Holli - September 7, 2015

Before transfers...Me, Sister Duncan, Elder Strickland, Herrmann, Ramos, Sowards

My new companion Sister Bennion!

Hello Everyone!

This week was absolutely amazing! Sister Bennion is like the model missionary. She has taught me so much about teaching simply and powerfully and the best thing is, street contact is getting much better! We both try to awkwardly stop people on the sidewalk and sometimes it actually works. We met this one lady named Marilyn - we complimented her Hawaiian shirt and suddenly she was getting choked up
about a few of her kids passing away. It was so spiritual! In like 5 minutes we went from talking about her shirt to telling her we know she'll see her kids again. Awesome, right?

The Ward is awesome here too! This is President Villanueva's Ward so the pressure is on! But everyone here is so missionary minded it's crazy! We visited the Patriarch and his wife the first day I was here and holy cow it was such a powerful, spiritual experience. We just wanted to drop by and tell them about the ward fast (one family in the ward fasted for one out of 40 days to help bring about miracles in
missionary work) and they just blew us over with the Spirit. So apparently Arcadia ward hadn't had much success with missionary work for about 2 years so they did this ward fast and this awesome guy named Neal was baptized on the last day of he fast. And then this other guy named Joseph walked into church that same day asking if the missionaries could teach him more about what we believed and give him a tour. Awesome, right?

So two young girls are getting baptized into the ward: Tyler (11) and Morgan (9). They are so sweet! We will get to take them to the LA Visitors Center today so I will definitely take pics and send them next week :) They will be baptized next Sunday which is stake conference and 2 general authorities are coming to call a new stake presidency. Pretty awesome! Also we have mission conference coming up and Elder Echo Hawk is coming which is sweet. Sister Bennion, 2 other
sisters, 5 elders and I will be singing this awesome arrangement of Come Thou Fount for the mission conference so I'm super pumped! We were practicing for like 2 hours today so I'm sorry my email is a bit late :)

President came by our apartment for interviews the other day - super nerve wracking! But it was great and very brief - he doesn't speak much English :) We did a lot of service this week! We helped an inactive member line her shelves with some fancy shelf liner stuff and it took us 4 hours! However. She did buy us Sam's Club pizza afterwords and it was so
good! She has 2 cute girls and 1 boy - neither of the girls are
baptized so we're working on it! We also helped this cute old couple (the Merkely's) move out of their house and there were donuts! Best morning ever :) We also helped a single mom with four kids move out of her house - not a member but super sweet and wants to stay in contact so hopefully the missionaries in San Diego will find her!

My second night I was here we had dinner with the Evans. Man she reminds me of Sharon Thompson :) Anyways, they are super awesome and they invited their Philippino neighbors over to meet us! We had an amazing dinner and the dad is kind of the one that wants to learn more. He
just has lots of questions, and lots of doubt. But it was so cool because I could speak limited Tagolog with him. Haha I pulled out Chelsea's emails and was like, "Kumusta! Iglesia in Cristo! Kaming at mga missionary!!”  Except Sister Bennion and I couldn't figure out how to say "mga" so it may have sounded like a dead bird squawking. Sister Bennion is just so awesome and it's weird - she reminds me of Jessie Thompson! Maybe I'm just homesick or something? Jk☺️

Awesome spiritual experience. So we got a HQ referral and were biking around trying to find a street called E. Winnie Way. Funny thing was there are 3 E. Winnie Ways. So we biked through all 3 of them and the house number wasn't in any of them! So finally Sister Bennion pulls over and says, "Ok, we are going to pray before we look at this darn
map again!" So Sister Bennion said this great prayer and when she finished we hear this door close. We look over to the house next to us and there is a girl is throwing a milk jug in the recycle. We look at each other, we look back at her, we look at each other, and we book it over :) Her name was Cynthia and she was really nice. She is just starting college and she wants to go to church but she doesn't know
which one to go to. How about the true one?!? We were so pumped. Power of prayer is so real!

That's about all from Arcadia. Super spoiled again with food this week. Mom, I will be sending you lots of recipes soon. We are super safe here and doing well. Love you all so much! Have a great week :)

Love, Sister Dunn