It's Cold Here!

Familia!!!

Things in West New York are going just splendidly, as always. It is very very cold, however... No me gusta. Ugh. I don't like it, I don't like it at all. It is chilling to the bone. The weather really wasn't that bad until this week. Thursday was the first day that I really noticed being uncomfortably cold. We went to the statue of liberty that day... but more about that later!! :)

Sorry I didn't really send an email last week... I don't know what happened to my email time. It goes by so fast. I don't know if we spent the full allotted time because we were craving empinadas and we figured, hey, you only live in West New York once... The place where you can buy authentic food from every single country. I love the food here sooo much. I know Katie and Julie would love it too. I think of you two every time I eat something delicious and I wish I could share it with you. There is this spicy Colombian lady that we visit. She is a less active, but she really wants to come to church, but she has to work... Just like everyone here. Everyone is addicted to work. It's kind of sad actually... But anyways, we go and read in the book of Mormon with her a couple of times a week. She absolutely loves it. She calls me a pollito.. Which means a chick, because I just follow Sister Martin around like a little pollito. hahahha. But a while ago she made this stuff for us called agua panela. OH MY WORD SO GOOD. I don't even know how to explain it... Its kind of like hot chocolate, but its not chocolate. I don't know, it was good though. Sister Martin and I keep talking about it, we want more. I am finding that stuff when I get home and I'm gonna make it for y'all. I'm also addicted to pan de bono, which is kind of like sweet rolls with cheese baked in it... That is a really bad description, but it is soooo good. Whenever I feel frustrated I'm just like, "Sister Martin, I need some pan de bono and Colombiana". hahahaha. My goal in life is to be Hispanic.

We have been working with the Elders in our ward  A LOT the last two weeks. I don't know if Ive told you all very much about them, but we have 4 Elders serving in our ward with us. They have all been here for a while, so they know the members really well and stuff. They are so awesome, I love em. We really have been feeling like there has been a lack of unity with the missionaries and the  members and we have been trying to figure out how to motivate our ward mission leader to work with us more. We got a lot of inspiration this week at zone conference. After conference we met at the church and had this huge meeting for a couple of hours and we came up with a plan, for the work of salvation. We really hope to motivate the members to work with us more. We aren't here for ourselves. We are here to serve them and to build up their ward. We cant do it without their help. Then last night, we had an appointment with Monica, so we asked a couple in our ward, the Cuc's to come as a team up. Monica cancelled so we just decided to teach the Cuc's. We introduced our ward plan and they were way excited! They got into it and they were giving us some great advice. I really think we are going to be doing some good work in the next month. MMM... also, the Cuc's brought us really yummy cake and tortas. MMM Best tortas ever. FOOD!! (mom, they are trying to add you and me on FaceBook so they can tag pictures of me, so accept them pretty please :)

Ok, I have to tell you this funny story about the elders. Like 4 weeks ago they some tuna leftovers in a plastic container, they forgot about it and found it in the car about a week later... So when they went to dump it out, it smelled absolutely terrible, as you can imagine. Of course, them having the maturity of 19 year old boys, turned it into a game/contest kind of like "Hey if you don't smell this tuna, you're not a man".hahahahha so funny.... So they just keep it in the van now and threaten the zone that they are going to have to smell it if they don't do the zone goal... And then when we go to zone conferences or places with other missionaries, they make all the elders smell it.... It's so funny. Then, One day during our correlation meeting, Elder Blanco just let the WML have it and was criticizing him a lot... All constructive of course... But, we were in the van driving home and we were trying to come up with a team name for the missionaries in the West New York ward. We came up with the Tony Slayers, or the Tuna smellers... then we started combining them so it was either the Tony smellers or the tuna slayers.. WE decided on the tuna slayers.. So we are the West New York tuna slayers....

Working with elders is never boring... And that's all i have to say about that.

Zone Conference- Wow. My first zone conference was on Friday and it was such a good experience. There was like 3 zones together for a conference with President Jeppson and the assistants. Sister Jeppson gave a funny training on eating healthy... She was dressed up like a hot dog. I wish you guys could meet her. She is just the sweetest thing and she is so funny. President Jeppson is soooo in love, its adorable and really funny sometimes. President Jeppson likes to get out his guitar and sing to us and sometimes they sing together, it is waaayyy too cute. President Jeppson is the best speaker. I love hearing him speak. He gets so passionate and he is so inspired as to what we need to hear. We got so much revelation for our area. I'm going to be really sad when they leave in July... But I'm sure I will love the new President and wife too... But it will just be different. We played a game called zoom... In honor of the tiwi's (the car safety device things)... I totally won. hahahha it was funny. We also celebrated the birthdays for November, so both sister martin and I got to go up and be sung to.

