Well first update first... Cut my hair and lets just say that it will officially be put up into a bun until the end of my mission haha. cost a whole $2 which should have been my first sign...  it's not so bad.... but it could be better.

This week was great! After a pretty wacked week last week things really turned around this week. First off, the very best of all, is that we finally got some of our investigators to church!  And what miracle, because they came on foot from super far away and all by themselves. The best moment of our week was teaching them and we invited them to baptism and first one looks at his friend and says "Well I don't know about you, but as for me, yeah". At first I was nervous because they are super funny and like to joke.. especially with my comp, so I was like Uhhhh do you really want this or do you just have a thing for hermana Ramirez?? But nope, they are awesome, and totally showed it yesterday by coming to church. We have been and are continuing to work hard to find new good people  It's like the quote in PME that says "nothing happens in missionary work until you find someone to teach". 

 On Friday this week hermana Ramirez and I had a really neat experience. We went to go give our first lesson to 2 girls whose mom is inactive. They are super interested and want to go to church, but their mom wasn't giving them permission. We told them we would come back in the afternoon to talk to their mom so that we could share a message with her too. Later, our next 2 lessons were other people who ended up telling us ALL of the problems they were facing. And then we went to meet with a recent convert before lunch  to help him with his family history because he was going to go to the temple that night! We met with him Thursday night to check if he was still planning on going, and he wasn't!! So we were there convincing him until he made up his mind to go. The next day Saturday when we showed up to help him with names, he told us that their wasn't any room on the bus to Tuxtla and that he wouldn't be able to go. He was very disappointed. At lunch Hermana Ramirez and I decided that we would have a special fast for all these people that we had talked to. The most amazing thing of all is that I feel like it really helped. He got to go to the temple, and sent us a text in the night thanking us for our help.. I practically cried it was so awesome. we were able to find the mom of the 2 girls whose mom is inactive, and like I already said, 2 other investigators have  baptism dates and ended up coming to church. That night I just realized how much God is really listening to us. Hermana Ramirez has taught me so much about prayer. Her prayers are so real, and I have been trying to follow her example. It works. If we just look we can find all the ways he is constantly supporting us. I love this work, it can be really really hard, but I wouldn't want to be doing anything else. Right when you think that things are too hard, God always reaches out. He never leaves us alone, and his tender mercies are always there waiting for us. We just have to look.

 

Pics: Saying goodbye to Elder Leon who officially got to his house! Elder Rivera(not it the picture) who is training someone from the states now is our DL (district leader). 

The ward secretary Carlos, who has helped us out SO much. Whether its with the cockroaches or just making us feel at home, he literally treats us like we're his daughters. Good people

But that's about all for this week! I love you all!

Well this week started off in intercambios with hermana Taylor and hermana Avendaño! I went to a different Ward with hermana Taylor for Monday night and Tuesday day! Super fun as always. My favorite was that for our contacts in the Street we played this game where you have to say a key Word in the contact. Like a random Word that you have to throw in there. Made for some pretty interesting and hilarious stuff.

Things started getting a Little weird from there.. first thing is that hermana Avendaño and hermana Ramírez (my companion) called us saying they were going to the clinic because my comp had foot pain.. so they went to the clinic and got some pain killer and got it checked out. We had to stay in the house on Wednesday to rest her foot. So we basically just studied, or watched mormon messages.

BUT Wednesday in the morning we had a big reunion with Elder Valenzuela of the 70. It was AWESOME!!! After I seriously felt like I could just conquer the missionary world. Wooh. So good.

We went out on Thursday though with Nayorobi! She is super great and helps us out a ton in lessons. We found 3 new investigators and 2 of them are super interested and are going to come to church this week! They're only 17 and 18, but we have an appointment with them again this week and we will be teaching them one of their moms as well. We also went and saw another investigator again who wants to get baptized and was at church, and taught her a Little more about the book of mormon. She has SOO many crazy questions that it's way hard to control the lesson, but overall it was pretty good. We are working with her, and if she gets married, she will totally be baptized.

That's pretty much as much work as we did this week, because when we were working with Nayrobi I pretty much felt like I was dying. So we got back to the house at night and called hermana George to ask if we could call the doctor. The next day we went to the clinic and I had another stomach infection so we stayed there over night until we got everything cleared up. It was pretty funny though. All of the leaders and assistants and president were in the temple, and we couldn't get a hold of anyone. Our district leader was calling everyone and we finally got a hold of someone but by the end of the conversation with our district leader they thought I was in the hospital and they were going to do an operation and were about to call the family.. Gosh that freaked me out, because I just imagined mom dying thinking that I was in a Mexican hospital. Just a clinic. But By Sunday we were good to go and went to church.

