat Christmas present.  The entire mission got to go, with different zones going different days, and Santa Rosa and Machala went on Wednesday.  It was so nice to go, since I hadn´t gone in 6 months.  It was even nicer, because I realized that there was a group of missionaries finishing and going home on Thursday, and in that group were two of my former (and favorite) companions, Hermana Carollo and Hermana Herrera, my trainer.  And I got to see them both!  I got to talk to Hermana Carollo for a few minutes there in the temple hotel, but I just saw Hermana Herrera for about five seconds, literally, just long enough to give her a big hug and the note I wrote for her.  It´s so sad to think that my trainer has already finished her mission.  After going through the temple and eating lunch and everything, we went back to Santa Rosa.  Right before I left, the people in the office gave me some mail...and my package that you sent me!  I got it just in time for Christmas.  I was really really really really happy. :D

...but the locura doesn´t stop there!  The next morning I got a phone call in the middle of personal study from my zone leader, and the first thing he asked was how long I´d been there in Santa Rosa.  All I thought was "FREAK I´ve got cambios".  Then he asked how long it takes to go from Santa Rosa to Guayaquil, and I was just like "freeeeaaaaaakkk I totally have cambios".  And then the famous line in the mission that I think every zone leader is obligated to use when they´re about to tell someone they have cambios: "Hermana, ¿tiene algo para apuntar?" ("Hermana, do you have something to write with?") and I was just "freaking bestia tengo cambiossss".  So yup, Thursday, exactly a week before Christmas, I got cambios and left Santa Rosa after 3 months there.  Hermana Macahuachi was so sad that she started crying.  That made me really sad because I was really excited to be with her for Christmas for the second year in a row.  I love her so much.  We were only together for a month. :(  But yeah, so we got to Guayaquil and I waited a while until my companion showed up.  But we were a little confused, because my companion was the one who had cambios as well, o sea, she didn´t have a sector either.  We thought we were going to open a sector somewhere, but as it turns out, we were going to be in a trio in...you´ll never guess...Cuenca!  I went back to Alamos, my first sector there in Cuenca.  Yup.  That´s right.  I left Cuenca to go back to Santa Rosa, and then only left Santa Rosa to go back to Cuenca.  I thought they were joking when they told me.  But yeah, after nine months I´m back in Alamos.  It´s actually really cool, because I was only here for 5 weeks (my shortest time in any sector) but everyone remembers me and is all happy to see me.  That makes me feel good, and a little confused, since I didn´t talk much.  It´s interesting being in a trio.  My new companions are Hermana Arizala from Esmeraldas, a province in Northern Ecuador (I think that´s the Quito North mission), and Hermana Petersen from Utah, who I actually talked to on facebook over the summer when I was home and she just had her mission call.  They´re both really great and the three of us get along really well.  

It´s exciting to be back in Cuenca.  It´s cold, but I still have plenty of warm clothes from the last two times I was here (que bestia).  I love you all and can´t wait to talk to you on Thursday.  Have a holly jolly Christmas and make good choices!

Love,

Hermana Iverson

A fun birthday

December 15, 2014

The Birthday girl!

Wow so this week has been busy.  Wednesday was the big day!  When I woke up and walked outside of our room, I saw that my cute little companion had made me a little birthday banner and had taped it to the wall directly outside of our bedroom.  It was literally so cute.  Then later after we started our companionship study, she pulled out of nowhere an adorable handmade birthday card with a little box of chocolates!  I was dying from the cuteness.

We had to go to the chapel with all the rest of the missionaries in the afternoon to practice the opening and closing hymns that we were going to sing in the Christmas devotional that night.  We all had to wear green, but a sister in the branch was going to help us out by making us some dresses since neither of us had any clothing that was green.  She was going to give them to us at 5, but when we got out of the practice at 5 and we still hadn´t heard anything, we tried calling her, but she never answered.  We started freaking out a little bit.  So we went to her house, but her mom told us that she wasn´t there, and that she´d gone to her classes early to finish the dresses or something and that she didn´t bring her phone.  We started freaking out even more.  We had to go to the house and look for something to put on.  Later as the devotional was about to start and people were starting to arrive, Thalía (the member) ran in and grabbed us and took us straight to the bathroom to change.  Right in the nick of time we got our green dresses!  They were really cute.  Everyone loved them, especially since we matched.  We´ve been trying to think of something really nice to do for her for helping us out on such short notice.  But yeah, the rest of the devotional was really nice.  The choir sang really well, and even though they were the same songs as last year, I understood them a lot better this time.  It was neat.  Afterward, we had to bring some of the hermanas from the choir to our house, but as they were assigning us which hermanas would be going with us, the mission president´s wife told us to wait there and to not leave.  We found out that they were going to take us out for pizza for my birthday!  So we got to go out with them, and they got us pizza and ice cream.  That was really fun.  

It got interesting the next morning though.  We woke up to find that they had cut the water!  And we had four more people in our house!  We ended up going without water for almost two days, but the second day was unnecessary.  Turned out that the water had come back, but when the dueña came and was trying to see why the water stopped, she had left the water turned off, so when it came back we still didn´t have any.  We finally went to look in the afternoon, and we were really embarrassed.  

oops think I ran out of time gotta go, sorry they haven´t told me anything about calling yet.

bye love you

Hermana Iverson

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