OH MY GOODNESS THIS IS MY LAST WEEK OF BEING A TEENAGER!! How weird is that.. Next Monday I'm going to be 20. That is so weird, I cant even think about it. I'm so excited for my birthday though. Everyone here remembers when it is. Its so cute, everyone's so loving. 

My Birthday package from Mom and Rod. WOW! The elders were jealous.

WHAT IS THIS!!!

LA GUITARRA!!! GRACIAS - ME GUSTA MUCH!!

Liberty Island- Ok, I just have to say that Elder and Sister Dunning are just the cutest thing. Sister Dunning was just determined to get us there because after next week the missionaries aren't going to go anymore because it will be too cold. But she was so determined that she and Elder Dunning just drove us there themselves because they couldn't find any other sisters who could come and go with us. It was so much fun to drive down there with them. We only live like 15 miles from Ellis Island, but it took us like an hour and a half to get there because the traffic was so bad. ughhhh. (and you all think Phoenix traffic is bad). haha But they told us the story of how they got married, which is quite humorous because it is their second marriage and Sister Dunning was playing hard to get and Elder Dunning was trying to pretend like he didn't care. SO FUNNY. Sister Martin and I were just in the back cracking up. We have so many inside jokes about them now. I love it. Whenever we need to smile we just quote them.

(after Sister Dunning totally dissing Elder Dunning and telling embarrassing things)

Sister Dunning: Ok so here comes the good part.

Elder Dunning: Oh, so now there's a good part to this story?

Sister Dunning: Yes, you were leaving.

ahahhahaha. IT doesn't sound that funny right now, but I swear it was the funniest thing I've ever heard!

On the ferry

Anyways. We missed the first boat to liberty island because of the traffic, but it turned out to be a good thing. We met sister Insong and sister Holyoak at Ellis Island and we had about an hour to kill until the next boat came. 

Ellis Island

The museum at Ellis Island is still closed right now because they kind of had to restore it after the hurricane, but it is opening back up this week I think.. But we were taking pictures by the sign and we noticed that one of the doors was propped open. We went to peak inside and one of the janitors saw us and told us that we could come in and look around. It was so cool!! We got to see all of the museum even though it was closed. Such a cool place. I want to bring you guys there when I get home. 

The Museum

Then the boat came and we went to Liberty Island. We worked in this booth, where we entered in peoples names and what country they are from so they could get a certificate. It was really fun. Out of the Hundreds of people we helped probably only like 15% were from the U.S. There was people from France, Germany, Finland, China, Japan, India, Honduras, Peru, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Mexico, England.. you name it, they were there. We got to use our Spanish a lot, as you can imagine. It was sad though because we aren't allowed to proselyte there. We got an hour lunch break so we ate at the little cafeteria there and had fun shopping at the gift shop...  you all may or may not be getting fun souvenirs in the mail. :) 

There it is!

Cutest little compy comp ever!

Then... The fun part... We missed our boat to go back AGAIN. But it was all good. We got time to actually walk around the island and take pictures by the statue of liberty. We learned a lot about it, it was very interesting. Good times. It was a very good day over all, even though it was terribly cold... Ugh the breeze from the ocean was so awful.

The Front

And here it is!

Well, I'm here and I'm working and I'm happy. I'm eating and I'm trying to stay warm. I have everything that I need :)

Love you all!

Another Week in West New York

We just finished our sixth week, which means that I have been here for a whole transfer and I am half way done with my training!! We are using new planners now... It's so weird. We are also feeling like we know our area now and we finally know all of the members in the ward and we have some of our own investigators, and we know the less actives that we are helping. It feels good to really know the area. We love it! Today there are going to be new missionaries getting here from the MTC, so my group won't be the newest missionaries! yay!!!

We loved the package my mom sent. We're excited to give these to the primary kids. funny story - our goal in life is to always be better than the elders...right now the primary kids really like the Elders, so we're really excited to give them these Halloween erasers and pencils. hahahaha.

Mommy, Gracias for the socks!!

The building in front of our house is coming down!!

This week was fine, but it wasn't really the greatest. I got really sick for a couple of days. I got a really bad cold and I had a super sore throat and I lost my voice. It was not very fun. And the weather was terrible that day, so we couldn't really go outside of the apartment because we knew that I would get worse if we were out in the freezing cold and rain, so we stayed inside for one day. It was soooo hard not to be able to go out and teach. I hated it. BUT, there is kind of a cool story about that day... But it goes way back to a couple of weeks ago sooooo.