Best of all today we got the news that we won't be having any changes this transfer!!! yeah for 6 more weeks with hermana Ramírez!!

Hope you all have a great week!

Love

Hermana McNaught

Well hello hello hello otra vez

This week started off literally insane. After I wrote you all we went back to our house. In the evening before bed I went to go clean out the water tank. SURPRISE!!!! Out came 200 freaking cockroaches.. so that pretty much sums up my week. Fighting them and asking permission so that someone can enter our house and help us take care of the plague. Gross. If you can all just remember the movie the Mummy and when all 10000 of the bugs start leaving the pyramid and the guy gets eaten alive.... that's basically what happened to me. ok. yep. but it officially broke my companions fear of them. Now she kills them with me. Its a real bonding experience.

This week was super poderosa!! Seriously I love teaching with Hermana Ramírez! Sometimes I think we are just so on the same page that we are literally Reading each other's minds. Love it. First of all, had another lesson with our inactive member and it was awesome. We decided we were only going to talk about prayer. We had him share his testimony about prayer and as he really isn't praying now it got him thinking. The spirit was so strong and at the end of the lesson we invited him to pray again and for the first time in like 3 months he finally prayed at the end of the lesson again!!!! I was super happy.

Later, we found these 2 Young girls, whose mom is inactive and they were baptized in the catholic church.. don't really get how that happened... but it did. We have been teaching them this week and they have literally loved everything! They had awesome experiences praying and we showed them the DVD of the restoration, and I can't even tell you, the spirit was just there so strong. At the end one of the girls said the prayer and it went something like this "I really liked that video Heavenly Father, and I like how I feel and I just want this". Que poder (that power). We ended the lesson. The only thing is that if the mom doesn't go to church the girls may or may not have permission. So we are going to work with the mom, its just that she doesn't really want to listen... problems am I right??

Tapachula fun facts (just to copy Sister Lindsay)

Here every Young person is mamita or papita... Like no no mamita right now I don't have time for you.. (happens every day)

We drink every type of juice ever know to man, but coming up in February and march is mango season I'm pumped. And People here eat mangos "Green" like before they're ripe with salsa and salt. Tasty

Sorry That my updates are getting shorter and shorter, I think I'm going to start paying more attention to the big stuff that happens now..

pics! Hermana from the bakery gave us a rosca. It's famous for the day of the 3 kings the 6th of jan. Its when kids get there christmas presents. Inside of them there are 1 or 2 hidden baby Jesus. if you find the baby Jesus, you pay for the tamales! It was a miracle that she gave us one because they are super expensive.

Love the members here.

Our cockroaches. We sprayed alcohol and lit them on fire. We got a Little out of hand...

That's all folks!

Love you

Hermana McNaught

 

Well first thing to note this week is I'm officially dreaming in Spanish. But I'm pretty sure my brain makes up a bunch of words, because I had a dream about harry potter and I have no idea how you say lots of magical words in Spanish, but in my dream I knew them.. so there's that. Which is pretty crazy. And I also 90% of my dreams are teaching people about prophets or another subject of the gospel, Which is hilarious. My comp and I were talking about how when we don't have lives this is what happens.

But on to the good stuff! This week! We had a big zone fast and we were all going for the goal that we could somehow have 2 baptisms on Saturday. Right now we don't have investigators that are going to church, and since they have to go to church 5 times before they can be baptized, it seems as though that would be impossible! But we took a look at our old investigators and we found a family that went to church a bunch already but never got baptized. We went to go find them, found them, and have an appointment with them today! It should be interesting, and I'm pretty excited to see how it goes. 

Saturday we went to go eat with Hermana Maria, and as always she wanted to visit every single one of her neighbors with us. She is THE best member missionary in the whole world. 

New years eve was fun! We didn't do much crazy, but you can refer to my pics in a second to check out what went down, and the tamales chipilin con polloooo was super rico and I ate 3. Hope you all had a great New Years too!! Love you!

Hermana McNaught

Pics- Hermana Ramirez and I both complete months in the mission the same day because we entered the MTC on the 25th of the month! This day one of the ladies in the ward didn't have time to feed us, so she gave us money to go buy something, which never happens. And we had our own little party in the plaza for an hour.

Also new years eve a lady in the ward invited us to the hospital with her to give out tamales to the people waiting outside for their loved ones. Here new years is more of a family day which is pretty cool. Pretty much every holiday here is  a family day, not a day to leave with your friends. So it was fun to go teach or share small messages with the people who were a little sad to be without someone on a family holiday. 

Also instead of kissing on midnight they stuff 12 grapes in their mouths as they count down the seconds and make a wish on every one! We didn't have grapes so we just stuffed our mouths with sweet tarts. Fun times.