Hola familia! This week went by so fast! I was all over the place this week.

With Angelo our recent convert he was writing in our recuerdos books.

 We went to Huancayo for council and I learned a lot like normal. It was hard though because there are a lot of people going home this week and they had everyone give their final testimonies, including my trainer who I was with for 4.5 months in Huancayo. The spirit was very strong. I might go as far as to say one of the most spiritual testimony meetings I have felt. I think there must be something powerful about hearing a testimony of the Lord from those who not only believe but have been serving him actively for 2 years or year and a half. 

My trainer is going home this week. I said goodbye to her this morning. We were together for 4.5 months.

We have been feeling really blessed by the Lord this week. I cant really think of anything big but that he has been helping us in everything that we have been doing. On Sunday about an hour before church I pleaded with the Lord that a way would be opened so that an investigator we have been working with would come to church. He came even though it was a little late. On Monday night we really needed our recent converts mother to sign a paper that I needed to take with us to Huancayo the next day and we went and she wasnt there. The family said that she is guarding land. There is a lot of invasions going on right now with land and people go camp on their land to keep people from taking it. Its so hard to find people home sometimes. They said they didnt know how long she would be there or if she would even be back in the next few days. Right as we were leaving and saying goodbye, she pulled up in a moto. Thanks Heavenly Father. He also kept me safe in all my travels this week. 

This might be the last day with my companion.....sad

Speaking of staying safe while traveling, the drive from here to Cerro de Pasco was crazy. Peruvians are nuts when driving. We were in a car and we passed a police man going 110 km with a sign that said 35 km. Just a little bit over the speed limit. We didnt get pulled over though. We would swerve back and forth and be going head on with large trucks or other cars that we didnt know the speed limits for around blind turns.My companion and I both said a little prayer that we would make it their safely and we did. 

Llamas or in Spanish. Yamas lots of them driving to Cerro.

The mine in Cerro de Pasco, out of a taxi though. this is the center of the city and everyone works there.

It's pretty cold in Cerro. In our sleeping bags.

I'm wearing 6 layers in this picture. All ready to go to bed.

Cute little kid from Cerro de Pasco. this is where they use ponchos a lot. Like from the Emporer's New Groove.

He also helped us be able to eat lots of crazy foods this week. When my companion and I were in Cerro de Pasco we got wrangled in to helping judge a dessert night for their ward. It was basically fear factor. This one sweet old lady made this drink called masamora de chunyo that is basically rotten potatoes grinded up with some sort of wheat stuff. It smelled bad and tasted bad. We were trying to drink it without laughing but couldnt so I told them that we needed to laugh while eating all of them so they dont feel bad. It was really close to tocush. Yuck. Then on sunday this cute little old lady made us food. She brought us out a salad, then soup, then main course, then masamora de peaches, then more fruit and drink. Including extra potatoes and two chicken and 7 other potatoes on the main dish. We got full off the first plate and then we kept thinking she was done and then she would bring out more food. It ended up being 7 plates each in total and we were pretty much ready to throw it all up. We sure love her but we were very sick. We had stopped after the third plate and asked that heavelnly father would help us eat it all and he did. 

Maria, the one who fed us on Sunday. Weird picture but none of them were good.

This was that drink that's kind of like tocush. really gross. I did good though.

Our pday potluck. In the pitcher is mac and cheese that someone brought. Best thing ever. haha. We made the brownies on the end.

This is sting ray I was told. It was pretty good.

I realize that he is always helping us. Things constantly work out. We pray for help and strength and he gives it to us. Missionary work would be lot harder without it. Im just so grateful!

Sheep in the road

Latin elders attempting to play American football. None of them know how to throw it. So funny.

Hope you all have a great week! 

Hermana Rhoten

Hola Familia! This week was so great!

I didn't end up traveling like I had planned to because there has been so many landslides and Hermana Soliz ended up taking a trip to Lima so we are hoping to do that all next week. I have council on Tuesday and Wednesday in Huancayo and then we are planning to go to Cerro de Pasco on Thursday and Friday. It sounds like it will be a busy week. I feel sad to be out of my area so much especially right before transfers but they should be good experiences. My companion is great and even though she won't admit it she can run everything in the area fine by herself. I hope that we don't have cambios but I think that we might end up having them because we have already been together for two cambios and she needs to train. ;) Someday when she reads that she will laugh.

This week was the last week of Carnival! Hallelujah! I got hit in the head on Saturday by a water balloon and I think I am starting to be ready for it to be over.

