Happy Easter/General Conference!

March 30, 2015

Reunited with her trio companionship

Reunited with her old district

Sorry for the short letter last week, but it´s going to have to be short again this week.  We had to go to Guayaquil again for consejo de lideres, and our bus leaves at 5pm for Loja.  

As for news, the weather was really weird again this week.  It would be really really hot and sunny in the afternoon, and then around 5-6 it would start to get cold and even rained some days.  It was very frustrating.  

It´s almost General Conference!  Woohoo!!!  We got to go to the women´s conference Saturday night (the connection was awful and it kept pausing for a minute or two and we´d have to wait until it started again) and it was really nice!  Talked a lot about families so that was nice.  It stopped working at the end, so we never heard Pres. Eyring´s talk.  That was a little sad.  But anyway, super excited for General Conference.  I hope we can bring people so we can see it.  

Other than that, I´ve been using a rosemary shampoo that one of my former companions gave me and that´s what´s been helping my hair grow so fast.  Super awesome.

Welp, gotta go, the other hermana has to write too.   Love you all and talk to you next week!

Hermana Iverson

A Very Short Letter

March 23, 2015

Michell's baptism

Well this week it rained.  A lot.  It was really weird and kind of annoying.  But the biggest news is that Michell got baptized this week!!!  She was really careful not to drink coffee this time, and we were able to help her resolve her other doubts.  It was really exciting.  

Welp...that was really about it.  Nothing much happened this week, just a lot of rain and the baptism.  Yup.

Oh and tomorrow´s Kinsey´s birthday (I CAN´T BELIEVE SHE´S 18), so tell her I say happy birthday!

Love you lots,

Hermana Iverson

A Pretty Interesting Week

March 16, 2015

Katie and her companion Hermana Quispe

Katie giving her former companion Hermana Risco her pin

Katie and Hermana Risco getting recognition from the mission president

Welp, the week started out pretty interesting.  Tuesday we had a capacitación with Presidente in Loja.  We had to be there by 7:45am, so we had to take the bus that left at 6am.  We woke up very early that day.  We were the first ones to get there, so we waited outside in the rain underneath a tree waiting for someone to come open the chapel.  One neat thing about the capacitacion was that since the two zones in Loja were there, I got to see Hermana Risco again, my last companion (she´s in Zamora)!  She´s a little cutie, she always calls me mamita since I finished her training.  And now she´s senior companion, even though both she and her companion barely just finished their 12 weeks of training.  Something they do here in our mission is that in every capacitacion, every missionary that´s finished their training receives a special pin of the mission logo, and their leaders get to put it on them, or their trainer if they´re still there.  And since I was there, and technically was her trainer, I got to give her her pin!  I was so excited to finally do it.  Later, they did something a little different, where they handed out certificates of recognition, and Hermana Risco and I received one for the most rescates (rescues: less actives that we´ve helped reactivate)!  So now I have a neat certificate and a little pin of the temple in Guayaquil.  Super cool.

This week the Relief Society president presented us to a family.  The wife had been receiving lessons from the missionaries several months ago, when she and her husband were separated.  In the end she didn´t get baptized, and at the beginning of this month she and her husband reconciled and are together again.  We´ve started teaching them, and the husband has agreed to be baptized if he feels ready--but we know he will, he´s a really good guy and really wants to follow Jesus Christ and help his family.  Just the wife feels a little nervous because of things that happened in the past and doesn´t want to do anything that will disrupt her family again.  We would really really really appreciate your prayers for them, so that they continue progressing.  They went to church yesterday and really liked it, so we hope things keep going up with them.

Well, some sad news is that Michell didn´t get baptized this last week...she drank coffee on Monday, so she couldn´t get baptized on Saturday.  She also had a lot of doubts (her abuela tells her a lot of things to get her not to do it and it confuses her).  We´re going to try talking to her again to try and help her to maybe get baptized this week.  She just really needs to have the desire to do it for her, and not for anyone else.  Feel free to pray for her as well.

Other than that, everything´s pretty normal.  We´re working here, and I hope things get better and that we can find more families and more people that are willing to repent and that are ready to accept the Restored Gospel in their lives.  We literally have the best thing in the world.  We don´t even realize how blessed we are just to have this knowledge.  The gospel is true.

I love you all very much,

Hermana Iverson

Both good and bad

March 9, 2015

Welp I have almost no time to write because I have been looking for a place to send a package to my house and people have been sending me all over Catamayo looking for one.  We spent a super long time in one place to have her tell me that for my 8 lb package, from here to california it would cost me $128...so obviously I didn´t send it, but I did spend half an hour there that I could have spent writing.  Super mad.

