Sister missionaries sang as they walked and walked and waaaaaalked
Palm
trees... blue skies.... paradise :)
It’s been a CRAZY week everyone.
We have been stuck in the house allllll weekend long because of a cyclone warning. It was awful! Haha. I JUST WANTED TO GET OUTSIDE AND WORK SO BAD but also it was pouring rain as if God took a jazillion power washers and pointed them all at Kone at once on and off about every five minutes for three days straight. Wahoo. Then the kicker is the actual cyclone never touched down. How exciting!
We still had church on Sunday morning. This time we had bread for the sacrament because I made some. What else do you do when you're stuck in the house for two days? And a cute inactive young mother came with her adorable baby!! We were all super pumped. But the BEST part of this story is when she asked us if we could come over and teach her sometime, because she "only has a few lessons left before she can get baptized." Uh.... WHAT! Yep. That awkward moment when Elders have been here for the past seven months and NO ONE KNEW SHE WASNT BAPTIZED. The elders just assumed that she was inactive because her husband is. So we have a baptism coming up real soon!! We will be teaching her today! Wahoo!!!!!
Then yesterday we got out porte a porteing once again. Walking outside feels like walking through a sauna while someone is pointing a flamethrower at your face haha. Anyways, after walking about a mile and a half to actually get to the neighborhood, and we start yelling bonjour at houses. And everyone just ignores us!!! Even if they’re outside and DEFINITELY can hear us, they just pretend like we aren’t there! How rude! I’ve never seen anything like it. Anyways... After about an hour or so of that we didn’t have a ton of hope left. But we kept going, and kept on getting rejected.
THEN. We stop in front of this brick house with a car parked in front of it that I recognized. I remembered that I had waved at the beautiful black lady that had been driving in that car earlier that day! I knew that Heavenly Father had led us to her. Lucky for us she didn’t ignore us when we yelled and she came out to talk to us. :) After presenting our message, she was kind of trying to say goodbye when I asked her her name, Wilmida. :) Then I asked her where she was from, the West Indies. Then she started asking questions about us too. Then she asked us if we needed some water, and YES, we desperately needed some water!! She was soooo sweet and asked us all about our beliefs. Turns out, one of our inactive here is one of her best friends! So cool. She said that Soeur Clarque had talked to her a little about the church before. Then as Wilmida took care of feeding her baby we cleaned up the kitchen and did the dishes and helped her out. Then she even made us a milkshake, which she is working on perfecting because she’s going to open a milkshake/smoothie/juice place here in Kone, which will be SO cool because there’s nothing like that yet here. Anyways, SHES AWESOME! And we didn’t talk really to her husband because he was weed whacking outside, but he seems super cool too. MIRACLES HAPPEN! There are people here prepared for the gospel! God WILL lead us to them!!
I couldn’t be happier right now. I LOVE BEING A MISSIONARY! And I love you all :)
xoxoxo
Soeur Gardiner
Good morning, how are you?
ReplyDeleteMy name is Emilio, I am a Spanish boy and I live in a town near to Madrid. I am a very interested person in knowing things so different as the culture, the way of life of the inhabitants of our planet, the fauna, the flora, and the landscapes of all the countries of the world etc. in summary, I am a person that enjoys traveling, learning and respecting people's diversity from all over the world.
I would love to travel and meet in person all the aspects above mentioned, but unfortunately as this is very expensive and my purchasing power is quite small, so I devised a way to travel with the imagination in every corner of our planet. A few years ago I started a collection of used stamps because through them, you can see pictures about fauna, flora, monuments, landscapes etc. from all the countries. As every day is more and more difficult to get stamps, some years ago I started a new collection in order to get traditional letters addressed to me in which my goal was to get at least 1 letter from each country in the world. This modest goal is feasible to reach in the most part of countries, but unfortunately, it is impossible to achieve in other various territories for several reasons, either because they are very small countries with very few population, either because they are countries at war, either because they are countries with extreme poverty or because for whatever reason the postal system is not functioning properly.
For all this, I would ask you one small favor:
Would you be so kind as to send me a letter by traditional mail from Vanuatu? I understand perfectly that you think that your blog is not the appropriate place to ask this, and even, is very probably that you ignore my letter, but I would call your attention to the difficulty involved in getting a letter from that country, and also I don’t know anyone neither where to write in Vanuatu in order to increase my collection. a letter for me is like a little souvenir, like if I have had visited that territory with my imagination and at same time, the arrival of the letters from a country is a sign of peace and normality and an original way to promote a country in the world. My postal address is the following one:
Emilio Fernandez Esteban
Avenida Juan de la Cierva, 44
28902 Getafe (Madrid)
Spain
If you wish, you can visit my blog www.cartasenmibuzon.blogspot.com where you can see the pictures of all the letters that I have received from whole World.
Finally, I would like to thank the attention given to this letter, and whether you can help me or not, I send my best wishes for peace, health and happiness for you, your family and all your dear beings.
Yours Sincerely
Emilio Fernandez