18 MONTHS IN CHILE: ME GUSTA PASTA‏

Hayley studying

HOLA FAMILY

WOW seriously i don´t even know what to say i feel like i wrote you guys yesterday haha. BUT. let´s think back on this week shall we?? First of all, the lord is giving me tons of blessings in the spanish department, i can actually understand people these days and i´m contributing to lessons and... wait for it... TEACHING MY OWN LESSONS TO THE MENOS ACTIVOS. seriously a milagro. but anyways this week has been awesome, we found some golden new investigators, and we are still plugging along with m* and a* and n* and e* etc etc. and holy cow m*, whose baptism was a little over a week ago, is already doing missionary work!! she is such an example to me.

Hayley, Hermana Puertas and M at her baptism

M's Baptism

BUT not everything is perfect and smiles. it was hard this week because this one investigator that i had a lot of hope for and really thought was going to get baptized dropped us :(( heartbreaking. but it´s okay, we were just preparing her for another time!! missions are so so hard, honestly never expected it to be this hard, but at the same time such great things happen, i dont even know! I had intercambios for the first time (honestly don't know the word in english oops) and i went with hermana plothow for a day!! i spoke english for the first time in 3 weeks haha that was a good time! but she is seriously an example missionary and who i want to be by the end of my mission. SUPERSTAR. i learned a ton!! not surprised shes a sister missionary leader haha. the only bummer was that the next day i struggled with spanish a little bit because i had been speaking english haha sorry hna puertas!

Okay funny stories for the week! first of all, in the ccm we called pasta pasta, and no one ever corrected us! so i just thought it was acceptable. so when this family we were eating with asked me what food i liked here, i said i liked the pasta, and they all just BURST OUT LAUGHING. turns out that is slang for cocaine here hahahaha so DON'T WORRY FAMILY, i´m still embarrassing myself and telling members that i love some hard drugs. YIKES. haha also the old lady we sing to this week 1) asked us if we like boys, and 2) told us to shut the door because too much sun was coming in when it was night time. honestly so hard not to laugh haha i love her so much. also our district leader and his comp sing us bachata songs by aventura every night so we get a kick out of that haha.

OH and the best part of every single one of our weeks is BRANCH FAMILY HOME EVENING! every friday at 7:30 at the church building. gosh it is such a blast. and our investigator and the elders investigator DOMINATED the fhe this friday!! first we watched a spiritual video and then our investigators did games, and they were SO fun!! young and old, everyone was cracking up. great ward bonding, which we need so that they will come help us with investigators haha. but we danced. oops. the only time we will get to dance on our missions during this little repeat after me game haha. such a good time i can´t even tell ya.

ANYWAYS, everything is good here in ovalle, i´m stressing a bit because we have zone conference tomorrow with the mission president and he wants us to have ALL OF THE COMMITMENTS memorized. and i´m over here just barely finishing my third week in the field and my companion who just finished her first year doesn't
even know them haha. leerá el libro de mormon y orará para saber que es la palabra de dios? i love it. anyways, thanks for all your prayers, i really feel them, and i´m praying for you all too!! LOVE YOU SO MUCH!!!

Hermana Hansen

*Hayley was able to send some photos this week. So, some of them are from a few weeks ago. Hopefully the captions will help. :) Also, I am not quite sure what happened to the last few photos. For some reason they got all stretched out when I posted them...*