A complete family!

We had a super great Saturday with the baptisms of Maria, Manuela and Kaulin this weekend! It was so great and we've been working with them for a little while. 

 The mom was a less active member, but reactivated and now is going super strong.  Her husband is a recent convert and now the 3 children have all joined the church. A complete family! We're so happy for them and now they can work on getting sealed in the temple!

" Sometimes we become the lightning rod, and we must 'take the heat' for holding fast to God's standards and doing His work. I testify that we need not be afraid if we are grounded in His doctorine. We may experience misunderstanding, criticism and even false accusation, but we are never alone. Our Savior was 'despised and rejected of men' [Isaiah 53:3] It is our sacred privilege to stand with Him!"  -Robert D. Hales

I love that quotation and it's true. It is my privilege to stand with my Savior for these 18 months and I would never trade that for anything! I hope that all of us always have the courage to stand up for what's right and stand with Him as well.

Have a wonderful week!

Hna Safeer

Zoe and the "One Armed Man"

David's (Zoe's dad) notes:  Zoe continues to make friends and make people happy, young and old.
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Hola! Ok so this week, biggest things that happened is 1. General Conference! Super good, but it was my first time watching it in Spanish. As much as I love voice overs, I prefer it in English. But Conference never disapoints! It was great as always.

2. Transfers! Yikes! I'm the only one from my house who's leaving, but we don't know to where or with who. I'll find out tonight. It's probably fair to say I'm a tiny bit nervous. 

Besides that it's all just been a normal week.

So a couple last photos from this transfers.

First are the most GIANT coconuts in the world! We had to drink and eat them and they're actually gross. They may not look that giant but remember my hands are really big. 

One more photo from the temple that Hna Smith bombed.

Then like a week later we had more coco for district meeting, but they were smaller so I could handle it and now I like the coconut meat so that was nice.

And this is Heladio! I love him so much! He's just this cute old one armed man that usually doesn't smile but he smiled a little for the photo!

And remember, "Faith in God includes faith in his timing." -Neal A. Maxwell

Hasta Luego!

Hna Safeer

Zoe Goes to the Temple in the Dominican Republic

David's Note (Zoe's Dad): Temples are special places and there are only about 125 in the whole world, so going on a trip to the temple is a special treat.
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Another week has come and gone. Let me tell you some things. Nothing big has happened, but I have photos, so here we go.

This is Daniel and his friend. They´re not members, but were invited to a baptism. We ran into them at their neighbor´s house all ready to go in socks with flip flops, jeans, polo shirts and ties. Fancy!  

I told two of our investigator girls that are sisters they could give me Dominican hair. Here´s how it went.

 We got special permission to go on a temple trip with our branch in the captial on Saturday! We were up bright and early to leave at 530 am. This is me with Cesarina, who was SOOO excited for her first time in the temple.

Also a perk of a temple trip in the capital is PIZZARELLI!

This is us on our super long bus rides to the temple.

A Really Good Week! Nothing in particular....

David's Note: Zoe uses Hermanas instead of "Sisters" throughout her note. I am sure that she has other Spanish words that she substitutes for English regularly.

This week has been really good! Nothing particular I´m dying to talk about, but we´re teaching some AWESOME people which is always great! 

Things were a little crazy. We had a conference for all the Hermanas this week and did splits 3 days this week. Which is CRAZY a lot. Also we had other Hermanas sleeping over at our house this week, so it´s been hectic, but good! One of the days of my splits I was able to go with an Hermana from Mexico, and she doesn't speak any English so it was good to be forced to speak ONLY Spanish for an entire day. It´s still not completely natural for me but it went really well and we did a good job working that day! Also, another day my companion and I took out an Hermana who´s still in the MTC and we got to take her with us to our lessons that day. She did awesome! She´s learned a lot of Spanish already since she´s been here and she´s going to be so great once she actually gets out here in the field. 

This is Hermana Buhrley, Hermana Jorgensen and I. We´ve been super lucky to live together for 5 months on the mission! Not very many missionaries get to be together for that long, but we´ve been able to and it´s been so great!

This is our full district at the temple. It was sooo nice to be able to go!

These are all the Hermana´s in our mission. We had an Hermana Conference this week. It was good.

¨As we press forward along the straight and narrow path, we build progressive spiritual strength- strength in using our agency to act for ourselves.¨ -Robert D. Hales

Zoe Dance Battles in her Dominican Nightgown & Human Frailty

David's Note (Zoe's Dad): Zoe makes reference to a bad keyboard and weird writing. I correct spelling and typo's so she doesn't have to worry about it.

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Hello everyone! Sorry I'm on a funky keyboard right now, so my writing is a little weird today... but everything is well here in the DR! 

It's been a good week! It's gone by very quickly and we've just been nice and busy. A couple cool things is that we got to go to the temple this week with our zone and another zone and the mission president and his wife. It was really nice.

Also, a funny story. The other night my housemate and I were being goofy and laughing and kind of dancing weird and one of the girls in the room tells us that they think these 2 girls are watching us. We look up out of our huge window and see two girls that are about our age across the street on their balcony and they are watching us.  We're on the second story, and so are they, so nobody below us can see us, but we can see each other.  Then they start dancing back at us. Next thing we know me and my housemate are in a dance battle with our cross the street neighbors and we just have this dance off for like 20 minutes in our Dominican night gowns and it was super funny and we're all just laughing. It was intense, but I'm pretty sure we won. Ha, ha, ha.. and the great thing too is that they're doing their Dominican Latina booty shaking dancing, but we're missionaries so we're just doing things like the Charleston and interpretive dance and things like that on our side. I'd like to think that we're friends now with those girls.

We're working with 2 people for baptism and a group of 3 boys that are Juan-Carlos' friends and they're great and all go to church together and all the lessons together and the are awesome! 

Before I forget. One of the girls also has a blog incase you want to check it out it's hermanacaitlynbuhrley.blogspot.com 

And heres a lovely message - I can't do quotation marks. Sorry! 

"Be kind regarding human frailty... Except in the case of His only perfect Begotten Son, imperfect people are all God has ever had to work with. This must be terribly frustrating to Him, but he deals with it. So should we."

  -Jerffery R. Holland