REWIND- Two weeks ago

I was on an exchange with Sister Biolena and we were out wandering West New York trying to find people to teach because our appointments juked. I was looking at all of the people that we have to get a hold of in the ward. Since our first week in WNY, everybody in the ward had been telling us to get a hold of this one member who is very, very sick, Sis. Martin and I had tried to call her several times, and we had gone to her door a couple of times but no one answered. We knew she existed because a lot of people in the ward know her and asked us if we have heard from her and she has a pretty lengthy record in the area book, so we know the sisters had gone to visit her before. The whole situation was kind of weird. But anyways, I looked at her name and got this weird feeling that we should maybe try to go over. So we headed over to her street and up to her apartment. We knocked on the door and SOMEONE ANSWERED! BUT, it wasn't her, it was her son. We asked if she was home and he told us that... She died. I was in complete shock. It was so sad. Then about half an hour later we exchanged back and Sister Martin and I were kind of freaked out and we started letting the ward know. It was soooo good that I had gone over there though, or else no one would know still.

OK now FAST FORWARD! - This week.

We have been trying to work with the bishop a lot closer lately, so last Sunday we asked the Bishop what he wanted to work on in the ward this week. He told us that he wanted us to try to find the dead woman's daughter, Monica. They are not members, but they had been taught a couple of lessons by the other sister missionaries. He told us that he thought it was really important that we try to find them and really reach out to them and try to teach them. We had gone to her apartment and met her once and invited her and her daughters to noche de hogar during our first week in WNY, but we never heard from her after. We had tried calling her a couple of times but we never got answers. Sooooo, we tried to get a hold of her all week. We went to her apartment every single day, we knocked on the door and we could hear her kids running around inside, but she would never open the door. We left her notes and we decided that we would keep trying to go back until she let us in or something.

One day, we left our apartment and we were feeling a little irritated because we had left late and we had no idea why, and we also left our suit jackets, which we needed to wear for correlation. On any normal day, we probably would have thought that was an important enough reason to go back home and get them, but for some reason, on this day, we decided to just keep walking. I think we were going to walk down to the fruit stand to see our new investigators and just check up on them and follow up on their commitments. We decided to walk down Hudson, which was weird because the fruit stand is on Broadway.... But anyways, we were walking down Hudson, and we thought, hey, Monica lives on Hudson, lets try to go knock her door again. So we head towards her apartment, then WE SAW HER!! She was just leaving she had her 3 stinkin' cute girls with her, all bundled up to go somewhere. We stopped her really quick, and introduced ourselves. She was very sweet. We told her that we heard about her mom and that we knew that our message about Jesus Christ could help her in her life... She got very teary eyed and she accepted. We taught her a very brief over view about the plan of salvation right there and she was soooo open. We gave her a pamphlet to read and she said that we could read it and that we could come back on Friday at 1 to talk about it more.

MIRACLE!!!

Ok - Friday, the day to teach Monica. I wake up that morning DEAD. I was seriously soooo sick. Sister Martin just let me go back to sleep. Then, I woke up a little bit late, and got  a blessing from the Elders. I took a shower and got ready, then I felt like we should still go teach Monica.... So we headed out the door to go teach her. It was such a good lesson. She was way prepared. She understood everything and had good questions. We read a baptism scripture with her, she said it really made her feel like she should be baptised. We invited her and she said yes! She agreed to let us keep coming over and preparing her for her baptism.

After the lesson... I died. I couldn't even talk after that, so we went home and I crashed for the rest of the day :(

Other than that, the week was fine! We picked up another new investigator, a reference from a member. She has a really good solid family. I really hope this family decides to listen to us. We also made more progress with Adiel and Olinda. Olinda is really opening up to us now. We stopped by randomly one day and they just happened to be home and we had a good chat with them. We showed them the lds.org page and how they could watch conference talks. We left them with a conference talk to  watch. I hope they watch it. I'm sure Adiel did, he was already starting when we left. I can't wait to follow up with them and see how they liked it.

Saturday night we had a ward party. 

The fire alarm went off before the party started, so we all had to go across the street while the firefighters checked the building out.

La Noche de la Hispanidad. SO MUCH FUN. Way better than any ward party I've ever been to in Utah or Arizona, that's for sure. The members set up rooms and tables with fun things from all of their countries. 

Representing the United States!!

Elder Benson representing the U.S., cute little Evelyn, representing Peru, and Elder Blanco representing Mexico.

Sister Martin and I in Peru!

They LOVED telling us all about their countries. Sooo cool. 

Hermana Torres with her Ecuador station. She is so great!  hahaha

We made a table for the US

Uruguay

El Salvador

The Benitez family made some great food to represent El Salvador!