Getting hit in the head with a water balloon

It's a fun idea and things but when you can't play back and are just getting hit by things all the time it's a little bit less fun. The last four days of Carnival is called Calixto where they have sort of like a festival of colors. There are hundreds of people running through the streets throwing water balloons and colored chalk (that's why in the picture the water is all red in the street).

The streets are running with red

The route just barely touched our area but I was on divisions with Pedro Puelles this week and it was crazy there. There was also a lot of parties going on with the trees in the middle of the road.

The tree next to our house for the big party

The pictures I sent were right directly outside of our house. They had a band and were drinking and dancing until 3a.m. We didn't get any sleep even with our earplugs and the music was so loud that our doors and windows were shaking. 

Party outside our house until 3a.m.

We had baptisms this week! Tuesday was a really great day because we were able to get permission for a boy we had been teaching to be baptized, we confirmed Jenny's baptism and another person we have been teaching finally accepted a date! On Saturday and Sunday we had combined baptisms for our ward (we share a ward with our zone leaders too) and they turned out so great. There were lots of people all dressed in white.

Everyone in white. Lots of baptisms for our ward this week.

Baptism pictures from Saturday

The parts that touched me the most were the testimonies after though. The little boy said the water was cold but I didn't feel scared. This is probably insignificant for most people but knowing that he has a great fear of water made it really special. He also said when he was baptized that he felt like a son of God. After Jenny's confirmation on Sunday she turned to me and whispered I think I get what you were trying to tell me about the Holy Ghost. It's like you feel it in your heart and you feel a great calmness. Its indescribable. I think she hit it right on the head. It confirmed to her that she had made the right decision.

Jenny's baptism

Baptism pictures

I have realized recently how well Christ was able to relate to the people he is teaching. I like to imagine that he is teaching Peruvians sometimes because a lot of the symbols that he used relate so well to them as I imagine that they did to the people of his time. The symbols of him being the light of the world, bread of life, and our shepherd work so well to people who don't have light in there houses, who have to leave to the store to buy bread everyday and people who actually own and work with sheep. When we travel outside the city I always see large groups of sheep and a person leading them and it always makes me remember that Christ is our shepherd. He simply wants us to follow him. Sometimes he is calling out for us and we don't listen (Alma 5). If we follow him we will receive his protection and his love.

Silly Peruvians trying to translate things directly into English.

Have a great week. Love ya!

Hermana Rhoten

Hola Familia

At the conference

Como estan ustedes? Bien? Espero que si. Estoy super feliz and super occupada. These next couple weeks are going to be so busy! I have a bunch of divisions including going to Cerro de Pasco this week, and then going to Huancayo for council the beginning of next week and the next week is cambios. Its a lot of crazy.

 We started out the week getting over the colds that we have had, and I ended up taking my companion to the clinic. It was a little bit difficult to work though sickness when I would lose her voice and she would start coughing but usually we were blessed to be able to talk when the other one couldn't. We still had really great lessons and were able to keep positive. I think sometimes my companion feels the stresses that I have been a sister training leader and trying to think about everything at once but she handles them so well.

From the conference

We had a conference and pday with President this weekend! It was really great and uplifting. We played soccer! The hermanas got an entire field to themselves since there are so many of us here in Huancuo we could actually play. Soccer is so popular here that it is usually a joke asking what we are going to do for pday because all the elders want to do always for everything is play soccer. I love soccer too but we usually can't play since we can't play with elders so we were all really excited to play and we woke up pretty sore the next day. We learned and focused on learning to be better preach my gospel missionaries and committing to living the principles that are in there. 

Watching soccer. We played too but we were still a little sick so we watched the elders play.

These are all the people from my MTC district that are still in the mission. Elder Layton is now working in the office so he came for the conference.

So there are these special nuts here that people always eat that have a hard shell on them and they themselves are pretty hard, and I don't even think they are very good but everyone loves them. My innocent companion got offered some during ward council on Sunday from a member and I declined them because I was fasting. She had never seen them before because they are foreign to us and she didn't have me as an example of eating them so she just stuck them in her mouth without taking the shell off. It cracked so hard that we thought she had broken her teeth and it echoed a little bit. The entire ward council seemed to see it and we were all laughing until we were almost crying. It was so funny. I think she was a little embarrassed but took all the laughter really well.

From our ward activity. I guess bobbing for apples is an international game.

This is a jungle dish that I don't remember what its called. It's basically fried bananas that you eat with a hot mango sauce. It is pretty good.

