The First Adventures in Texas

 Howdy doo dee!!!

This week has been awesome, rough, tiring, sad, happy and everything else! Where to start! I wish I had time to write every detail but I sadly don't. I always forget I am in America and then I see a sign with Texas on it and I remember. It is extremely ghetto here.

The very first house (trailer) I went in we were tracting an area and saw that the door was open so we went and knocked on the door. This lady answered and let us in and we talked to her for awhile. She was freakin nuts! They had this guinea pig they were playing with and she was telling us that she ate them! The Mexicans love to give us drinks; most of them are like a fruit drink that I have never heard of but I was drinking a weird drink that she had offered us and was afraid to finish it after she had said that! It was probably guinea  pig juice. I wish I had time to tell about all of the investigators but I'll tell about the good ones. All the people we are teaching we have pretty much found or met since I got here. We have roughly 7 new people/families that we are teaching as of now. One of the members in the ward is a mom that is baptized and the two sons who are 13 and 14 aren't. They go to church and seminary but they won't be baptized. We spent a little bit talking to them and trying to help them understand the importance. I probably would have had an easier time trying to baptize a cat.

Do you want to hear the worst day ever? On Friday when we started biking it wasn't raining but as we got a few miles it started to pour and I mean POUR. The roads turned into rivers.  We went to the trailer of an investigator that we had found earlier in the week. Her name is Claudia and we are teaching her and her 5 kids. At first we started teaching them standing on the doorstep while it's still pouring but then she finally let us inside. We taught them about prayer and Joseph Smith and the spirit was so strong. We had her 13 year old boy pray and things went really well. After that we started to bike home but we stopped off the side of the road and were deciding what we should do when this car stopped and said that they would feed us and we could teach them. (it wasn't a coincidence that we couldn't decide where to go) it turns out that the son Jose had just been baptized and that the rest of the family wasn't. We ate and taught them. They offered us a ride to our car (we parked at a members house then biked) because it was pouring rain and was dark but I insisted we ride our bikes but my companion said that they should give us a ride. When we got to the place where we had parked our car the guy who gave us a ride tried to back up to drop us off. He got his truck stuck in a ditch and had backed into the mailbox. We had the member come out and see if they could pull him out. The member's van got stuck too!! We got the van pushed out and then forever later we got the truck pulled out. The same guy who got the truck stuck jumped out of the truck to help push and nobody was in it to stop it, so it rolled on the other side of the road and got stuck on that side!! Then we realized our car was stuck too. The Zone Leaders finally came and pulled us out and we didn't get to bed until like midnight! Also, I got bit like by a million fire ants while this was all going on. I did catch a GIANT frog. We were able to find two new investigators that day so it all worked out.

While riding bikes I've been keeping tally marks on how many dogs chase us. It's really fun. I don't count how many times we get chased though because that's too many because the same dog will chase us several times!  This week we were chased by 12 dogs! I almost kicked one in the face because they try to bite my heels!! They never chase my companion either!

Also, my stomach problems are back! Every time we eat at someones house I almost poop my dress. My stomach is a fire ball but the food is so good. The little kids laugh at my Spanish and everyone loves to call on me to say the prayer. I've been getting really good at saying the same prayer. Some days are hard here but when we go out and teach the people I forget about my problems. We play pross ball which is when we are tracting and see someone playing we go play with them. We made a deal with some kids that if we won them in a basketball game we got to teach them about Jesus. Sadly, they won.

OH i almost forgot...there are ice cream trucks EVERYWHERE! We teach a lot on peoples' door steps or will be talking to people on the street and we will be in a serious spiritual moment like "I know that through Christ.." then in the middle of a sentence an ice cream truck comes by blaring some stupid kids' song super loud. It has happened so many times!

We taught two sisters who thought Moroni was an alien and they believe we came from aliens. That was a rough lesson. We taught them behind the counter of a convenience store they own. I don't have time to go into detail but it's hard to explain why angels aren't aliens in Spanish!

I hope you have a great week! I feel your prayers and thoughts all of the time! Thank you for the support!! love you!
                                                                   Hermana Thompson