So yeah, this week was both good and bad.  Good, because we found a whole bunch of new investigators!  Woohoo!  But bad, because none of them went to church.  So we´re going to be working on that this week so that it doesn´t happen again.  No good finding new investigators if they don´t go to church.  But there are other good news!  Michell is getting baptized this week!  She´s an 11-year-old girl that we´ve been teaching; her twin sister and her younger brother are already members, and for a long time we thought she was a member as well.  But when we found out she wasn´t, we went to talk to her and invited her to get baptized and she was just like "yeah okay" and we were like "oh cool, sweet".  But she´s a sweet girl.  She´s actually been really excited, because she´s getting baptized on her birthday (she´s turning 12), so we´ve been planning on making cupcakes.

This week has been really sweet with my converts: Delia told us this week how even though she has 1,001 health problems, "she got baptized, so she has to keep going and enduring to the end."  It´s a wonderful feeling hearing one of your converts say that, especially if she´s an adorable tiny little old woman.  Also, Jesus got a Bible this week!  She´s been wanting one for a while, and a senior missionary couple had talked to her when they visited Catamayo last week, and this week since they were going home, President Pettingill sent his own Spanish Bible to Catamayo specifically to gift to her.  It was so so sweet, and she was so happy.  I love Jesus and Rodolfo.  They´re the sweetest couple.

Welp, gotta go now.  Talk more next week!

Love,

Hermana Iverson

I´m a mom! (wat)

March 2, 2015

Guayaquil Temple

Katie's new companion, Hermana Quispe

Katie with Hermana Whitmore who is going home

First of all, I CAN´T BELIEVE THAT IT KEEPS SNOWING IN CALIFORNIA WHEN I´M NOT THERE THIS IS SO FRUSTRATING.  It´s snowed in Temecula, and now it snowed in San Jose--I feel like at any moment I´m going to hear stories about snowboarding in San Diego.  Gosh darn.

Well the biggest news this week is that I HAVE AN HIJA NOW!!!  Or in other words, right after I wrote last week, at 6pm on the dot, we got a phone call saying that Hermana Risco had cambios and that I was going to train!!  We had been saying all week, Hna. Risco and I, that she was going to have cambios and that I was probably going to train.  But it was a little weird that that was exactly what happened.  So we had to go pack up her stuff super duper fast and barely left on the 7:15 bus for Loja (one of the very last buses to leave).  She ended up going to Zamora, in the other zone, and I left for Guayaquil with other trainers and missionaries who had cambios at about 10pm.  We got there to Guayaquil at about 6am, and the trainers went straight to the temple with the missionaries that were going home (one of them being Hna. Whitmore, my bff here in the mish; I never lived my dream of being her companion *sniff*).  I was so tired and gross and all I wanted to do was bathe and change my clothes, but there was no time; we ended up going to the temple, so I changed there (que vergüenza).  But woohoo!  I went to the temple this week. :)  But yeah, later we met the newbies and had the capacitacion (training meeting? I don´t know what it´s called in English) and then they assigned the companions.  My new companion is... *drum roll* ...Hermana Quispe, de Perú!  She´s from Arequipa, which is in the southern part of Peru.  She´s also 25 years old, and taller than me (that surprised me more than her age to be honest), so it´s kind of interesting.  She´s a little quiet, but really sweet and really excited to work.  We´re starting to open up a little more and we´re starting to get along really well (not to say that we didn´t get along, just that she´s a little reserved, like I said).  So yeah, I have an hija. :)

Nothing else really happened this week, just that exciting change.  I was a little nervous, but I think it´ll be fine.  I´ve reached a point where I pretty much know what I´m doing, and I know that the Lord will help me teach her what she needs to know.  We´ll see how this goes!

Love,

Hermana Iverson

Carnaval´s over now...back to normal

February 23, 2015

Straight hair!

This week had a lazy start.  Since Carnaval here lasts until Tuesday, we had to be inside the house by noon both Monday and Tuesday.  So after we wrote on Monday, we went straight to the house and were there alllllll afternoon.  We were supposed to clean the entire apartment, and as I had been putting something in the freezer I realized that there was so much frost and ice that I could barely stick the thing in there.  I therefore got to work getting as much ice out as I could.  We had to unplug the fridge and I had to pick at it with a spoon for about an hour before I could get most of it out.  I attached a picture of the ice, using the spoon as a gauge so you can see exactly how much was in that tiny little freezer (it´s just a tiny little compartment in the top of the fridge).  I sadly did not take picture before and after, that would have been more impressive.  But yeah, so that was the most exciting thing I did that day.  Tuesday, we went to the district meeting in the morning and then got to work for two hours and go to lunch, but then it was back to the house.  We were all supposed to do weekly planning that day as well, so we did that, but even then we had a lot of time, so I also straightened my hair (since I recently bought a hair straightener...surprise!) and in the evening I made tortillas.  They´re getting better.  I´m getting excited.  

