Week 5 in Este Wenatchee

Big hunking strawberries of East Wenatchee

Hey, hey everyone!

Officially hit my one month mark here in Este Wenatchee. It feels like I've been here for an eternity though. Pretty strange... 

So this week were focusing on our less actives and investigators on this side of the river. Well, that changed!  We have been given a new ward boundary to cover, which meets in a building about 25 minutes away, and our less active and investigator area has also been cut down.  So we are still covering a large area, but if we continue to teach people in the northern part of our area, we are asked to start attending their ward in their building in Cashmere - 25 minutes away.  Luckily we haven't had to do that just yet.  But we may have to in the next couple weeks. 

We received not one, but 2 media referrals this week.  Our first one we visited was actually a young mom, who we had already knocked on her door earlier in the week.  We left her with a Spanish B.O.M., but she speaks English and Spanish very well.  So we got a media referral for the same girl the next day, but she requested for an English B.O.M.  We returned, not knowing if it was actually her, but it was!  It was really funny now that we look back on it.  As for our other media referral, I'm sad to say it was a fake...  The address doesn't exist and the phone number isn't for him.  Kind of sad, but we've also seen some great miracles this week.  

That same day we headed over to the Senior Citizens home and played games with them for service. We serve at the home twice a week, and lately we have been helping out at a museum with projects for the summer camps they hold for kids.  It's been so much fun. We even served on Saturday morning at a less active's home who had a ton of yard work to do.  Lots of humbling serving opportunities this week.  Here are the families we are teaching!

Jose Juan and Allejandra have a super cute family.  They both work full time so we rarely get lessons with them in the evening.  Jose Juan has been struggling with his remission of Leukemia.  We were able to have a lesson with them on Thursday night as a back up plan for when we had a church tour planned with Kristina and Ellie, that fell through.  Luckily, we had a member with us, number 2 boo'yeah!  Mirna, and her daughter Krissa, are from El Salvador and moved here to East Wenatchee about 2 years ago.  She has a great background with how she ended up here, but I won't go into it. 

Our plan was to go back to Jose Juan and Allejandra's if our church tour fell through, and when it did we immediately headed to their house with Mirna and Krissa.  We watch the Restoration video with them and then talked about it afterwards.  Jose Juan has an outstanding testimony of faith!  He told us about his hard experiences with cancer and how thankful he is to still be here.  It was definitely a testimony booster to have that lesson with them.  They fell through with their commitment to come to church, but we are planning on visiting them later this week. 

Beautiful sunsets every night.  Feelin' lucky!

We have been teaching Kristina lately with her daughter Ellie who is 12.  We had a lesson with them this past week about attending church and the baptismal covenant, and Kristina got really interested and excited.  Meanwhile, our member who went with us, Shaela, was getting her nails painted by the 5 year old.  We have them on date for May 16th, and recently taught them about the Sabbath day since we are trying to get them to attend church.  We knocked their door on Sunday morning and Ellie answered the door.  "Are you guys going to come to church today!?"  "Yeah, my mom is getting ready right now!"  Boo'yeah!  We got super happy a long with another family that said they would do all they could to come.   Unfortunately we didn't see them or Jose Juan's family at church.  We were a bit sad until we visited Kristina later that night...  And... they attended church!  They sat out in the foyer for the last 20 minutes of sacrament meeting and then they returned home because they had just returned the previous night from the kids' soccer games and a family reunion in Seattle.

 

This week I am studying more about the atonement during my personal study and I've been getting really far on my reading in the B.O.M.  If I can read 7 chapters a day for the next week I will make it through Alma... hopefully. 

So that sums up my week!  I absolutely love the ward I serve in and we've been getting fed a bunch lately.  I love this ward and the area.  I thank Heavenly Father every day for this area and for the amazing ward we work with. 

Love you all, have a safe week!

Con Amor,

Hermana Sarah Marble

Week 3, all is well!

Yo y mi companera matching for zone conference and interviews.

Hola mi pueblo! Como Esta?

Well, this week was awesome. We had interviews with President Ware, and he was able to give me some great counsel. I have been on a spiritual high since General Conference and my interview with President Ware. I really enjoy being around him. He's a gem!

Apple orchards for days ya'll!!