We also had food from all of the countries. AMAZING!! We had Tamales, papusas, empinadas, mongoo, and a bunch of other things... SO GOOD. 

Hermana Sanches and her cute little boy all dressed up for their Mesico table. They brought great tamales and jarritos and chips and salsa!

Hermana Pavon, dressed up for Mexico. She looked so cute! She fed us this week and she is such a great cook! She cooked us taquitos! Seriously sooooo yummy.

And I loooove the Colombian soda... Seriously my favorite treat. mmmmm. I love the food here. hahaha. Then, they had dances from all of the different countries. I swear, Latinos just naturally know how to dance. They all danced. It was so fun to watch. They are all wayyy good. It was a FIESTA!!!

The older woman is one of the Elders' investigators. She had the time of her life. She just got up and started dancing, so Hermana Sanches got up and danced with her. It was so cute. She is getting baptized soon :)

The dance for the dominicanos!

Hermano concepcion  with his flag! BEST MOMENT OF MY LIFE!!

  My favorite part though, was watching Hermano Concepcion (I think I've probably mentioned him a couple of times, he's so awesome) had a Dominican Republic flag and he got up and said "por todos los dominicanos" then he danced around the room holding the flag then he put it on the ground and kissed it. Everyone was cracking up. He is such a funny guy. 

The dance for Venesuela. I think they are the only two in the ward who are from there. They were so good though! She is the Relief Society President, and she is awesome!

The two Mexican Elders got up with their cute little Mexican investigator and sang the anthem. So cute! She was just having the time of her life!

Evelyn doing her cute little Peruvian dance.

Hermano Rondoy loves to tease Evelyn.

Well, that's about it. It was a great week. I had a ton of fun at la noche de la hispanidad. I love you all!!

-Sister Clark

p.s. Shout out to my girl Miriam!! Congrats on your engagement! You  better keep me updated!

Faith

Hola!!

This week was so great!! We taught a lot more lessons than the past couple of weeks. 

 

Here are all the sisters who were at the transfer conference the day I arrived in NJ

We started out the week last week, with our Zone Meeting, Elder Benson and Elder Blanco, our Zone leaders gave a really good training about Faith, which is our monthly focus.

ELDERSSSSS

 I am soooo excited for this monthly focus. I could really need to exercise my faith. They made us all a calendar with goals for each day so we can strengthen and exercise our faith. A lot of it is using your personal study time to study faith. I studied a lot about what faith is, how we can improve our faith, and the blessings of acting on faith. On Thursday, the goal was to contact 5 people on the street, and teach them about faith. We looked at the goal before we left, and I felt kind of scared, and I knew this might be hard for me, because contacting people is still really scary and uncomfortable for me, and because a lot of people don't really have the time to be taught a lesson on the street. BUT, We did it!!! It was an interesting day, but we did it, and we found some really awesome potential investigators, and set a few return appointments. 

One of the people that we met that day, was a sweet young family, that work at the fruit stand that I wrote about a few weeks ago. We passed by the fruit stand, and the wife was there, who we had never met before, and they had the most adorable little baby girl. We talked to the wife, and asked her if we could return. She was very kind and said she would love to chat with us the next day.

The next day, Friday, we look at the calendar. The goal for that day is "Test your FAITH, invite 3 people to be baptized". I freaked out a little bit inside. We planned really hard for this fruit stand family. We just had a really good feeling about them, and they are just the cutest little young family, and we really want to teach them. So we planned to teach them more about faith, then lead that into the doctrine of Christ, then INVITE THEM TO BE BAPTIZED, right there, on the side of their little fruit stand, on the first lesson. 

So we prayed, then left our little apartment to the fruit stand. They greeted us warmly and pulled us up seats. The little girl was in her car seat smiling SO BIG with Cheetos all over her face. One of the cutest things I've ever seen. We began talking to them and got to know them, their background and what they needed. The man, Yonny, is from Honduras, and his wife, Adriena, is from Puerto Rico. They have only lived here for 2 months. They are both really easy going and spiritual, but they aren't committed to any church. We talked about faith, and we asked them what faith meant to them. They both said that they have a belief that Christ is the son of God and things like that. Then we read in 2 Nephi 31 where it talks about the doctrine of Christ. We had them read the verses about following the example of Jesus Christ and being baptized. Yonny said that he knows that he needs to be baptized, but he has been waiting for the right church.. We both freaked out inside a little, then asked them to be baptized and... THEY SAID YES!!!