Wednesday we finally could leave!  We were so excited, but we weren´t sure what we were going to do with so much time.  We kind of didn´t have any investigators, so we weren´t sure what to do.  The previous Saturday, we were in the same pickle, so we stopped and said a prayer before continuing.  After saying a prayer, we started walking, and Hna. Risco asked me where we were headed, and I just showed her 1 Nephi 4:6 ("And I went guided by the Spirit, not knowing beforehand what I would have to do.").  I´m so funny hehe.  But yeah, we just kind of kept walking in el centro, and then we got to an intersection and we both just kind of looked at each other and were like "...let´s go to the left".  So we did, and we passed the store of an hermana that I thought was a member, because her kids were always in the church.  We started talking to her and I found out that she wasn´t a member (apparently my companion already knew) since she isn´t married to the man she´s living with, but neither of us knew that of her twin daughters, one of them wasn´t baptized.  So we decided we were going to go talk to her Wednesday.  We went and asked her why she hadn´t gotten baptized with her sister or her little brother, and explained some of her questions and stuff, and after a few minutes, she was just like "Yeah, I´ll get baptized" and we were both like "wait...wat. ...CHEVERE" so we invited her to get baptized March 14, which just so happens to be her 12th birthday.  We´ve been teaching her every day, and she´s really excited.  She´s a little more shy and quiet than her sister, and a lot of elders have passed by to try and teach her in the last couple months, but I think she just needed some hermanas to invite her.  That happens sometimes.  But we´re really really excited, and very happy.

Delia's Baptism

Bueno, other than that, we did intercambios (...exchanges? idk missionary english is hard) again this last Friday, but this time I was in the other sector in Loja.  It was actually really sunny there.  It´s definitely colder in Cuenca, even on Cuenca´s sunny days.  But that went really well.  I had been planning on making tortillas for the zone meeting Saturday morning, so I had to bring the flour with me to make them there.  Our zone leader (who two weeks ago was our district leader here in Catamayo) is from Mexico, and every time he hears that I´m making tortillas he almost cries from sadness if he´s not there, or from joy if we´re making them for him.  He´s a cool guy.  I think he goes home this week...but we aren´t sure.  They never tell anyone the date that they´re going, even if you´re a week away from hitting 18 months or 2 years.  It´s a little weird, but that´s how it is here.

Oh I also got two packages this week!  One from I think the Activity Day girls from the Foothill Ward, and the other from Erin: she sent me some leftover nut goody!!!!!  I was really excited.

I´m so happy that I served a mission.  I´ve been able to learn things that I may never have been able to learn just as a normal person doing my things.  I think the reason for that is because here you really learn to completely rely on the Lord in everything you do, and you learn to depend on His Spirit to help you.  I´m not looking forward to when I can´t feel the Spirit every day like I do here, like how everyone says it´s like when you get home.  In two days I hit 15 months, which means I´ll only have 3 months left.  My companion just hit 3 months last week (she officially finished her training yesterday, and today there are cambios, so we´ll see if she goes or not), and I think about how fast the time went for her, and it makes me sad.  She just finished her first 12 weeks, where I just began my last 12 weeks.  Pero cuida´o!  Not trunky.  Just a little sad, and motivated to work a little bit harder.

Love you all so much!

Love,

Hermana Iverson

long time, no letter...

February 16, 2015

 

After being pelted by water balloons

(sorry for not sending a letter like this in so long, I keep forgetting/running out of time)

So we´re writing a lot earlier today because of Carnaval.  It´s a lot crazier here than it was in Cuenca.  There, it´s cold so everyone travels out of town to go to the beach, but here it´s hot and people are traveling to come HERE to party and whatnot.  I think I might have mentioned last year that what they do for Carnaval is throw water at people?  Welp, it´s way more common here than it was in Cuenca.  We escaped water balloons, water guns, trucks full of guys with buckets of water that drive around attacking people in the street.  Saturday was the day that it was "officially" carnaval (even though they´ve been playing for two weeks).  We passed through the park in the middle of the center (downtown, I guess you´d call it), where it was the craziest:  There were people all through there, soaking each other, throwing water balloons, spraying carioca (it´s basically a can of foam that you spray at people), and we somehow miraculously stayed dry.  I said to my companion "we are literally walking with angels today".  Buuuuuuuuuuuuut the next day, Sunday, was very very different.  We had so many people following us, trying to get us wet.  It was worse in the afternoon.  These last two days, we´ve had to be in the house by 6pm, and yesterday about an hour before we had to go back, we got straight up attacked.  I have a picture of me at around 5 o´clock, where I´m perfectly dry, and then a picture in the house at 6 o´clock where I´m completely soaked.  There were probably about a dozen people, men, women, and children, that were straight up chasing us with buckets of water.  I was yelling at everyone in English and no one understood me.  It was great.  We were with about 5 other sisters there in the branch, and alllllllll of us were so wet.  We went home about 10-15 minutes early, because it was just ridiculous.  

Today we only have until noon to write, but it´s better than last year; at least we got to write this time.

Well, that was pretty much all the news I had.  We´ve been super terrified and paranoid all week with everyone throwing water balloons and everything.  Y´all can keep on praying for me if you want, no complaints here...

Love you a lot and talk to you soon!

Hermana Iverson