So some big news coming up...  As of this past Friday, my companion and I are only going to be covering the East Wenatchee part of our area, the less actives and Recent Converts, plus our climbing number of investigators.  While trying to cover two wards, we are also trying to get together a new Spanish group and hopefully a BRANCH by June, but it's taking a lot of work.  Covering two wards has been two much for our zone. So this week we have been given counsel to cover only our English speaking ward and bring all of our Spanish speaking investigators and Spanish less actives to the English speaking ward, where we have some of our Spanish speaking elders translate for them, since its an English speaking ward. This will be so much easier to cover and focus on, but also we have so much more time to tract and proselyte on Sundays now, instead of 8 hours of church, including our meetings.  But it is also sad because in our small Spanish speaking ward we just got an awesome ward mission leader, who has come with us to some lessons, and he speaks very good Spanish.  But it will get better.  We have some more bi-lingual people in our English speaking ward who we will be contacting this week to come out with us.  We also have been inviting our ward to come out with us, even if they don't speak Spanish.  We are going to start asking people who would like to come and bring their testimony written out, and we are going to translate their testimonies, and translate what they would like to say.  It's been quite a blessing because a few of our Relief Society members have signed up to come out and also a bunch of our youth.  We just had two youth in our ward receive their mission calls to Pennsylvania and New Zealand. They are great teenagers, and they are planning on coming with us this week, which is exciting!  I finally get to somewhat train someone, even though this is only my first transfer, haha!

We have had a lot of tender mercies from people who aren't interested, but we talk about having faith in Jesus Christ with them.  We have come across Pastors from the Lutheran churches here, we enjoy talking with them! At the doorstep, Lutheran members tend to be a bit more open with us and they are a lot nicer about letting us speak with them for a few minutes.  We found a lot of good potentials this week and also new investigators.  We passed our investigator, James, to the English elders in our area, because we teach him both in languages, but we decided he needs some more male influences.  His dad has no part in his life at this time, so we are looking forward to him being baptized by the English speaking elders. We hope they will become brotherly role models to him, but we will still be able to go to his baptism since we taught him for a time.  We are excited for him to hopefully be baptized by these elders.  Praying and crossing our fingers! :)

Anyway, sending love to you all, love and miss you all!

Oh, other exciting news.... I am getting a new sister-in-law in June!  I am extremely happy for my brother and his fiance!  I already love her!

Being a Sickling but lot's of Sunshine!

We made pancakes this week since we haven't had many member dinners.

Hey everyone! 

This past week has been quite a roller coaster. General conference was so awesome last weekend, but I've had a super bad cold this past week, so I'm getting used to being sick but being even more exhausted. #missionarylife #Earachesandtissuesforlife

I went on my first exchange this past week with Sister Peatross. She is one of our awesome STL's but they both are a "zebra conpanionship" (one English speaking, one Spanish speaking).  Her companion Hermana Garcia is very fluent in Spanish and English but Sister Peatross is just speaking English for her mission. She is the bomb dot com!  Before we all went our separate ways for exchanges, there was a baptism that night and we found our District Leaders, who we asked earlier in the week to give me a blessing of healing and comfort. It was wonderful and I thanked them both twice!  Our District leaders are pretty amazing and we are super blessed to have awesome elders in our area at this time.  On exchanges, we did a lot of proselyting in their area.  The best part of living in the Wenatchee area is the beautiful land and the super cute houses, so we kind of did some house searching while we were proselyting.  It's all good, haha!  Met and talked with a lot of people and found some awesome references for our English elders and also for Sister Peatross and Hermana Garcia to go back to.  

After exchanges I was still pretty sick, so we called Sister Ware, our Mission President's wife and told her what was happening.  She advised us of which clinic to go to, and we went after our awesome Zone Leadership meeting on Thursday.  We arrived at the clinic and waited.  After we met the doctor, I explained my situation, and she checked my ears.  Apparently I had no ear infections, but my left ear was terribly swelled from my sinuses, and that's why I haven't been able to hear well lately.  She prescribed some medicine, we headed out to do service at the senior home and picked them up later.  Earlier that day, we had our Zone Leadership meeting... 

Good story, I am the only one who even slightly plays the piano, so I did my best, which sounded... absolutely terrifying and... we all failed terribly at singing as a result.  Haha, I definitely need to practice more.  The members we live with have a beautiful piano they have been letting me practice on while they have been out of town. They have been traveling a lot for the holidays and they are going on a cruise for the next couple weeks. Practica Mas! 

Everything is blossoming!

We visited a smaller town in our area on Saturday after we tried to contact some potentials. We had knocked and we were waiting at the door when my companion literally jumped off the front step!  We watched two ABSOLUTELY HUGE spiders chase each other in the window.  We were a little creeped out.  But eventually our potential didn't answer, so we swiftly walked back to the car.  It was hilarious and disgusting at the same time. 