A MIRACLE OF FAITH, PEOPLE!! SO we have 2 new progressing investigators, Yonny and Adriena. They are wonderful. Pray for them, we don't want to lose them. If everything goes as planned they will be baptized in November. We have been keeping in daily contact with them and they have read in the Book of Mormon the chapters that we left them, together. So exciting!

 

Sister Martin and me on our hospital adventure.

On Thursday, we got to go on a fun little adventure to the hospital, which is actually not in our area. We had to take the bus, which was... interesting. The hospital is right on the edge of the river, which was so cool! It felt like we could have swam to NYC. 

 

Me by the river shore during our hospital adventure.

The woman that we visited was so cute. She's like 90, but she is so faithful. She told us about how she has worked in the temple and how she has done all these cool things. She sang beautifully too. We sang some hymns with her. She really likes to color in coloring books too, so she proudly showed us some of the pictures she has colored. It was sooooo cute. The people we serve are just so great. I'm going to remember them all forever. 

Sister Martin and me - NYC in the background

That night, we went to try to contact some inactive members of the ward and we ended up on a street called Broadway. We went to this woman's house and we met another strange woman named Berta, who told us she was a member of the church.. It was the woman that we had the name of who was supposed to live there... But we just went a long with it. She was very sweet and kind of a spunky lady. But she told us that she wasn't interested in coming back to church... then politely, with a smile on her face told us "I don't want you to come back"... It was kind of funny because she was rude, but nice about it, but then she hugged us and just kind of went along on her way. It was hilarious. Then while we were walking back to our apartment we see these two men walking toward us then all of a sudden we hear, "CONGRATULATIONS!!" we look around confused then he continues "ITS ABOUT TIME THEY LET WOMEN BE MORMON!"... bahahhahahahahahhahahaha. It was seriously so funny. He was a nice guy though. He made sure that we knew that he was Jewish, but he thinks that what we do is really nice. hahaha

On Wednesday night, we had a breakthrough lesson with the Amayas. They are the family that I mentioned we were struggling with. We had only visited them a couple of times, but each time we felt like there was something missing. So this time, we worked really really hard to get some members of the ward present in the lesson. We actually worked it out so that we could have two members with us. Sister Sanches and Brother Paillaman. Two kind of younger, but AMAZING members of the ward. We went in there and the Amayas were happy to see us and happily invited the members into their home as well. Olinda (the woman) had to finish feeding the little girl, but as soon as she finished she came in and sat by me. We were talking about how their youngest and their oldest are 17 years apart in age. When I realized this, I told them about how my sister and I were 17 years apart in age too! When I said this, her face lighted up and she got excited! I felt like that really helped me to connect with Olinda. After that we were IN! We had a great lesson with them, and Olinda finally understood the importance of reading the BOM and agreed to read about it, then pray for an answer as a family. It was great. MEMBER PRESENT LESSONS MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE! If you are reading this right now, pick up your phone, call the missionaries, and ask them when you can participate in a lesson with an investigator. It will be an answer to their prayers. The testimonies of members are strong. 

 

Hermano Cedillo and Obispo Concepcion. Two of my favorite people in the ward. Hermano Cedillo is a recent convert since January and we visit his family weekly. He sounds like Mufasa and he is so wise. His wife always sends us home with orange juice. He's rom Ecuador and he knows l ike 5 languages. Hermano Concepcion is just amazing. I swear he knows everything. He's from the Dominican  Republic.

 

CONFERENCE WAS SO FUN!! I got so spiritually fed. I feel ready to go and do work!! I hope you all are ready to do your part in member missionary work now too!

 

Evelyn, Me and Hermana Incarroca. They are sooo cute. They texted us one night telling us to come to the church. We showed up and saw all the elders and they said they got the same text Then they showed up with pizza and soda for us.  Evelyn is the cutest little girl ever! She's so funny!

 

My LOVE! Soda Colombiana. I am sooo obsessed Julie...You would love this!

 We had a really fun lunch with the ward after the Sunday morning session. I seriously love this ward so much. The people are so awesome. Sister Martin and I were a little bit late to lunch because we got caught up talking to a recent convert who really needed to talk to us about something. Like 3 of the members were looking for us, then when they found us they hurried us into the cultural hall. They had saved us seats and made us plates of food. 

 

All the cute little boys in our ward lined up for the dessert after conference.

Then they would come and make sure that we had all the food that we wanted. Then we had TWO members bring us desert... So we got two deserts. It was so funny. The Elders are always kind of jealous because the members adore us so much. hahahahhaha

 

We have CUTE kids in our ward

Well, I love you all! Hope you all have a good week, and are happy. 

-Sister Clark

 

Sister Martin makes me banana pancakes!

Here's our spunky little WNY apartment. I love the archway. Such a fun place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The hallway