I did a division with an hermana that has been having a really hard time this week. She had been crying a lot which everyone knows is my favorite because I just never know what to do. She has been struggling with feeling forgiven from past sins that she has already repented of. During the division we talked a lot about being forgiven and the atonement. She had expressed to me that she didn't understand how god could love someone like her for everything that she had done. I was surprised to have felt my mind go to the Book of Mormon in a chapter that I hadn't studied recently or very thoroughly in Spanish.The more I talked and we read I was surprised to find that there were lots of details that fit her situation and feelings perfectly. We compared the love of god to him watching a child. We don't lose love for a child when they trip as they are learning to walk, we don't get angry when a child honestly says a sincere I'm sorry for the things they did, nor do we continue to remember and feel upset after they are long over because of the love we have for them. I came to the conclusion that I don't think that our Heavenly Father gets mad at us when we trip in learning to love and be patient nor does he continue to feel upset over things that we sincerely repent for. I think he just continues to love us and help us.

Sometimes we have huge bugs in our house and they jump on the shoes we are trying to kill them with.

Les quiero mucho! Espero que tengan una bien semana. 

Hermana Rhoten

Bringing people to a knowledge of the gospel is such a happy work. I love being a missionary.

This week was a long week because we are both fighting a little bit of flu bugs. Sorry I didn't get to send a lot of pictures. But even in long weeks on a mission there are always lots of tender mercies. This week we might have a baptism on Sunday and we have a fun pday planned on Friday with a conference with president on Saturday.

Some of my favorite tender mercies from this week were:

Having a woman contact us in the street and then going to her house and her accepting a baptism date right away.

Teaching the elderly man and having a succsessful prayer after the lesson! It took us awhile but we finally got there.

The miracle of an investigator that we didn't think would come to church came to church.

I had some of the best scripture studies of my mission this week while my companion was sick.

Being able to eat the hugest plate of food at a members house when I thought it would make me throw up.

Listening to the honest prayer of a little boy. 

Reaching our goal of 100 street contacts in the midst of all the lessons that we taught. Funny story actually, we finished talking to the 100th person right next to a butcher shop and my companion turned to me and said Do you smell that? I said the smell of dead chickens? She laughed and said no, it's the smell of success we just hit 100 contacts. Oh, so that's what that smell is. 

This was our attempt to make Mexican food in Peru. Tribute to Marissa. Don't ask me what any of that is because I couldn't tell you. It's some sort of concoction.

If you have ever wondered what missionaries do on Valentines day, well I will tell you. You go to all your appointments and they all fall through, then you stop by other investigators, members, or less active members houses and no one answers. So then we spend a lot of time walking around the streets counting couples and trying to contact them so we can give them law of chastity pamphlets. Just kidding about the last part, we really didn't do that but we did count couples. There were lots. But all is well I got to spend it with my companion and she is the greatest!

My Valentines Day card from my cute companion

There were also lots of men yelling at us this night and we were a little bit nervous about going home because there were so many people that were watching us so one of us pretended that we were knocking on the door while the other one sneakily used the key to open the door. Then when it opened we pretended that we were greeting them. Just playing it safe. We aren't supposed to let people know where we live so we take safety measures. :)

This is tocush. It is a food they eat here that smells awful. You can smell it from a long distance. What it is is they put rotten potatoes in water for 8 or 9 months and then eat them. They say it has a lot of penicillin and that it cures everything. I mean everything, even cancer. It's a mission rule that we can't eat it as missionaries and I have never been so grateful for a mission rule. I don't think I could even get a bite down it smells so bad. It's always the center of mission jokes too. If someone looks like they aren't feeling good we say they have been eating tocush.

Speaking of how my companion is the greatest, this is the second transfer we have been together and we are learning that we have a super power. Its called reading each others minds and feeling exactly what the other person is feeling. It's sometimes a little bit creepy because our feelings are very specific like I was going to ask this exact question in that lesson but as I thought it, I heard my companion say the exact one. Or we turn to the same scripture at the same time. Or we have the same pain in our left knee, or we both really want yogurt at the same time. Its really weird but it has helped a lot in teaching. I feel like we have such great teaching chemistry and we are always on the same page about where the lessons need to go. Especially as my companion is learning Spanish and can't always find the words she is looking for.

This is out a ways in our area.

My other favorite tender mercy of this week that I forgot to mention is from one of my favorite investigators. We were sitting in sacrament meeting by each other and she turned to me and whispered so when can I get baptized? I said well your date was for Saturday but we haven't really talked about it since the beginning of the week. She said I want to be baptized then. I just feel in my heart that its time and I have felt so much peace lately. Bringing people to a knowledge of the gospel is such a happy work. I love being a missionary.

Have a great week! 

Hermana Rhoten

Hola Familia. Sounds like Rissa is doing great!

I just glanced over her email and she looks good. I'm glad she has her pday before me so I can read them. Also thanks dad for writing me three weeks in a row. It's a miracle!

