Querida Familia y amigos,
I love you all so much. Elder Holland's talk reminded me of how thankful I am for my family and all that you are doing to support me. Just as he said that they could not continue forward in the work without our prayers I know that I would not be able to go forward every day without the love and support that I receive from you. Thank you for your prayers.
I think I mentioned in my email when I talked about our visit by Elder Kikuchi that he challenged us to contact 80 people a day. That's been a challenge for all of the language missionaries here because we are looking to find a subpopulation that is spread out over a large area, but we have been able to increase the number of contacts that we make each day significantly. As Hermana Melton likes to say, we are looking under all of the rocks to find people who speak Spanish and to talk to them. For example, at the end of the day when it is dark and we didn't have anything to do, we used to stop by a less-active member's house or make phone calls. Now we are more creative. For example, on Saturday we were in this position and I was sick. I had Tylenol cold medicine at home, but as we all know, NyQuil is the best thing to take when you're just feeling terrible so we decided to go to Walmart to contact people (and buy NyQuil of course). Every time we go to Walmart we see tons of Hispanics that we know and we also meet new ones so we thought it would be a good idea. Sure enough, in the parking lot we were able to talk to some people that Hermana Melton had met a few months ago. They're still not interested, but we contacted 5 people. Then we went to find the medicine, but of course we took the long way to the medicine aisle to see if we could find people to talk to. We saw Saul and Maria that we had met contacting about a month ago and were able to talk to them. Then we grabbed the medicine and intentionally got into line behind some people that spoke Spanish and in a line where the cashier was Hispana. All in all we ended up contacting about 10 people in half an hour at Walmart because of our creativity.
In our weekly planning session we were able to come up with a lot of good ideas. For example, there are some homes here where a lot of Spanish-speakers live. We are thinking about reserving the community room that they have and holding a community Noche de Hogar (Family Home Evening) and inviting all of those who live there in the park. We will probably give out the booklet Three Ways to Have a Happier Family that the church produces and we will do a Halloween activity. There of course will be treats! We are excited because this will help us to build trust with those in the community here in Federal Way and to help them see that we are here to help their families. We plan to do the same thing at other apartment complexes here during the Holidy Season.
General Conference was this weekend and to be honest, it was a struggle for me. We ended up having to watch the whole thing in Spanish. I understood everything but I appreciated again why it is so important that people are taught the gospel in their native language. It was hard for me to take notes or really get a lot out of it because I was having to cocentrate so hard in what they were saying. Not to mention the fact that I was sick and a little bit out of it. It's also better to be able to listen to them speak in their own voice. But it is interesting how I could tell some talks were really powerful even though I wasn't getting a lot out of it.
It has been a good week here in Federal Way. Things are always great when we're in the service of God. But I do have to admit that we have been struggling here in Federal Way. There hasn't been a baptism in the Spanish group since December of
2009.
The members here are so stalwart. I have really never seen so much unity among the members of the church. They are all so kind and good. For example, this week two sisters went visiting teaching to a less-active member of the church. One of the sisters is a convert of 6 years and the other of 8 years but she herself just recently returned from inactivity a few months ago. For the one it was her first time visiting teaching someone. They are both very shy by nature but very sweet and loving. Apparently the sister whom they went to visit ended up spending the whole time lecturing them on how she already knew them and how they needed to be better at greeting people at church. They were so sweet and just listened. When we called the sisters to ask them how their first visit went they said so meekly, "Well we went to teach her a lesson, but she ended up teaching us. We need to be more friendly at church. I know we could do a better job. We invited her to come to church, but she said that she wouldn't because people don't greet her there. I guess we'll have to keep trying." That is just one example of the goodness of the members. They teach me so much.
I love serving and learning from our trials every day (or at least I'm trying to love it :D). Thank you again for your prayers.
Con amor,
Hermana Kinghorn
