#15 - Hola (again)!

Our plants!

 We got two plants this week in the same day. This guy literally just came out of his house with a plant and told us that it was a gift. Then at another lesson a different guy gave us a cactus. So random, but now we have two plants. They're named Itaa and Quinoa.



Wednesday was exchanges with Hermana Whitney and Hermana Malpica who are serving in Los Banos! (Yes there's a city here named Bathroom ). I learned SO MUCH. I was with Hermana Whitney and she was just so confident, and I'm really wanting to work on being bolder. They're so sweet! Also, Hermana Whitney told me that in the middle of the night she woke up and I was speaking spanish....I have no idea what I said but that's kind of cool! And we baked Banana Bread!

Zone Conference! We talked a lot about working with members. He had everyone write down as many ward leaders as we could remember, and not just Brother____ and Sister___ But first names, children, and information about them. I realized that I really do not know the ward very well. It's hard because a lot of times I don't completely understand what people are saying, but I'm going to work on it! Missionaries are awesome, but the members stay in the area, and really help support people. Also, we sang the song "When someone cares", and I realized that I recognized the tune, but not the words. It finally clicked that I listened to the spanish version of the song in high school on one of our girl's camp CD's. My favorite line is, "With God nothing is impossible", o "Con Dios, nada imposible es". So true. We see miracles every single day!

Exchanges with Sister Whitney (blonde) and Sister Malpica

Update on Joanna: We are teaching 6 people in her house, and they are all at different points! Two are recent converts (Petra and Jose) But one prefers spanish, one prefers English. Then we just started teaching her cousin. Their family is so awesome! They're always so sweet, and we sort of do split lessons where Hermana Feldman teaches someone and I teach the other, in Spanish and English. This week Joanna recorded herself doing the Book of Mormon challenge I mentioned last week and it was so sweet! She picked 1 Nephi 3:7.

We had this crazy dinner this week when we showed up and 10 minutes in another family showed up that lives there. They seemed to recognize us, but we didn't recognize them, but they were really sweet, and they all wanted to talk to us. The son wanted to show us his graduation video he made, the mom was speaking the most fluent Spanglish I'd ever heard, the lady we were actually there to visit was trying to listen, and all at the same time we were sort of teaching the story of Joseph Smith and the song "Joseph Smith's First Prayer" was playing in the background. I'm still not really sure what happened or if we really taught, but everyone was happy!

Baptism with Maylin, she was so happy that we came!

Church was awesome!! Bertoldo and Luis came, so they can both get baptized in the upcoming week!! Luis has a date for this saturday, and Bertoldo for next Wednesday. They both love reading in the Book of Mormon and are the sweetest people ever. And yesterday one of the 8 year olds in the ward got baptized, and Bertoldo got to go and said it was beautiful and he's so excited!

This week I learned where the term "gringo" comes from. We were driving this member named Martha to a lesson, and we were teaching her a bit of English. We got to a stop light and she said, "green- go!" and then explained to us that because for Americans green means go it just kind of got mixed together. Fun fact of the day!

We learned a lot about following where the Spirit leads us this week. We ran into so many people who just really needed our message. I'd encourage all of you to pray for someone you can reach out to this week, and you will be led to someone you needs you!

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Hermana Marin Fisher

California Fresno Mission

1814 N Echo

Fresno, CA 93704