October 26, 2015

hello everyone! 

the mission roller coaster was so real this week, I never have known so many ups and downs in my whole life!

exciting news - we recently reactivated a 20 year old kid named junior, and he has been bringing his girlfriend noemi to church, this week she accepted baptism and told us that she is ¨counting down the days!¨ so we are super excited and happy for her - lots of prayers that everything will go well!

2 of my investigators from Tiquipaya got baptized on Saturday! It was amazing to be able to see them finally enter into the waters of baptism and how happy they were! the Lord really does have his timing for everything :)

this week we were in the middle of a lesson with a super catholic grandpa and he stopped us and said ¨you guys would make some really good nuns!¨ he then spent the next 20 minutes telling us why we should be nuns and not missionaries. hahah when we told him pretty much ¨¨thanks but no thanks¨´ he got real mad and kicked us out. hahaha we left and just couldn't stop laughing at the whole situation. super weird! 

the weather here is finally cooling off! we are heading into rainy season which I could not be happier about! Its fun cause it will be super hot, rain for a few minutes to cool everything off, and then be hot again! so its a much better balance :)

happy Halloween!! I hope everyone is eating pumpkin flavored EVERYTHING! nothing sounds more delicious right now then a pumpkin shake or a big slice of pumpkin chocolate chip bread! 

love and miss you all! 

love, 

hermana andersen :)

#flushingtoiletpaperisnormal? #hatespiders #fullheart‏

Hello everyone! 

Lots of scattered thoughts this week - haha I always sit down to write and think ¨how am I supposed to put everything that happened this week into one little email?!¨ but here´s the week in a nutshell: 

-temple! seriously when you can only go to the temple once every three months, its one of the most exciting things for us to be able to all go together and do a session as missionaries! also the temple is the only place in cocha where you can flush your toilet paper.. and I'm not gonna lie it freaked me out a little to see toilet paper in the toilet. hahah that's when I said to myself ¨yeah I´m officially weird.¨

-spider attack. last week I wrote about baby spiders, this week something way way worse than baby spiders happened. every night I literally crash into bed like I haven't slept in weeks hahah this week as I fell into bed my head fell literally CENTIMETERS from the biggest most disgusting spider I have ever seen in my entire life ON MY PILLOW. I screamed so loud that our pensionista came running from next door to see what had happened, and even she was scared to do anything with it! she said ¨stand back I think its poisonous!´´ seriously I wanted to die and my week has consisted of hand washing every blanket we have in the house because to say I am paranoid is an understatement haha also my companion and I may or may not have made our two little beds into one medium size bed - we figure  at least if there´s spiders in one bed they´ll be in both and we can suffer together!

-sweetest experience! we have a menos active couple we have been working really close with and have come to really love, they treat us SO good! my watch has been cracked since the mtc and I have just been living with it because I haven't had time to fix it and this week the whole face pretty much shattered - as we were teaching this couple a lesson, the husband noticed it and after the lesson asked to borrow it, I forgot about it and when I realized that night thought, ¨I´ll just get it next time¨.. Last night we had another lesson and he handed me my watch in PERFECT condition! he had taken it to get fixed and was so excited to surprise me with it! something that sounds so small for us I know, but something that means so much to me because they really dont have hardly anything, and I know it was a real sacrifice for them to do that for me! I have learned so much here and come to really appreciate the sweet little acts of service that these humble people give every single day! I love Boliva, I love Bolivians, I love this gospel, and honestly couldn't be happier! 
Happy fall! Its crazy to me that its fall here, because we are still feeling like its the middle of summer here! I love you all so much! have the best week! 

love, 

hna andersen 

October 12, 2015

hola! 

its been a week of lots of ups and downs! we got to celebrate my companions birthday this week, so its been fun planning lots of little surprises and doing my best to make it feel like a ´´different´´ day, because in the mission days that at home are the best, are usually just normal days! but we have had lots of fun and eaten LOTS of american candy hahaha she told me ´´I think I´m going to have diabetes when I get home´´ #´merica

2 of the inactive families we have been working really closely with officially reactivated this week, and it has been so amazing to see the way their lives have changed as they have made the decision to come back to church and the blessings that come when we live the way we should be living. 

I have been thinking a lot this week about how blessed I really am. as we left a lesson with an hermana that is passing for an innumerable amount of trials and having a hard time understanding why, I told my companion ¨Isn´t it interesting that some of us are SO privileged that we never have to go through anything that even compares to even one of the many trials that some people are faced with?´´ she told me something that really got me thinking. she said ¨yeah but because we have been given so much and been blessed with so much, we have that much bigger of a responsibility to help the people that are down and that don´t have the things we have been blessed with, and we are going to be judge according to what we did with what we were given¨

We are seriously more blessed than we even realize and have the responsibility to share the blessings that we have with those that are passing through hard times. 

I love you all and am so grateful for all the prayers and love from home, especially in these last couple of weeks! 

oh one more thing, this week a spider had babies in our house!! ahh I hate bugs so much. hahaha every night we go on a hunt for all the baby spiders we can find, and every night in my prayers I pray that there aren't any in my bed, and that if there are I will never know. hahah ahh 

love you all! 

hermana andersen :)

Doing service - washing laundry by hand - for 4 hours!

Appendicitis in Bolivia

hello everyone!

thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for all the prayers this week! It was an experience that I will never forget and a pretty crazy week, but I have seen so many miracles and couldn't be more grateful! haha I've never had an appendicitis in America so I can't really compare it, but I can say that the whole thing seemed suuper relaxed here. haha the story goes like this:

 

Saturday night we watched the Women´s Conference in the mission home and they fed us Mexican food from heaven, but as we were leaving I told my companion ¨wow I think I'm finally used to Bolivian food because my stomach is not doing well with that food´´ - as the night went on the pain started getting more and more centralized and by morning I had pretty much diagnosed myself with an appendicitis. We went to the clinic and they took some tests to send to the lab but I think because I wasn't screaming and crying nobody really took me seriously. They told me they didn't have enough beds for me so I would have to wait in the waiting room for the results.. 4 AND A HALF HOURS LATER I told my companion ´´If I have to wait one more second in this waiting room chair I´m going to die right here´´  haha she went Blake Andersen mode for a sec, found the doctor, gave him a peace of her mind and thankfully that sped the process a bit. They brought my results and said ´´uh yeah.. we´re really sorry for the wait... it looks like were gonna have to operate but before we can do that you need an ultrasound and the ultrasound doctor is watching a soccer game so you're gonna have to wait a couple more hours...¨ haha literally all I could do was laugh because in my head I was saying ´´well I've lived a good life.¨

Thankfully President Hansen and my zone leaders got there to give me a blessing while we were waiting for the doctor to finish his soccer game which made the waiting bearable, the surgery went well, and I came out alive  its really been a miracle how fast I have healed, I got home from the hospital on Tuesday afternoon and by Tuesday night I was feeling good enough to get working again. 

I couldn't be more grateful for President and Sister Hansen, they were there from the second they found out until they knew I was okay and haven't stopped checking on me all week. It was a little bit of a scare but I knew the whole time that Heavenly Father was with me and that everything would work out fine. 

I love you all so much and am so grateful for the support system I have at home! I hope everyone got to watch conference - it really is so amazing that we have the people to give us direct insight into what Heavenly Father needs us to know in these times! 

love,

Hna Andersen :)