That night while driving to the small town we checked the phone after receiving no calls for almost all day... we had 4 missed calls.. "Uh... What?"  Our phone hasn't been cooperating lately.  Long story short, we were asked to speak in the Spanish ward... for the next morning. *what's going on in my head* "Oh my dear.... Uhhhh" I still haven't been able to practice a lot of Spanish with real people outside of language study, so I was a bit stressed.

So we were both somewhat ready for our talks, we attended our English ward, and then headed out to the other side of the river for our Spanish ward.  They had a baby blessing that day, and most of the family members were English speaking, so we asked a member to translate for them, and I was asked immediately on the pulpit if I was going to speak in Spanish or English so our Mission Leader could translate... "Uhh... Ingles, please" pulling out my Spanglish... I was so nervous to speak in Spanish, and I feel like I should've just spoken Spanish, but I knew I had more to say than I could translate in my head.  I, with Elder Woodward, were the only ones speaking English.  We also had a youth speaker who took too long, so my companion Hermana Wortely was asked to speak next week, and we rushed through some testimonies.  It was pretty funny now that we look back on it. 

Over all a good week besides being terribly sick.  We have a bunch more investigators we will be visiting this week, and hopefully helping "James" to get baptized.  We have no way of communicating with him until we knock at his home.  We haven't been able to meet with him for the past week, but on exchanges Hermana Wortley and Hermana Garcia stopped by his place and he fully admitted he is not ready for baptism, but said he will read and pray this week until we see him again. CROSSING OUR FINGERS. SO TIGHTLY. 

That's the gist of my week, I hope you all are doing fantastic, hope the weather is great where ever you are! 

Love you all, take care!

Beautiful!

Hectic Week and Hectic Head cold!

Hi everyone!

My first full week here in East Wenatchee has been beautiful!  We found a part member family we are now teaching, and they are the cutest family you would ever see!  The mother is a member, but stopped coming after they moved here about 2 years ago.  She was baptized down in the Tri-Cities area and then moved up here.  She and her husband, Ivan have 5 kids, and she is pregnant again.  She's one trooper!  We have also been close to a baptism this week with James, and he attended Conference with us Sunday morning along with Ivan's kids and his wife who is pregnant, and they brought her two oldest sons.  It was too bad that she was nauseous during the whole session, but she took notes and took them home with her.  James also absolutely loved conference, so that was awesome!

I have had some ear aches this week because of the elevation here.  I also acquired a super bad head cold, and woke up yesterday morning with an incredibly strong migraine, but hey.... that won't stop me!  We had a big day yesterday with our investigators coming with us, and also a lot to do with dinner and knocking doors.  We had a wonderful home cooked meal by some amazing members, who live on our side of the river.  They also sent us home with a lot of food! That's the biggest help because all we needed to buy today at the store was some stationary to write thank you cards and cough drops for both Hermana Wortley and I. 

Some goodies we got between sessions of Saturday Conference

It's still bright and sunny here, and we love it!  It's actually raining right now as I write this weekly update, but oh well.  I can't quite recite everything that happened this week in order, but this Easter weekend was amazing!  We also had an opportunity to help serve someone who needed some potatoes planted in his garden and a sheet rock mess cleaned up from his remodeling projects.  He has a beautiful home and has a great big backyard that has a great view to the river and Wenatchee across the river.  He invited us to come have picnics whenever we want.  He's such a potential investigator who said he quit drinking a year ago and hasn't smoked cigarettes since the beginning of this year.  He's seriously looking into the church, we are excited to see him attend soon!  He also has some work to do around his yard and he's looking for big groups to help with it... and that's where we come in!  We offered to come help with other missionaries, if he has anything he'd like us to help with, and we handed our number to him.  So hopefully we will have a chance this week (and hopefully not with the rain) to help him out in his big, gorgeous yard soon.  He sure is a gem.  He's ready to hear the gospel!  It's wonderful!  We have already sent his reference to the English speaking Elders in our area.  

Anyway, lots of walking, sneezing, coughing, the whole jist.  It's all getting better though.  I love it here and I enjoy every minute!  I almost forgot, we also go to a senior citizens home twice a week and play board games with the Old Folks, and also help in any way we can.  We love playing Scrabble with the old folks.  They are awesome.  Anyway, that's my week.  I'll try to have more exact details of my updates next week. 

Love you all.  Hope you all had a wonderful Easter weekend!

Great views everyday