Always an adventure.

Hola familia! 

Dad i got the pkg! thanks a ton, haha my reaction when i saw the candybars was priceless.   i got a letter from grandma! tell her thanks for me!  and shout out to the ashcrafts, thanks for th ewedding invitation i love it, sorry i missed it.  give them my congrats  and thanks for the note, i love you guys so much and miss you a ton!

so i wrote a novel last week so i´ll keep this short and sweet.

it was cambio week and it was crazy. so we got 1 new elder in our district and guess what, he´s from chiclayo peru!  small world. so i´ve been asking him all about chiclayo. his spanish is a bunch easier to understand than the chileans. so lindz has it easy up in peru.

we had an emergency intercambio this week.  2 hnas were having problems in their area. in short they were robbed at knife point on their way home to their casa at 10:15at night (thats why you follow the rules and return when you´re supposed to).  so anyway, they came and stayed with us and we went on divisions. i absolutely loved it, it gave me a chance to test how well i know my area and the people. and i actually did good at contacting! thats a first. 

so we made cinnamon rolls on pday last week.  it was amazing. they turned out super good to my surprise. i was sure it was going to be an utter fail especially when i opened the pkg of yeast only to discover it was the texture of playdough.  but they ewre amazing and the best part was everyone´s reaction, i don´t believe they´ve had anything like it before.

highlight of the week, our investigators evelyn and eduardo accepted a baptismal date! we´ve been teaching them since i got here and i have a lot of faith in them, so we´re praying really hard this´ll fall through. the only problem is they´re not married (this is the case with basically everyone here, i´m gonna be pro at teaching the law of chastity when i get back)  so we´re hoping they take the lesson on that well...

sundays are so crazy. so much for day of rest, for missionaries it consists of running around trying to get people to come to church.   i get to play piano for the primary program!

that awkward moment when you´ve been walking for hours and no one´s home so you start teaching a dog the plan of salvation only to find out that this just happened to be the 1 house with someone home and they´re staring at you like you´re crazy....

yup, so life is good. life as a missionary is an adventure thats for sure. but i love it!

i love you all, have an amazing week! 

-hna Hebdon la segunda  (aka Aubrey *cough*mom*cough*cough -i thought you might need a reminder ;) haha

I've completed my 1st cambio in the field!

I got letters! it was like christmas!  seriously keep sending them cuz they make my life so happy!

so mom, i hope you know that you sent Lindsey to Peru and not Chile, and that I´m (your daughter aubrey, remember me?) is in chile. hahah.  i totally knew this would happen. called it.  but yeah, tanks for sending me lindsey´s letter. it actually applied a lot to me so thanks.  but i´ll be sure to forward it on to lindz (but i´m keeping the picture of eliza cuz it made my life so happy! i honestly need pictures of the family please send me some physical copies).  your letter to liza made my day. i especially love the part wehre i quote ¨i hope eliza can be an orphan¨  i got a pretty good laugh out of that. eliza, i dont want you to be an orphan.   anyway, i just hope you didn´t send the pkgs to peru cuz that could be a problem. but yeah mom, just so you know, lindsey is in peru. i´m the one in chile. hahah

dad, i got my debit card. and i absolutely love the card you sent! haha its great.  is there anything i need to do to activate  my debit card or can i just start using it?

so i had no idea they didn´t have reeces peanut butter cups here until i gave one (that elder york gave me from his pkg) to camila (my best friend here). her reaction was priceless. so now i have this crazy great idea that you should send me a pkg of a bunch of reeces peanut butter cups!  plus i´m in need of just plain white long sleeve t-shirts (i should have a bunch in my drawer under the window seat). and also some more black and brown tights both sheer and thick warm ones. its hard to keep tights in good shape when the dogs keep biting holes in them ;)

Curtis- thanks for the letter! so i totally forgot i met hna teeples´ family. everone talks about her, they all love her. she was the sister leader so everyone knows her.  so what names are you thinking of for mindy jr???

Jenny - thanks for all the updates! how´s blake? is he talking any? oh and by the way you were toally right about the boots, you´ve officially saved my life by making me get those boots. i wear them practically every day. so thank you so so much!

Andrew - what´s going on? random fact, they play a ton of ping pong here and there´s a guy in my ward that is a pro ping pong player (no joke, he actually played pro ping pong)  and he teaches ping pong class ever sat. i´m trying super hard to get an investigator to go so i have a reason to go.  and elder york is super good, i´ve never seen anyone put spin on the ball the way he does, so i play with him whenever i get the chance. so watch out andrew, i´m gonna conquer you when i get home! ;)

Cassi- you alive?

ok so letters seriously are amazing so write me millions!!! por favor!  dearelder.com is super sweet so use it :)

so it may seem odd to be thinking about htis now but Hna westover gave me the heads up to plan way ahead so....christmas for skype...what time is your church?  and it would be sweet if lindz and i could somehow overlap 10 min or so so we can talk. i don´t really know how to work that out with her but dad you should learn how to do group skype calls so i can talk with the whole family. just a thought.

