2/18/2014 Riverbend, Brownsville

Dear Family,

My apartment is infested with Cockroaches!!!!! Ahhhhh!  my new favorite tool to kill cockroaches is the millions of grapefruit that the Leighthammers give us every week. The grapefruit are a little sweeter here, but not enough for me to love.  It is incredibly beautiful here, there are rasacas everywhere, which are like large ponds, just on the side of roads, everywhere, and palm trees, and it is a lot greener.  My new companion is Sister Andersen, she's from Smithfield, Utah, went to Sky View, graduated the year before me.  Her dad is the Sky View basketball teams coach.  She is wonderful!  She is obedient, happy, talkative, and hardworking.  She played high school volleyball, (starting sophomore year, so I didn't play against her) so for morning exercise we invested in a volleyball and we pepper in the parkinglot.  It is a blast!  I have so many miracles to share with you this week! 

Tuesday: the transfer went fine, I thought a lot about the kind of missionary I wanted to be when I got there.  I knew right off the bat I wanted to be exactly obedient, humble, and full of faith, meet all of the members as soon as possible.  That first night, we only had 3 hours to work, but the Lord just put us in all the right places.  We visited a less active father who wants his kids to have the gospel.  We taught his son and his son's friend, and they both accepted to be baptized.  We prayed to know which less actives to visit after that and both of them that Sister Andersen hasn't seen in a while were available for a visit, and there was a friend at one of their homes who more or less accepted to be baptized. 

Wednesday: I have to tell you about the Leighthammer family!  They are an older couple, Brother Leighthammer only speaks English and is from Germany so he has an accent and can't understand spanish, and Sister Leighthammer only speaks Spanish, and can't understand English.  So it is interesting teaching a lesson with them.  We just speak the whole lesson in Engish and Spanish.  We asked them how they communicate, and apparently Sister Leighthammer can't understand our English, but she can understand her husband's accented english.  he is a great cook and loves to talk.

Thursday: There are 4 recent converts in our area, so we get to meet with them weekly.  They're great, and we are helping them prepare names for the temple and get really solid in their ward/branches.  Last week Sister Andersen and Sister Nail (who was in my mtc district and came out with me, so I replaced her here) offered some service to a stranger.  We stopped by this week, and Betty let us in and accepted to be baptized.  She is going through a lot of pressure with religion from her family because she wants to get married to a man who belongs to a different religion, so pray for her.  Her prayer after our first lesson was very sincere, and she told us that she felt like she had been missing something and this was it. 

Friday, we oym (open your mouth) to everyone we see, and found Sandra who wants to come to church, and so we're teaching her too.  So for valentines day we took each other out to eat at Taco Palanque, the tacos here are incredibly delicious.  Also, for Valentine's day, I was grabbing something out of my bathroom bag and my RETAINER fell in the TOILET!  Gaaa!  So I washed it with dish soap, scrubbed it with toothpaste, then soaked it in listerine, and have yet to boil it and use it again. 

Saturday: Was a weird day, but good nonetheless.  We were starving so we prayed whether to go home to eat or go to our next appointment, and right after the prayer the phone rang inviting us to a birthday party with food at the recent convert's house right then.  Quite the tender mercy.  

Sunday: There is one English ward and 6 or 7 spanish branches, so the english ward gets 22 missionaries. It is a little overwhelming for them, and it makes it a little harder to work.  The branch we mostly work with is called Casa Linda, and it is wonderful.  There is a set of elders and us, and we feel very welcomed.  The branch mission leader is awesome.  His friend got confirmed a member of the church this week.  He just takes care of everything for us.  A pretty cool miracle at in the English ward happened.  We work with this black family named the Crocketts, who are like music super stars and are less active.  We stopped by their house and found the dad and son leaving to go meet up and do a music video with two white rappers.  Well the Crocketts decided to come to church this week and they brought the two white rappers with them.  Gospel Principles was incredible, we talked about the Holy Ghost and after the meeting one of them described his experience, "I've been to a bunch of different churches and I've felt good, but nothing like what I felt today.  I felt (the spirit) so strong I couldn't breathe for like 5 minutes."  We're not sure who will be teaching them because they live in the Elders area, but are at the Crocketts in our area a lot, but that was pretty awesome.  Then that night we got a referral from the English branch that two -step brothers of a member have been to church three times and want to be baptized.  We get to meet with them today, I'm super excited!  You need to understand that sad things happen in the mission too though.  We had to drop a family that we had been teaching who had a baptismal date because they weren't willing to act and come to church.  That was very hard.  So every prayer is so important! 

Monday: I am so grateful for laundry machines in the home and a mom who did my laundry!  We have to pay and go to the laudromat here, and it takes a lot of time because you have to wait there and it's a little hard to focus and do studies.  Funny story: I threw our shower curtain in the dryer, and it melted!  So I had to buy a new shower curtain. 

Love,

Hermana Campbell