Showers and Miracles (December 29, 2014)

Hola familia y amigos!

MERRY (LATE) CHRISTMAS! Yeahhh, it was this week. But I wanted to wish you all merry Christmas again! It snowed a little bit this week! On Christmas eve, so we had a white Christmas. But it really hasn't been as cold as I expected, especially considering December is almost over! But the lady here at the Family History Center told us that this week is going to be cold and the inversion is coming. Sooo I'm preparing myself for this week.

So this week was really awesome. So much to tell, but I'll just tell the highlights. On Tuesday, we made tamales with one of the ladies we're teaching. She's from Honduras, so we made Honduran tamales. They're pretty different from Mexican tamales. I still can't decide which I like better. In central America, the tamales are wrapped with banana leaves instead of corn husks in Mexico. They also have more fillings than Mexican tamales. We put in potatoes and rice and meat (with the bone and everything). Mexican tamales usually just have meat and are a LOT spicier in general. Also, the masa (filling stuff) is more moist in central American tamales. Sooo they're a little different. It was really fun to learn how to put them together. In total during this Christmas season, I've eaten 10 tamales. About half of which were Mexican, half central-American. And then this week, we're going to eat with our ward, soooo we're expecting even more. Yummmmy.

We also went caroling as a district. It was really fun. We went to some of our Spanish people and we thought it would be a good idea to sing feliz navidad. Buuuuut, there are a lot of silent pauses. After we sang it the first time, it was too awkward and we didn't sing that again. haha

We also had pretty much the whole day of Christmas eve free, so we decided to go tracting. When we planned on it and left the house, it was cold, but not too bad. Theeeen, it started sprinkling. We hadn't set any appointments or anything, so we just went with it and bundled up. It started raining so hard that people pulled over to offer us a ride. Someone even stopped and gave us an umbrella.

SOO funny thing about Hispanics is that they are so respectful and polite, that they'll let us come to their house even if they're not really interested in what we teach. This causes problems a lot of times, but other times, it gives us an opportunity to soften their hearts. Another result of their politeness is that when we knock on their door, if they're not interested, instead of just telling us that, they avoid us. They come up with all sorts of excuses. One of the funniest ones we've encountered lately is that the kids will answer the door and tell us their parents are "showering." We joke about it a lot and thought it was especially convenient because we were being showered on as we tracted. We even knocked on a door that day where the lady answered the door and was in a towel. Then she got upset at us. WHY DID YOU ANSWER THE DOOR THEN?... I don't understand some people. 

But that day, as we started off, we started getting super rejected. It was kinda weird. We'd never had that much rejection when we'd gone tracting. It was kind of disappointing. THEN, we had a really cool experience. We were walking along and saw a man outside setting up his Christmas decorations. He was looking down, but it seemed like he was Hispanic. Sooo sidenote, we got a referral a few months ago for a manager of a restaurant. And the address they gave us was the address for the restaurant. I think I told the story before in an email. Long story short, it was really cool because we went to the restaurant to try to meet him and didn't know how it would happen. But we just went. Then timing was perfect and we were able to talk to him. He wasn't very open because he was at work. We asked if we could come over to teach him and he said sure. We asked where he lived and he just said "near the sugar beet factory"... EVERYTHING in Nampa is near the sugar beet factory. Sooo that didn't really help. And we didn't want to creep him out and ask for a specific address. So it just ended at that. And that was about 2 or so months ago. THEN, back to this tracting day. We walk up to this man and he looked up. IT WAS HIM!! We asked him how he was and he remembered me. He even remembered my name! I was a little weirded out. Then I recognized who it was. WOAHHHH! So we talked to him a bit. He told us he normally wouldn't talk to missionaries or people like us, but that he liked us and was willing to talk about religion. MIRACLE!!! So we found him and are totally going to keep teaching him and his family. If it hadn't been for both of those miracles, things wouldn't have worked out. He wouldn't have talked to us and been open. If it wasn't Christmas eve, he wouldn't have been home. If we hadn't gone to the restaurant before, he wouldn't have recognized us. Sooo many things lined up perfectly. It was definitely the hand of Heavenly Father.

Besides that, our Christmas was really good. I'll have to tell you more about it next week because I'm out of time. But it was amazing. Heavenly Father is blessing us.

Hope you all have an amazing week!

Con amor,

Hermana Shirley

Our rainy tracting. We saw some ducks.

Ana, who we made tamales with.

We used the WHOLE chicken.