Transfer 3: Week 2 Update

Hello!

 

This week was a wee bit crazy, but over all a pretty good week.

 

Syracuse is an amazing area, it's a city and so we meet many people everyday and we teach everyday. We teach more than we find, but when we do need to find people to teach it doesn't take too long which is really nice. Right now we are at 16 investigators, we picked up a new investigator yesterday. His name is J. and he was referred to us through mormon.org and he seems really nice and super sincere about wanting to know more. Young guy, mid-twenties and he told us that he would love to come to church and he would read the Book of Mormon all the way through by this next sunday, so we'll see how it goes. At the end of the week, we taught a total of 15 lessons which isn't too bad. So I guess I'll give you some more highlights from this week.

 

Monday: Best P-Day ever!!! Got all of the necessities done early in the morning; email, of course, then we went to the zoo with the elders, and went apple picking with M. and K. - M. has a baptismal date and K. is less active, they are super cool and love the missionaries. Last Monday was the day that all the leaves seemed to change, so it was perfect to go apple picking with a slight chill in the air. Pictures to be included. Oh and we even got a  lesson in after all that, which was sweet.

 

Tuesday: Not super exciting. All of our appointments fell through, but we still got 3 lessons in somehow, haha. Kinda how it goes a lot of the time, ha. This was the day my tooth started hurting. It hurt pretty bad so I just took two Advil in the morning, took some more medicine at dinner and we saw one of our favorite investigators that night, R. She is like our mom away from our mothers, haha. She gave me some extra strength Tylenol, but it didn't even touch the pain. In the middle of the night, I got up at 3 am and took 3 Advil because it hurt so bad.

 

Wednesday was kinda a crazy day. When I woke up my teeth were in sooo much pain and I couldn't focus at all.. it was fanfriggintastic. Then, to add to the pain of the morning, we got a call from a member at 7am.  To wrap up the beginning of the day in a nut shell - this crazy lady called up at 7am, said her daughter was in the hospital and needed us right away. We went and nothing was wrong with her even though she was in the ER. She was frustrating the crud out of the nurses and we were wondering why we went. The Elders came and gave her a blessing (at her request, and after we left and the blessing was given she made them sing I am a Child of God in the ER hahahaha). She kept calling us throughout the day, as well as the Elders and the entire ward leadership. She made a pretty big stink in the ward. In the middle of all this, I was trying to find a good dentist to relieve the pain and figure out what was causing the pain in the first place. R. had given us her dentists information so we went there and he was really nice. He told me that my front tooth had abscessed and needed a root canal. Remember when I broke my front teeth on the pool deck from playing marco polo years ago when I was 8 or so... well apparently the damage from that incident was so traumatic that the tooth has died from it and now needs a root canal. The dentist said that it's really weird it is just now starting to flare up now, that it could be malnutrition or stress (yup that's basically missionary life in a nutshell I thought to myself, haha). He perscribed me some antibiotics to ease the pain and I have been taking oodles of Ibuprofen. After the dentist, we had to rush to an appointment and amazingly made it on time to a member present lesson, which was sweet. We got 2 lessons in on Wednesday, somehow, in the midst of the craziness, hahaha.

Thursday- My face began to swell up with pain when I woke up that morning, I didn't feel up to going anywhere but we went and taught 3 lessons that day. We taught 2 in the morning and one at night. Thankfully Thursdays are our planning days so we got to rest a little bit while we planned which helped.

Friday-3 more lessons on Friday we taught and even got a referral (it was the investigator we contacted and picked up on Sunday). One of our investigators is the daughter of a less active member, she's 13. When we called to confirm our appointment, the dad was trying to dodge it by saying his daughter has a lot of homework and doesn't have time today. But I told him that my companion had been studying to be a teacher before her mission and said we would love to come help her with her homework, hehe. My companion helped her with her math and I helped her with her Spanish, which was pretty cool. I helped her do about half of it because that's all I could remember, haha, which I thought was actually pretty good for not having taken Spanish classes in at least 3 years. We taught this guy T., he's a born again and it's been very difficult to teach him, to say the least. I don't think he has really read the Book of Mormon at all or prayed sincerely. We will probably be dropping him after his next lesson this week if nothing changes, which I don't think it will. I had a feeling and could tell that he wasn't sincere.

 

Saturday: ZONE CONFERENCE! We got to have Elder Paul B. Pieper from the Quorum of the Seventy speak to us. There were 3 or 4 zones combined to hear Elder Pieper speak. It was going to be an all mission conference but instead it was split into 3 zone conferences. The only bad thing was my face was at its peak swollen and pain point. My face was the worst that day than it has been this whole week, of course right? Haha, once I humbled myself I had a pretty good time at Zone conference. I even saw two of my MTC brothers. Zone conference went from 8am - 2pm with a member of the quorum of the seventy. Oh yeah and there were a select few that got to be interviewed/ have a private get to know you conversation with Elder Pieper of the Seventy. I was the only Sister Missionary choosen to be in on that. I was very surprised to be chosen. He is pretty cool, it was very relaxed. He just wanted to get to know some of the missionaries a little better and see how we were doing. It went by pretty fast, unfortunately. 

 

Sunday was crap, all our appointments fell through and no one was available or would answer their door. But D. and E. came to church, so that was good. It wasn't a total bomb cause we picked up someone new to teach, as I mentioned earlier.  So that's my week.

 

-Sister Gifford