I´ve officially made it through my first cambio in the field!  so last p-day was so great. it consisted of rearranging the apartment, dominos pizza and cookies (cinnamon rolls are today it didn´t work out last week).   who knew they had dominos here? made my life happy when i found that out.  so we rearranged the apartment so we could be in a smaller room so we could trap the heat from our pathetic heater and actually be warm right, so we had to take the table apart to fit it through the door which consisted of me using a fork as a screwdriver (surprisingly very effective)  and so we finish rearranging and discover that the door to the room doesn´t close. so much for trapping the heat. hah. what are the chances? pretty good with my luck.

it was Hna palma´s b-day this week. so i made her brownies that morning (the one thing i can make here that´s actually good)  andn then that night the bishop surprised her with a small party.

so it rained a ton this week (big surprise) but honestly i find it super relaxing walking for hours on end in the rain and crazy (i mean crazy!) wind either deep in thought or attempting to sing disney songs in spanish. seriously, i love it!

english class and piano class are going great.  i´m learning to play piano in spanish!  the notes have different names so its tricky to teach cuz i don´t even know the names of hte notes anymore. and enlgish class was left solely up to me this week but it went super well, with my beautiful artistic skills i effectively taught the different parts of the body (i´ll send a pict later, its pretty great)

so i get super animated during study time. personal study time is my favorite time of teh day, then during companion study i get way too excited.  i never realized how ridiculous i am until the other day it occured to me that its probably not normal how i´m banging on the table, waving my arms around and practically shouting ¨how can they not believe? they saw an angel and still doubted!¨ (talking about laman and lemuel). yup this is a common occurance, my companion probably thinks i´m crazy, but at least i´m keeping her awake.

so funny story, we´re teaching one of our new investigators how to pray and he´s holding the pamphlet that gives the steps of how to address and close and such and so we ask him to pray and camila points to the box on the pamphlet of where the intructions should be and so we all kneel down ready to pray and he starts ¨the plan of salvation, many people wonder....¨  haha he was on the wrong page so camila had pointed to the wrong box. i was trying so hard not to laugh.  i guess we forgot to teach the most important part of how we believe in personal prayers and not recited prayers. whoops. 

so yeah its been a great week, i love you all, write me millions of letters! and keep smiling!

I'm starting week #6

Hola mi familia! wow the weeks really do go by super fast. i´m on week 6! what?!  half-way done with my 12 weeks of training in the field. 

ok i´m gonna combine emails now cuz email time is super stressful, so for the fam... that is so pathetic that you just got my letter from Mexico.  something is seriously wrong with their mail system. haha, well happy belated birthday i guess dad. hahah. thats pretty funny.  dad, that is one profound metaphor, thanks for that.  I´m glad ole and lexi get along, honestly i was kinda worried that ole would try and hurt any dog that invaded his space in our family after what happened with scotty.  So apparently it takes who knows how long for me to get my mail here. i don´t think it takes very long to get to the mission home but then it sits there until the zone leaders need something from the mission home and then they just grab as many letters as they can carry. not the most effective system but....i guess i´ll have to learn patience.  wait, olympus is doing cinderella? why?  hmm guess i´m not missing out on much, its not my favorite.  thanks for putting my name in the temple, i really do need all the prayers i can get. and i definitely have been recieving answers to those prayers. every time someone compliments my spanish i just say its not me. cuz its not. its completely the gift of tongues. the lord is definitely on my side.   we´re making the cinnamon rolls today, i hope i remember the recipe correctly....i think i do but i´m not positive... but also the ingredients here are different, the brown sugar is the texture of normal sugar, its weird. and i have no idea if the yeast is the same......i guess i´ll find out.  i really do want a good recipe for chocolate chip cookies so i would love you very much mom if you´d email that recipe. thanks.

