Zoe Makes Friends Wherever She Goes

We love this family sooooo much! We´re all just best pals. 

This is Yeseli. She´s 8 and in our ward and thinks we´re the best of friends. We pretty much are so it´s cool. 

Yeseli thinks she can gives me piggy back rides but she can´t. I just walk normal.

We had so much fun just being goofy with this kid! He´s soooo great! He may only be 11 now but he´s got a good life ahead of him!

Oh did I mention he´s dancing in the streets for Carnival? I love this kid. I´m going to try to video it and send it home. We´ll see how that goes.

Zoe- Pretty in Pink at Valentine's Day

We had district meeting and we were asked to wear pink. So we did our best.

Hahaha so much pink. I felt like a weirdo walking around with 3 other girls in all pink.  But it´s Valentines day so it´s whatever.

President of Dominican Republic Visits Zoe

David's (Zoe's Dad's) notes: Zoe has had some really interesting experiences, but this one is pretty big. Read about Zoe and her visitor...
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Hey ya´ll! I´ve got lots of pictures for you guys this week so be excited!

These first two are just the girls in my zone being together.

Carnival is coming up. These are a couple boys in their already made costumes and their whips. 

So Valentines day we had a nice surprise. Right across the street from our house is a baseball field. Guess who decided to stop by in their helicopter?

The President. As in the President of the Dominican Republic. I have no idea why he chose our town but he did. Then he hopped out and into a SUV

People and mostly children were running and climbing trees trying to see him over the big wall surrounding

 the baseball field. We had a perfect view on the roof of our two story house. 

Zoe Crams into the Back of a Pickup

David's (Zoe's Dad) notes: If you ever get a chance to live in a poor country, you'll have the privilege to take public/private transportation. So, it's a private truck that is used by the public and the more the merrier.

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Buenas!!! I hope everything is going well in the USA. Things are swell here. Just pluggin away doing what missionaries do. Nothing terribly exciting or new but I will share a couple.

1. Raikel is getting baptized! He´s soooo cute and 11. His Aunt and Uncle and their family is LDS and he´s super great. He loves church and the scriptures and everything about life! He´s super responsible and smart. He wakes himself up every and make the walk to church. He´s only 11 now, but we´re sooo excited and he´s going to do some great things in his life!

2. Just my companion and I had 11 investigators at church this week!

3. Today we met 3 girls from Switzerland that are staying in our town for 3 weeks. It´s cool, but actually really weird. And we struggled to communicate between English and Spanish. We started in Spanish, but then realized they knew more English, which still wasn´t a ton, but we made it work!

Here´s a picture of my life. Remember how I used to hitch hike when I was in school in Hawaii?

That´s child play compared to how we get around now hahaha. Check out this photo. Everytime we leave our town we have to take one of these truck that the shove with people. We lucked out today that they had like a seat thing in it, but usually we just sit on the truck rim. Is it dangerous? Ya. But we have no choice and we´re pro´s at it by now, and it´s quite breezy!

 ¨I am o thoroughly convinced that if we don´t set goals in our lifes and learn how to master the techniques of living to reach our goals, we can reach a ripe old age and look back on our lifes only to see that we reached but a small part of our full potention. When one learns to master the principles of setting a goal, he will then be able to make a great difference in the results he attains in this life.¨
- M. Russell Ballard

Talk to you next week!

Hna Safeer

Zoe Finally Has Water!

David's (Zoe's Dad) Note: Zoe has been taking bucket showers for the last month or two. Now you will understand why she is so excited...!
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Hey everyone! 

So not much to share this week... except WE HAVE WATERRR!!!!! best week of our life!!! It´s great. REAL great. Thanks you Alberto Jr. and your working partner for saving our house! 

So that´s the big news for this week. There is now a very happy house of 4 hermanas in Sabana Yegua everyone. Watchout. Also, we got 3 cieling fans brand new from the mission. Pretty snazzy too eh? I´d maybe be more exciting about it if I wasn´t comparing it to recieving water right now haha.

Besides that´s it´s been a slow week and yet a fast week. We have an amazing pool of investigators right now, and water,so I really couldn´t ask for more!

Oh and today we went to the capital for my companion to take an English Certification test and we celebrated with Sweet Frog! Yum!

¨You must stand up for something or you will fall for everything¨

-anonymous  (sorry if i spelled that wrong. I´m learning Spanish ya´ll and don´t have english spell check¨ 

talk to you later!

Zoe

P.S. Oh and today we also celebrated with Krispy Kremes. Don´t judge us. The capital is a rare occasion for us!

Birthday Fireworks! Video of Zoe

David's (Zoe's dad) Note: Zoe's birthday is on December 23rd and she spent the day with her companion in the hospital. Her companion is doing really well and they are back together, working hard, and having fun.
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Hna Linares came to our house to do splits and gave me an early birthday gift! (This was before the hospital trip.) A snickers, earrings, and a suprise thing that we finally figured out that we needed to light it and it was so fun! I make reference about a picture of me smoking in this video. No I´m at not smoking here... but  I´ll send the picture and explain more later!

Zoe In the Hospital for Her Birthday and Christmas

David's (Zoe's dad) Notes: I have not done a great job of keeping up with Zoe's weekly letters SO.... I am starting with this week's e-mails and I'll keep up and work on adding the letters that I missed as I can.
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Wowie! Sorry it´s been soooo long since I´ve really written but things have been CRAZZZZZZZZZZY!!!!!! Let me try to catch you guys all up....  

First off an old Hanukkah photo from my old area. Yes we lit candles and yes we played dradel multiple times and made up our versions of the dradel song and it was super fun and everyone´s first Hanukkah! Well besides me of course!

So Hanukkah was from a very long time ago, but now I´m with a new companion (well it´s been 5 and a half weeks)

But starting on Sunday the 22 my companion, Hna Hernandez (from Chile) ended up being super sick, throwing up and a fever of 104.5 which landed us in a hospital by about 9 at night to the closet hospital which was about 30 minutes away. Luckily, we have a member of the church who lives next door and has a car, so he took us. 

This is my really sad picture of our hospital set up. I have better photos, but they´re on the camera

of Hna Rush, so I´ll send them next week. This is Hna Hernandez in a hospital bed, Hna Alcantara under a weird bed things, Hna Rush´s legs and our two mat beds. Sleepover! Yahoo!

Then Monday we were off to the capital to get surgery. Appendicitis! Ya! No idea how to spell it. But it´s already about a 3 hour bus ride to the capital and some angry workers decided to burn tires in the middle of the road and cause complete stand still traffic for who know how long. Our bus luckily was very close by when this happened, so it only took us about 40 minutes to get going again. We ended up taking a very long detour.

We should have been like this smart man and just ridden a donkey around the fire. It probably would have been faster. hahaha

This was my poor companion, but serious she has the BEST attitude!

We finally made it to the capital!

And after speaking to the mission doctor he landed us in definitely one of the nicest hospitals in the DR.

So some good news about our stay in the hospital we got some good food. The lovely Dr. Walker and his wife brought us gift baskets on Christmas morning from the Senior Missionary Couples at the MTC who had heard about our situation. It was so good and filled with AMERICAN food! It was my breakfast and lunch and it was great!

Then for dinner one the the Senior missionaries in the office made all the Elders that work in the office a good ol´ traditional AMERICAN Christmas dinner! And they brought it to me that night! Honey baked ham, mashed potatoes, rolls, green salad, pumpkin and banana cream pie!