Flooded Streets & July 4th Dominican Style

Ola! Everything is good as usual. So many things are progressing. Our ward has already gotten enthusiastic and supportive of what we´re doing. We´re getting more and more investigators and they´re all progressing as well. Even less active members that we've been visiting have started to become more involved and it´s great! We even have a baptism coming up in August for a super awesome 17 year old girl named Carla and she's super cute and excited and we've even started teaching her young, I think 14 years old, brother.  All just a lot of exciting stuff! 

I sent a few pictures this week. Sorry my emails are always so disorganized, but I do my best!

Perla is a girl who was more recently baptized. She´s super awesome and we still visit her and teach her on a regular basis.

This is where we email.

This is from when my back was out and I just walked around everywhere with a hot rice bag in my skirt.

This is a double banana that I bought. And the two bananas weren't even morphed together!

MRS.PECK you are amazing! Thank you SOOOOOOOO much for the mint Oreo surprise that you sent me!

We got the dinner table all set up properly for the 4th of July. And that´s Hna. Jorgensen's head peaking at the top.

We enjoyed a lunch of shishkabobs, corn on the cob, and mangoes.

Then we had smores! (But a little bit different because we used Dominican ingredients)

We gave the two Elders in our District our left over 4th of July food.

This is my current Zone.

This is my letter box I constructed to put all my letters in!

We had tropical storm Shantal this week. We couldn´t go out so we watched 17 Miracles on our tiny DVD player with our matresses all stacked up. Good movie.

Us during movie night. 

Now let me really tell you about this storm. This is an insert from a letter I just wrote to Kay Morgan, but I haven´t sent yet.

Yesterday my companion and I went to an investigators house and she told us she couldn't meet with us, because she had to clean her house and get it ready to flood for the cyclone that was on it´s way. After she declined our offer to help her clean we left and went to another investigator´s house. She also told us a cyclone was going to hit either that day or the next day, but being unconcerned (our district leaders would call us if the storm was coming, right?) we teach her a lesson. 

As we´re teaching, it begins raining and it keeps raining. We had finished the lesson, but wait about another 15 minutes to see if the rain would stop. As soon as we thought it was letting up we left her house and turned the corner to see her street was a river and it starts raining quite hard again. So we pull out our umbrellas and walk to the main road. It´s even more flooded than the first!

We realize that we can´t make it to anymore houses and start heading home. We walk out to the very flooded main road and within a few steps we realize it´s worse than we thought! The water was up to our knees! And walking down hill, even on cement, was like trying to hold your balance walking down a water slide! People were yelling at us telling us to go into a shop or go stand someplace dry, but we were already soaked and needed to go home! We did get some help, however, from a couple kids. They helped pull us along and held our hands where the water was rushing very quickly. They told us where to walk if there was a shallower part on the road. 

One girl grabbed my skirt (that was about mid'calf length) and started pulling it up and I got nervous and was trying to tell her it's OK and she didn't need to do whatever she was doing, but she wouldn't stop. She grabbed my skirt and pulled it up and tied it in a know so that now I had a knee length  skirt. It was actually very nice and made it a lot easier to walk.

Finally, we made it home and showered and got dry. 

That´s all I have this week. Hope everyone is doing well!

Hermana Safeer