July 31, 2013

Dear Family,
ALOHA! I mean..... HOLA! The funny thing is, here in this ward, most people are English. Yesterday there was a Polynesian family that I thought was Hispanic. Apparently they don't speak Spanish.... My companion is Sister Huchendorf from Idaho, Ohio, and on and on. She went to BYUHawaii. Pretty cool I think! She has been here 4 months and speaks really good Spanish. She studied spanish for 3 years in junior high and a semester in college. I hope that I can get to speak as well as her. It can be a little hard in lessons because I have a hard time contributing when I can't speak, but she doesn't have any problem so she just goes at it. We have met some nice people but we need to find more investigators. I realized that when I thought about missions I always thought about missions outside of the US in third world countries. Well pretty much I am in Auburn and it is a lot like..... Logan. Hahaha. I am sitting in the car with her today (P-Day) and I am like... "So what do you do on P-Day?" She says "I am still trying to figure that out." I am thinking we need a cultural experience, but the only draw back is that the culture seems to be the same here. There aren't children starving on the streets or houses breaking down. I got an email from one of the elders from the MTC. He is in Guatamela and his baptism font broke so he had to do the baptism in the ocean! Yeah. Two different missions. The people here have been pretty nice. The coolest thing about being here is that I think my faith and conviction grows the more that I have to tell people that. It can be little scary going around talking to random people, but it has been okay. The spanish people are so much nicer. I would much rather knock on a spanish persons home than a white persons home. They are so willing to talk about Jesus. The hard thing about teaching them is that our lessons are way too long. I talked to my companion and we decided we really need to work on taking control of the conversations. She isn't very aggressive, so I sometimes feel like it is up to me, but the trouble with that is I can't say anything in Spanish. I am trying to learn how to love everybody around me and desire to share the Gospel with them. I haven't quite figured out how to successfully start Gospel conversations. I sometimes just can't think of anything to say. Or I say "could we share a message with you?" and then I don't know what to say so it is just weird. I don't really know what to share with people! Ambree and Daniel. Learn the Scripture Mastery verses. And study the scriptures in Preach my Gospel. I always felt like I knew the Gospel pretty well, and I think I still do in action, but scriptures are the best way to provide validity to my words and I feel like I don't know them near as well as I should. BUT. I just keep moving forward. The first few days were really hard, but it gets better everyday. I love you all! Glad to hear the family is well!

Love,
Hermana Clark
P.S. It can get really confusing when I call myself Sister and Hermana Clark. I always get confused about who I am.