This morning it was a little rainy. 

We had such an awesome week. I went to Huancayo on Tuesday and Wednesday. I think I forgot to mention that last week that I was going. And about the goat pictures. I meant to say that trying to teach lessons with goats in the living room is so difficult. It really is.

This is the new mission home! They just finished it and we got to see it when we were there. So pretty. It must be the nicest house in Peru.

President's desk

The consejo (training/council) was great we talked about how we can help others become autosufficient. Is that a word? Autosuficiencia? Someone who speaks Spanish can help my mom. Maybe being self sufficient might be the English word. Anyways it helped me ponder a lot on the topic because it applies to everything I do as a missionary. My goal is to help everyone, recent converts, investigators, less active members, my companion, the sisters I'm in charge of, and myself become self sufficient in a testimony of the gospel.

Just the drive to Huancayo

Drive to Huancayo. Our driver was nice and let us go take pictures. This is just off the side of the road.

Drive back to Huanuco

I also was able to stop by a family that was baptized while I was serving in Huancayo. They are doing great. David just got called to be the new ward mission leader, America his wife is in young womens and the two boys are as crazy as ever but sharing the gospel with their friends at school. They have a temple date to be sealed as a family in August!

David and America with the two missionaries that were together when they were baptized. Love them. I think this is such a funny picture. My hair looks like a lion because it was raining in Huancayo as always.

They made a scrapbook of their family history and included a part about us and how they came to know the gospel. So cute.

I didn't mention it last week but Carnival is still going forward with full swing. On Sunday we were walking down the street and I got an entire bucket of water thrown on me. I was soaked when I went to go pick up our investigators for church. My companion right after that got pegged in the back with a water balloon. If only we could play back! It's funny because when they do stuff like that they say such loving things. Like I love you, I'd give my life for you, you are beautiful and they make kissing noises at us. They have such an odd way of showing love here. They also throw baby powder on each other. My companion got some of that all over her back yesterday too. Another part of Carnival I haven't really mentioned is that people cut down big trees and dig a hole and put them in the middle of the road. They decorate them with random things like clothes, baskets, etc and then have a drinking party with bands and all until the tree falls down and they collect the stuff. Our little recent convert Jordan said they were like pinatas for big people. Haha. There were about five of them by our house on Saturday. I'll try to send a picture.

This is that tree..haha

My two funny stories of the week. We were invited to a house of a member of the church who passed away. In Peru when a person dies they clean out all the furniture in their living room and the dead body and the coffin stays in the house for about three days or more until the funeral. It smells so awful because it's hot here. We were invited to come sing hymns for a bit next to the body in the house. We started singing but we had two other members that sang with us and it was just awful. The worst singing I might have ever heard. I kept my cool but my companion started laughing. She had to cover her face so that the people couldn't tell she was laughing and when she covered her face everyone thought she was crying and looked really concerned. They mouthed to me "is she okay" and I was like yea she's fine don't worry. We just should go soon. It was so funny.

Hermana Alpaca put this up for all the missionaries that served in Camino Real. she even put one up for me. :)

The other one was from a lesson we had with one of our investigators who is 80 years old. He came to church on Sunday and really wants to be baptized. He was in jail for awhile and to receive benefits whle in jail listened to "the word of God" He knows a lot and when we invited him to be baptized he told us that he has to do it and told us how important it is. The funny thing is that he is a little slow and we have to explain things very carefully to him. Our first lesson we thought we explained how to pray and started to explain the Book of Mormon to him but got off subject really quick talking about things like baptism. We realized we needed to end the lesson quickly and go so we asked if he would pray. He ended up saying a fifteen minute prayer from his heart but not like anything that we explained to him including lots of glory to god and he said thank you to us for giving him this book of songs to praise god. My companion and I left the lesson thinking what did we even teach him? I wouldn't say about prayer, and we can't say we taught him about the Book of Mormon because he thinks it's a hymn book. Missionary failure. But we plan on going back and teaching his wife this week. We have some clearing up to do.

Mangoes. I love them.

We saw God's hand in the work a lot this week. He really is helping us so much. I am so grateful that he lets us be a part of his successes. We had been praying and fasting to find and teach families. We ended up finding and teaching three complete families by the end of the week and at least one member of each family came to church this week. One complete family showed up themselves even though we didn't expect them too. It just so happens that we had thought of two people to help with their conversion in the ward and they were already friends with them. One of them even spoke in sacrament meeting and one of our investigators leaned over and said that is just what I needed. I have said it before but I really do know that God listens to us, and helps us with our individual needs. I know that he lives and this is his work.

I hope you all have a great week.

Hermana Rhoten