January 18, 2016

Its been a pretty normal week here in Bolivia! I´ll start with a cool experience from yesterday, we have been using the records in the elders´ area book to try to find people that they were teaching before, but there arent street names or anything here, so all we have to go off of are the maps the elders have drawn in 30 seconds, usually reallly complicated. but yesterday we were looking for this lady and were seriously about to give up, but felt like we should try one more street, and we found it! she let us in and after getting to know her she told us that the night before she had a dream that 2 missionaries came back to her house to keep teaching her and she took it as an answer to her prayers, and when we showed up she said we were the outline of the people she saw in her dream! super cool!

I have been studying a talk this week by Niell F Marriott. ¨¨yielding our hearts to the Lord¨ its about accepting what the Lord wants for us and trusting that if we are doing what is right, it will all work out. sometimes I struggle telling people that dont have food to put on the table for their kids,  or have been abandoned by their husbands, or lost children, etc. that ¨everything will be okay.¨ but this talk helped me to understand that everything really is and always will be OKAY as long as we are doing the best that we can. Heavenly Father understands us and our situation and will always bless us. We might not understand today, or tomorrow, or maybe not even in this life. but if we are doing what we need to be doing everything will evenutally work out. 

¨you will have challenges and hard decisions to make throughout your life. but determine now to always do what is right and let the consequence follow, the consequence will always be for your good.¨ -Richard G. Scott

We are seeing lots of progress here! since I got here we have been able to count on about 4 or 5 families to be at church every sunday, there are lots of less actives because of bad leadership here in the past, so we have been focusing a lot on those menos actives and teaching them WHY we go to church. yesterday our assitance hit over 70, it was truly a miracle. we cant take the glory but we can say that Heavenly Father is touching lots of lives here in Santo Domingo :)

I love you all! have the best week! :)

love,

Hermana Andersen

A new less active lady we recently found. We are winning the way to her heart one pancake at a time!

We are teaching this little boys mom, he has a defect and cant walk so for her to be able to come to church we have to carry him 2 miles to church. its worth it though cause hes soo cute. hes trying to smile in this pic, not crying 

A Little Bit of Heaven

hello hello!

The week has been super awesome here! we flew into Cochabamba on Tuesday for a leadership conference that lasted all day, and there are only planes to come back in the mornings so we got to stay the night there and visit our old areas and converts! then we had 2 options.. sleep on the floor of another sisters apartment, OR sleep in the mission home... uh, I think we´ll take the mission home! let me just tell you a few amazing things about our stay in heaven: 

#1: carpet!! we took off our shoes and just let our poor little feet be so happy for a night

#2: eating cold ceral at 10 PM with President and Hermana Hansen, haha it was just like home! 

#3: no need for shower shoes!! PLUS there was a real shower door and also a real shower head and there wasn't even a risk of it electrocuting us! 

#4: the bed!! for the first time in over a year a slept in a real bed that was bigger than me (and also the bed that the apostles sleep in when they come)

#5: A/C INSIDE our room!! like if it got hot we could turn it up and when we got cold could turn it down!!

#6: waking up in the morning and going hill running up and down the temple hill - SO beautiful!

#7: WAFFLES!! we ate waffles for breakfast from a real waffle machine!!

#8: Dishwasher!! I kid you not that we literally spent 5 minutes trying to figure out how to open it before giving up and asking Hermana Hansen to come help us.. haha how embarrassing. 

#9: drinking water! we could drink the water straight from the tap and there wasn't little floating guys or anything in it! 

#10: Quiteness! we literally slept through the whole night and didn't hear a single dog barking or car engine rev or people yell!

So to sum it all up we literally felt like royalty for a day and it was the best! BUT that being said, it was also nice to get back to our humble little apartment with these people that we love so much! 

we are planning a wedding for the second week of February and the wife is going to get baptized the next day, wahoo! definitely wishing pinterest was a missionary approved website haha! 

I love you all and am so grateful for such amazing people in my life and such an amazing support system back home! have the best week! :)

love, 

Hermana Andersen :)

Happy New Year!

hey everyone!

okay so turns out that new years is actually a bigger holiday than Christmas! remember all those pigs that I said our in our area? well now there's just lots of baby pigs, cause I´ll the big ones were killed for new years eve dinner! hahah we were walking down the street and just heard this pig squealing and I told my companion ¨I think its giving birth!¨ haha we peeked our heads over the wall and definitely didn't see a pig giving birth, haha so disturbing! then we walked down the street and could hear pigs being killed in like every house! it was actually really traumatizing and I was actually really grateful that we aren't allowed to eat pig here!

we rang in the new year in our cute little apartment just the two of us! haha we were sooo tired but we couldn't just sleep on new years eve! haha so we held our eyes open and definitely regretted it the next day when the alarm went off at 630! haha our area was like a ghost town, we had an investigator fall asleep mid sentence. but we weren't even mad cause we felt the same way! 

our area is slowly but surely progressing, we have to go at a really slow pace with most of the people here because they usually don't have more than a second grade education. so we have to relate pretty  much everything to crops or sheep herding. haha but they are the most humble sweet people and I am so grateful to be here! 

Happy new year everyone! love you all so much!

love, 

Hermana Andersen 

Bolivian Christmas!

hey everyone!

