Email 12/22

Just to catch everyone up to speed: Kaitlyn has been transferred to the Gilbert area and has a new companion, Sister O. They not only will be in a Spanish area but also covering an English area as well.



Holy emails.Okay. Wow. What a crazy week.

We love the family we live with! She's like our mom/grandma she reminds me of Grandma Linda, who I miss. It’s a very nice house; we have the basement to ourselves but were upstairs half the time anyway with all of them. They have a giant tennis court in the back which is nice in the mornings because we can actually work out. Heavenly Father had a plan: Sister O and I were supposed to be together right now, we both needed each other. She is from Connecticut and she has been out a year. She is pretty much fluent in Spanish which is good for me, especially now that we are teaching in both. We are really, really busy! We have 5 wards and our Spanish branch. It is very different from Showlow. I don't know if it is because they are legal and have homes and jobs but they think they are better than everyone and they ignore our investigators. It's annoying and it makes it hard to be motivated to do the Spanish work. There are a few that are good though. I thought I would be really mad to do English work but it has been a breath of fresh air for both me and my comp. English work is SO easy. Our 5 wards keep us pretty busy. We have 2 baptisms on date, both for the Spanish branch. One is Dec 29th ("A") and the other is Jan 1st ("B")

OH ha ha, I almost missed the funniest part of last week. My immune system decided to give up and I completely lost my voice for 3 days last week like literally not even a whisper... So Sister O took me to this lady in one of the wards, Sister "V" who is an energy therapist or something like that.. So I get there and she hugs me and puts me in a massage chair and makes me drink some nasty leafy drink and suck on something and she put frankincense on my head.. then she hands me these two metal handles that are hooked up to this machine and they vibrate in your hands and somehow relax you. After a half hour of this she comes out and tells me I have laryngitis because I am not speaking truth to people and I’m not telling them how I really feel and I need to express myself better to authority because she could tell I was irritated with all authority figures and feeling not understood... Lol! We were both laughing. So then she tells me that my aura is flipped backwards and so she comes over to me and snaps her fingers around me and then waves her hands above my head and says "there you go, I flipped you back right way up"...Thanks? The best part was when we were leaving she was like OH You need a stone. So she hands me this little purple stone with little Chinese symbols on it. I’ll take a picture. It is supposedly infused with energy and tells me to keep it on me always and then she slips in into my pocket.. Also I am supposed to sleep with it under my pillow...Pretty much believe it was 80% poop but I did feel a lot better after we left. Maybe my aura really was flipped upside down or maybe I just liked the massage chair. Probably the massage chair.

So "B" the one who is being baptized on Jan 1st is awesome, except I can only understand 50% of what she says. Her Spanish is crazy. She is from Puerto Rico and she speaks incredibly fast and she mixes it was English so its hilarious. She goes 90 miles an hr and then she will stop and say "Ya know like..?" and then she'll say "entiende?" and we just shake our heads sure. When she laughs I laugh when she smiles I smile and when she frowns I frown and I catch a verb every 5 minutes. Sister O doesn't catch most of it either. But what we do know is that she is amazingly prepared. She has looked into a lot of religions and knows a lot and is just in search from the full gospel. They met her like two weeks ago. She read the Book of Mormon in 3 days. She read Gospel Principles and Church History last week. Were running out of stuff.. She has amazing questions and she loves us. She calls us her little angels. She has a really hard life and is going through so much but she is seeing that the more that she learns, the smoother her life is going.

So the other day we are having a lesson and she commits herself to live the word of wisdom which was awesome and so we decided to just commit her to baptism and we’re like “so when would you like your baptism? half joking.. and she's like "whenever"... Well that was easy. So she is progressing really, really fast and she already knows more than most our members. She got us these little Christmas presents which were adorable and really sweet letters. We’re going to buy her some nice scriptures today. I didn't have time to shop last week for Christmas presents so I will have to get them this week and next week… I'm sorry.

I love you all very, very much and miss you very much!