HAPPY THANKSGIVING!! 🦃

 Helloooo friends and family! HAPPY THANKSGIVING! Hope you've all had a great holiday!

We started teaching the CUTEST family!! They all came to church on Sunday. Rosa, Albino, and their 7 kids. They filled up an entire row and were all really engaged in the meeting. We love them so much and hope they continue to progress. We've stopped by their house to teach a few times this last week, but the last couple times they have said they're busy or not everyone's home. So we're crossing our fingers it's true and they're not just saying that because they don't want lessons. Pray for them!

A few of the promising people I mentioned last week have now fallen off the face of the earth and we haven't been able to get in contact with them for a while. See, this is what I'm talking about when I say the mission's giving us trust issues haha. But it's also teaching me patience and that I can do my very best but everyone has their own agency, and I can love them where they're at!

I haven't gotten a good chance to talk much about language-learning in the last few emails. Honestly it's partly because I don't even know where to start! Learning the languages has been a huge part of my focus lately, but it can get overwhelming and hard to explain the process! I'm to a point with Spanish I can generally communicate each of the lessons and have a decent conversation, even if my grammar isn't too perfect. I definitely have a long way to go, but I guess learning Mixteco too has made me feel relief speaking Spanish in comparison haha! Mixteco is just SO foreign to me! Very different than Spanish and every word sounds almost the same to me. It uses a lot of "k" and "x" sounds (the x is pronounced "sh"). We write out the sounds for words to memorize them, and I recently learned that there is technically a written version of the language, but almost no people that speak Mixteco can read or write, so it's more for our sake to memorize. I literally feel like I'm just memorizing sounds half the time, but I can recognize some specific words when natives say them. Here's an example of a phrase in English vs Spanish vs Mixteco:

English: "God is our Heavenly Father and He loves us so much."

Spanish: "Dios es nuestro Padre Celestial y nos quiere mucho."

Mixteco: "Ndioxi ku ra yuva nda'a vio ra kuni ra yo."

So Spanish and Mixteco are super different! Thankfully a lot of Mixteco-speakers speak a little Spanish too! I feel like I have so many words swarming in my head all the time and sometimes I mix up the languages haha but Hermana Silva's literally amazing because her 1st language was Portuguese, so she has 4 languages she has to keep track of!

I had exchanges with an English-speaking sister this week and it was such an amazing experience! They deal with a lot more rejection than we do on a day-to-day basis, but Sister Merrill kept such a positive attitude! And the lessons were SO GOOD! The people we taught have such incredible faith. Also, one thing I love about people who are just coming into the church is their prayers! They haven't yet heard the same things repeated so often in prayers by other people and they are so raw and genuine in their thoughts and feelings. It makes me want to do better at remembering to pray without saying the same things. One thing one of the women we taught said in her prayer that I loved was, "I'm yours, God. I'll do what you need me to do." She was such an example of commitment especially as we taught her the commandments and she chose to give things up in her life to follow the Lord!

We had a service project on a farm this week where we helped a lady take care of her horses and alpaca and goats!! We mostly just scooped poop and cleaned but it was honestly still sooo fun just to have a change of scenery and help out!

This is the most random story ever but it was funny so me so I'm sharing it. One day I was grabbing my bike because we were heading out of the apartment, and a spider had a tiny web it was climbing up to get into the visor of my helmet, so it was just hanging in front of me as I started to put it on. It freaked me out haha but we killed it and then left. And then as I was locking the door to leave, I looked down at my handlebars ANOTHER spider was climbing up a little web hanging off my bike handle to get onto the bike. It scared me so bad but then I remembered that half my friends are literally in foreign countries on missions right now dealing with a lot more than spiders so I can't complain. Haha anyways moral of the story is spiders love me.

SPIRITUAL THOUGHT:

It's Thanksgiving so OF COURSE I need to talk about gratitude! I heard a quote I really loved this week:

"Being grateful isn't about having what you want, it's about wanting what you have."

We choose to be grateful for the circumstances we're in, not just grateful when the situation fits our expectations! I challenge everyone to write down 5 things you're grateful for every night this week!

I love you all! Have an amazing week!!

-Hermana DeMordaunt

PICTURES:

-pismo beach 

-picnic/utimate frisbee at dinosaur caves park!

-service on the farm! 

-district council pic

-free corn!! 

-biking in the rain (we basically broke the mission rules and went swimming with how wet we were) 

-liz, ashley, and irving! our new members! they're amazing and love the gospel