Happy Thanksgiving!

Hi everyone!

I can't believe it's already THANKSGIVING! That is the craziest thing. Then Christmas and New Year's and, man, time is just going so fast. I hit my nine month mark this week. So crazy. (BTW mom, thanks for the "hump day" letter! You timed it perfectly, I got it EXACTLY on my hump day!)  For Thanksgiving, we'll be with the Hernandez Family, they're really sweet. I probably won't have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner but I'm sure it'll be super good. 

I forgot to mention in my letter last week that two Sundays ago we had the Primary program in the church. It was adorable. They actually have about 30 kids in the Primary here which is really pretty good considering the size of the ward. The Stake Primary Presidency was there and I was asked to translate for them. It was my first time ever translating and it was SO HARD. It was hard because a lot of times I'd just want to translate the words directly but pretty often, that doesn't end up being grammatically correct in English. Plus, you have to listen to what the person is saying as you're translating what they just said a second ago. So tricky. But I was grateful to be able to try it out because it's a useful skill. Sometimes for service, we go with investigators to appointments with doctors or lawyers and interpret.  That's much easier because they pause and wait for you to interpret. So crazy though. 

Sharing the dinner message with the bishop last week actually went super well! After we talked a little bit about the importance of vision, he told us that he'd actually had the same thoughts lately, that the ward needs some kind of direction if it's ever going to go anywhere. We were able to present to him our vision that we had as missionaries and he really liked it. We had dinner with him again last night and he was talking about how he really wants to have the members and the missionaries working more closely and really the members taking a lot more responsibility in the work of salvation here in their ward. This is EXACTLY the shift that President Samuelian has been talking about for months and we've been trying so hard to make it happen here. Hopefully, now that we're all kind of on the same page, we'll be able to move forward and actually make it happen. 

We found this new family to teach that we're super excited about. We had our first lesson with them last night and it was just amazing. We found them because the husband, Javier, is friends with one of our investigators and he was over there once when we went over to teach him. We've been trying to set something up for weeks but he would always cancel at this last minute. We had his address so we just decided to go over yesterday because we had some spare time. We were able to sit down and have a really nice lesson with him, his wife, and his wife's brother. His wife, Adriana, is seriously so sweet. She was talking a lot about her kids and her family and how all she wants is a better quality of life for them and how she knows that comes through Christ. We shared with her The Family: A Proclamation to the World and talked about how happy families are the whole purpose of the gospel. They had a lot of really great questions and genuinely want to change in whatever way they have to in order to follow God's path and help their family. We are so excited. They are so golden. 

Hermana Cardon and I are getting along super well; she is so sweet. We're both the kind of people to just laugh it off when something goes wrong so it's really nice. This week, we knocked on one door where the person totally came to the window to see who it was and we waved at them, but then they walked away and just didn't answer the door. That happens a lot, but this time it was just so stinking funny. We were standing on this stranger's porch, busting up laughing. 

Well, that's all for this week! I hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving! I love you!

Love,

Hayley