Alright, week 5.  I had m,y7 first intercambio this week adn i absolutely lo9ved it!  pretty sure i made up for the month´s worth of no speaking english in 1 day. i talked so much.  hna westover pretty much knows my life story just cuz it felt so good to talk to someone and they actually understand.  and i loved actually having roommates with other hnas. its a bit quiet in our house with just me and hna palma.

k, so they have this thing with evil spirits here and it creeps me out. one member is telling us how her house has an evil spirit that she´s felt push her several times.  apparently missionaries hear this kind of stuff a bunch here. it gives me the chills.

spanish mistake of the week... i´m telling Hna palma about my experience with intercambios and as i try to say we stopped at someone´s house i conjugated the ver for stop (parar) wrong so what came out was ¨we gave birth at someone´s house¨.  my companions face was priceless.  parar and parir, their similar right? whoops. hahah

yesterday the teacher for sunday school for the ym yw didn´t show up so hna palma and i ended up teaching. it actually went really well. i loved it.  my spanish is actually starting to surprise me.  its great though, because as the members realize my spanish is better they´ve actually started talking to me a bunch more.  and i can hold a conversation, mainly cuz i´ve learned taht ¨bien, muy bien¨ answers practically every question they ask ;)  so just laugh when they do and say bien a lot adn you can have a great conversation with them.

we´re out of wood. sad day. the mission only provides wood for the winter months so we´re lñeft to freeze. so today we´re rearranging the house so we´ll study in a smaller room where we have a small heater that will hopefully keep us warm.

well that my week.  all is well, time is flying by and life couldn´t be better.  i love you all! have a great week!

-Hermana Hebdon la segunda

Life is interesting!

What have i gotten myself into??? i´m teaching piano lessons.....in spanish! i don´t even know how to teach piano in english let alone spanish. and its supewr difficult cuz its multiple people and they´re all on different levels. but everyone was so intrigued that i knew how to play and when i offered to teach a bunch of people got super excited.  So we decided to start piano lessons for whoever wants to come. we´re hoping it´ll be a good way to get investigators and help inactives to make friends and get involved again.  so it might end badly with my lovely teaching and spanish experience but its worth a try i guess.  so yup i´m teaching piano and english.  an now i´m doubting my idea to become a teacher, i don´t think its the right major for me.....

general conference was amazing! holy goodness, conference blew me away, it was exactly what i needed. i was able to watch half of conference in english, so Sat afternoon session was in spanish (hna palma and i had to compromise)  i didn´t get much out of it honestly. its quite hard to understand when you can hear some englihs words in the background with their lips saying english words but hearing spanish over it. super confusing. and of course right after watching the whole session in spanish we discover the magic of subtitles. wow, we´re super smart could´ve thought of that a bit sooner. haha.  but honestly the spirit is the same no matter what language.  It was great.

So i was super proud of my spanish this week, i´d say things and then i´m all i have no idea what the goodness i just said but the people don´t look confused so it must´ve made sense.  but anywho, i was feeling great until yesterday when it crashed and burned. and now my mind is just a pile of mush.  i´ve disdcovered that Chileans are not specific at all when they ask questions and they change topics faster than mom (which is really saying something haha) and in spanish when i´m trying super hard to follow what they´re saying it really throws me off when they suddenly change topics.  so the other day we´re talking to a Hna in the ward about playing the piano and she asks me ¨Sabe rollos de canela?¨ i´m all ¨es un cancion?¨(is it a song?)  everyone starts laughing. apparently its not a song.  yeah turns out she asked ¨do you know cinnamon rolls¨ how we got from playing the piano to cinnamon rolls in less than 5 seconds i don´t know.  so i say yes i know cinnamon rolls, thinking i´m simply telling them that i know what they are.  so yesterday i asked Hna palma what we were going to do for p day today.  here is a small piece of the conversation (translated of course)

¨what are we doing tommorow?¨

¨if you know we can do it¨

¨if we know what we can do what?¨

¨you said you know them¨

¨know what?¨

¨cinnamon rolls¨

¨uhh yeah i know cinnamon rolls, what does that have to do with tomorrow?¨

¨then we can do that tomorrow¨

¨and what´s that exactly?¨

¨We´re going to make them tomorrow with Hna Jacky¨  she looks as me as if its a question...

¨was that a question?¨

¨yeah, did you understand?¨

¨yeah i understand but how is that a question? thats a statement...¨  as she looks at me as if i´m an idiot.

welcome to my life of confusion.  this is a very common occurance.  the conversation continued for another 15 min as i tried to figure out what in the world was going on.  apparently when i said i knew cinnamon rolls to them it mean i know how to make them .  why they can´t jsut say ¨do you know how to make them?¨ i don´t know.  seriously this is my life right now, it takes me 10 min just to figure out exactly what they´re trying to ask me cuz their questions are so vague.

so besides my state of confusion all is going well.  i´m trying to have patience with my spanish but it can get very frustrating when you can´t communicate with your companion.  but i can´t learn spanish all at once. baby steps.

well i love you all, Hope all is going well with you. keep up the letters & emails, seriously the support mean everything to me. thanks for everything!

love, Hna Hebdon la segunda