Buenas! This week was quite spectacular and also quite frustrating, as usual! It was spectacular because of the people that are here! The people here are so amazing! They’re willing to listen, learn and most importantly, to ACT! We had three families of investigators at church yesterday. That’s more than I have had in my whole mission combined! It’s so cool to see these families progress and start to make changes in their lives. This is the first time in my whole mission that I’ve felt like I’m really an instrument in the hands of the Lord. It’s been really nice to actually see the fruits of our labors ... and immediately!
I have great news! We found a house! We moved in on Tuesday It was super bittersweet because it was SO much fun to live with the other sisters. But it is also really awesome to actually be in our area and not have to take 4 buses every day. Our house is way cute! It’s really small but actually probably better that way (so we don’t have to clean so much!) The walls, the tile and the front of the house are all PINK! It sounds like a lot, but it’s not, I promise! We love it.
My companion is really awesome. She’s SO tiny! I legit have never before met anyone my same age that has smaller hands than me, or feet. But, I feel like Big Foot wearing a foam finger with Hermana Tenorio. It’s really strange. Anyway, she’s way funny. She says super random things sometimes, haha, but we’re always laughing. We get along great. She was baptized about 2 years ago and is the only member in her family. She has a really inspiring testimony and is a good example for me.
So our area is like a little pueblo set off away from the city. But the ward boundaries are really big and cover a big area of the city. So we’re just a tiny part of the ward that’s really far away. Sometimes we leave our area to eat with other ward members and usually on the way we get lost. Because neither of us know the area, we don’t have any maps and NO ONE KNOWS THE STREET NAMES! All directions are given with reference points like “hay una tienda en la izquina” or “donde el camion da la vuelta”, when there are millions of stores on street corners and a million places where the bus turns around! It’s been really hard to find our destinations. One Thursday the Elders literally had to come get us because we were very lost and no one could help us haha!
I had a very simple but quite profound realization the other day. We were in a taxi talking about the dollar to peso ratio (a hot topic nowadays) when the driver told me he had a dollar bill in his wallet, and gave it to me to look at. It was the first time that I had held a dollar bill in 7 months. It was so strange because it was something so familiar, yet felt so foreign. It just didn’t fit together in my brain. It was as if someone had photoshopped the dollar into my hands. In that moment, I realized how drastically everything has changed in the last 7 months, and especially how much I have changed. That something so commonplace and seemingly insignificant could bring such strong feelings of nostalgia and gratitude to my heart. Nostalgia for my “old” life, my friends, my family. And gratitude for this incredible opportunity that I have to be in this place serving the Lord.
Love,
Hermana Keeler
Hermana Keeler
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