"Cuidado!"

Hoopla one and all.

To start this little guy out on a good note, right after I emailed you guys last week, we had to stop by the mission office and... I GOT SOME LETTERS! But not from Momma or Daddio... From Sister Nusbaum and Katie!! (so thank you tons you two!!! And Katie, when I have a spare second *literally* I will write you back!)

I am glad to hear about how beautiful Andrew´s funeral was. I wish I could have been there! I´m not gonna lie, hearing about what happened has been really hard on me this week. But a little tender mercy from the Lord has been the fact that literally every lesson we ended up teaching this week was the plan of salvation. So to me, that was a comfort that was reiterated in my mind multiple times this week. Gotta love those tender mercies, huh?

So here in Limache there is this guy who drives around a little Nacho Libre bike that is fixed up to look like a train. So when he drives around he blows the horn and it goes "chuuuuuchhuuu" (like a train)! Well inside his little train bike doohicky is maní (peanuts)! The good kind with baked sugar or whatever on the outside. It may not seem like a huge deal or whatever, but after walking around all day and nothing too exciting happening, to us, that chuuchuuu sound of like a halleuah chorus! The other day, we quite literally chased him down for some maní... yeah, he knows us by name now haha.

My feelings over the past few weeks with spanish can be catigorized as just short of bi-polar. Sometimes I´m like "yaaayyyy, I got this" and then other times I´m like "wow..it sucks to be me right now". But something that I learned this week is that the times when I am beating myself up and down on myself, I am quite simply lacking faith in myself and in the power of the Lord. I´ve learned that patience and faith go hand in hand. Besides, I see progression in my understanding spanish and my ability to speak it, but at times I seem to block all that out and focus on the ´not´. So my goal this week is to lose the fear and keep the faith. I really liked something Mom said in her email to me this week.. "I can´t do perfect, but I can do faith". That´s what I´m gonna do. If I get only remembered as one thing on my mission, I want to be remembered as a missionary that never lacked faith (faith in herself, faith in the work, faith in her companions, faith in her ward, faith in the Lord....fe en todo.) Because faith is the foundation of everything in the gospel. One if the few phrases that I can say in spanish that I always say to our investigators is: Without faith, we can´t do much of anything; but with it, we can do and see miracles....That would be a good way to be remembered if I do say so myself.

So to get to the storytime of the email.... (coughcough)
So this Saturday was a very eventful day! Our investigator Carla was baptized!! And I consider her my first real baptism cause I was there for the teaching process. Carla is wonderful and sweet and has some really good friends in the ward so I am really excited to witness and help her with her transition into the church. Now we are teaching her 10 year old son Oscar..and after the first lesson we had with him, he said "I´m gonna be baptized...Mom can I watch yours this weekend so I can see how it´s done?" We had to calm him down a bit and tell him to take a step at a time cause he was setting the details aready haha. So great.
Then later that afternoon, we were walking down a little side road to visit an investigator. Our dog Monsi got this HUGE dog that lives down there all angry and riled-up and I was right there so I was like " woooaah there big fellow" and so I picked up the pace a little bit cause he was jumping all around and starting to attack Monsi...but when I started to book it for the other side of the road.....(now Mom, before I tell you what hapenned, know that I am okay...........okay, to continue..) Satan (that´s what I call the huge scary, angry, crazy dog) looked over at me and jumped on me and bit my arm. I fell to the ground and then Hermana Barros started hitting him with a brownie pan that was in her hands so I rolled away once he let go. (it was super scary in the moment and it hurt like the dickens but now that I look back on this...its a pretty funny image haha..well for me anyways). At the time, I was luckily wearing my thick winter coat (the blue one), so that stopped a lot of damage from happening to my arm, and I´m gonna have to get an Hermana in the ward to fix it cause it now has a big ole hole in it. But the dog did bite me (like pierce skin with blood and all that nonsense) and the owner didnt have paper proof of a rabies vaccination, so now I´m currently getting a shot every other day for the next two weeks and I´m on meds to make sure I am A-okay. So yep, now I´m a REAL missionary...dog attack (check).
So yes Momma, don´t be scared or nervous, cause I´m aaalllllll good :)

Random sidenotes:
-Dad, before I left you said you were gonna pick up drawing...how´s that going? Caaause I wanna a picture!
-Who´s name do I have for Christmas? Cause I gotta start lookin..
-This week, that one song "somewhere out there beneath the pale moonlight, someone´s thinking of me and loving me tonight (dududududu) somewhere out there someones sayin a prayer...blahblahhh" ...that song goes through my head when we are tracting and I start missing home or just think about family..love it!...then I start thinkin about Fivel Goes West...classic!

So yep, that was my week and my time is now up. I know you all have lots of questions that I haven´t answered yet, so I will try and do that next week.
Until then, know I love y´all and I pray for you guys all the time and you are always in my heart...siempre siempre.
Thank you to the moon and back for your support and prayers and everything thiny micjiggy you guys do.
Keep being awesome and keep makin the Lord proud :)
Until next week...
Love always and always,
Hermana Abigail Page