It was a super different, but also super awesome Christmas! on Christmas eve we ended up planning a big party for all the missionaries in Sucre and also a group of kids that we thought were orphans, but actually just turned out to be a group of Korean music lovers.. haha long story. but it turned out super fun and were able to contact all of them as well! 

they celebrate Christmas different here, the bigger day is the 24, they stay up until midnight and then celebrate at midnight and open presents! it was super cool because our house looks out over all of Sucre and at midnight we watched from our window fireworks throughout the whole city, super awesome and fun to have a different experience :)

also the next night we got home to find a FULL live band IN our house. haha they partied allll night... but the good news is that we get home so tired everyday we just slept right through it haha! hna wing and I are working super hard and having lots of fun too!

I love you all and I hope you had a very merry Christmas
and a happy new year :)

love,

Hermana Andersen 

Merry Christmas!

hello everyone!

its been a crazy week, but super awesome!

#1. having an american companion is AWESOME! hna wing is from highland and everyone thinks it is so crazy that they have two missionarys from the ¨holy land¨ in their ward haha. we work super hard and good together and make English jokes and american treats and its the best!!

#2. I witnessed the craziest rainstorm I've ever witnessed in my whole life this week! the weather is crazy and goes from baking hot to pouring rain in literally 2 minutes. we were super far away from the house and didn't have a single jacket when it started raining seriously so hard. we rain all the way home and by the time we got there it looked seriously like we had just jumped into a swimming pool with all our clothes on!

Life in Sucre

#3. Friday night I went outside in flip flops to get some clothes that were hanging up to dry and there was a piece of broken brick that sliced my toe right open. hahaha there was seriously so much blood and it turned into a murder scene and the people that live in our building still look at us really weird when we leave. luckily its healing slowly but surely! feet injuries are the worst!

The work is super awesome here and I am loving this area more and more everyday! we are finding lots of really awesome people and are super happy with the progress :) 

Merry Christmas from Bolivia! we taught the latinos in our district some good gingerbread house making today - Bolivian style! there aren't a lot of big Christmas traditions here, but its been fun to celebrate a little bit differently and focus a little bit more on others and a little bit less on myself and really remember the true meaning! 

I love you all!! :)

love,

hermana andersen :)

Hermana Andersen & Hermana Wing

Christmas season :)‏

hello hello!

Christmas is finally in the air here in Sucre! after hearing about so many sad experiences of Christmas last year in the mish, we talked to our zone leaders and decided to make this Christmas unforgettable! on Saturday the whole zone met up at the main park here in Sucre with our portable dvd players and we split up and contacted everyone in the park with the new Christmas Mormon message! then at the last hour we all met back up and went caroling haha it was super awesome and seriously got us in the Christmas spirit! then yesterday we got to watch the Christmas devotional broadcasted from salt lake, and after President and Hna Hansen flew in for a Christmas conference! it was super awesome and they reminded us the real reason that we celebrate Christmas, hna Hansen told us ¨Christ sacrificed his whole life for us, the least we can do for him is sacrifice one (or two) Christmases away from home¨ so true! 

This morning we also did a gift exchange with all the sisters so its finally feeling like the Christmas season! :)

Super exciting news!! my companion is leaving tomorrow, and originally I was gonna be left without a companion for 2 weeks, but my prayers were answered and President is sending me someone tomorrow... AND SHES AN AMERICAN!!! haha I LOVE all of the companions that I have had but I feel like I am entering into a whole new world being with someone that has the same culture as me, and we are gonna celebrate Christmas American style :)

We have some people really progressing that we are excited about. This week has been a little bit frustrating because there is a show here that seriously everyone watches every Wednesday and this week they showed a supposedly ¨´Mormon´´ family from the states that lives polygamy. it sounds like something so small but its made a lot of people we are teaching not want to listen to us anymore and even some members start to doubt everything. ughh freaking media. but other than that all is well here :) 

Love you all!! 

love, 

hermana andersen :)

December 7, 2015

hey everyone! 

woah so much that I could share this week, but so little time! I am loving my area and these people so much!

despite all the challenges, it really is so amazing! for example, we haven't had a bishop for the last 2 months.. and he doesn't have plans of coming back anytime soon.. hahaha #Bolivia. so that makes our work pretty complicated, also there are a lot of people that only speak quechua here, so there is a language barrier, haha I'm trying to learn but its the HARDEST language. so hard that the Book of Mormon is only 1/3 of the way translated. also almost everyone lives together but is not married.. which also makes our job hard! BUT,in spite of all of that, I have never met such amazing people in my whole life and I have also never seen so many miracles!

yesterday I was able to share my testimony in sacrament and as it is the last month of the year, reflected lots on everything that I have learned and been a part of this year. It has been absolutely UNFORGETTABLE and a year that I will cherish for my whole life. Its impossible to say how much I have learned and the way I have grown from the people that I have met and the things I have participated in, I love this work!

On a funny note, yesterday we went exploring to meet some people in a little pueblo that is now part of our area, we had to pretty much climb a mountain to get there and the mountain had LOTS of rocks.. hahaha my companion´s skirt got snagged on a rock and ripped all the way open! hahaha literally I laughed until I cried. we were super super far from home so she just had to hold it closed the whole day. hahaha the only hard part about having an area like this is that our skirts are a real inconvenience
sometimes.

I love you all and hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season!! see you soon! 

love,

Hermana Andersen :)