Week 4

Oh my goodness it has been a busy week.

On Monday we went to Lidos. Lidos is a Latvian food restaurant buffet style. I got a crepe with cottage cheese in it, some type of swedish-esque meatball and a potato pancake. It was quite good. So I had the best contact ever on Monday! I was talking to this lady on the bus coming home from Preparation day in center (we always go to center). She was very patient and kind considering my Latvian. She told me that she had to get off in two stops but that she wanted ME to write down HER number. I had already given her our card, but she asked me if I would take HER number and then she wrote down mine (even though there was a number on the card). It was so tender and neat to see that someone was wanting the gospel so much. I tried calling her this week but her phone was off. Sister Jake gave all the sisters a rose today. March 7th is Women's Day and the tradition is to get all the women in your life a flower. There were so many people in the streets walking around with flowers. In the evening we went and taught our cute little family Raitis and Sanita. Their daughter Katrina found a bag of cinnamon (all the spices come in bags here) and she poured it all over herself. It was pretty hilarious (her parents didn't think so).

On Tuesday we had an entertaining district meeting (as always). Elder Mills is very proper and perfect (he sings opera and wants to be a doctor) but Elder Adams happy go lucky hilarious personality is working on our posh handkerchief using Elder Mills. We took flowers to some of our investigators and we also went and visited Anda and Vicente, some recent members. They are both so fun and so smart. We do their lessons in English because Vicente is from Mexico (and was a doctor there) and Anda can speak English (as well as 6 other languages). I took notes; they definitely don't feel like they just joined the church! There were some pretty funny boys on the bus today, they were apparently telling me to stay on the bus a couple more stops with them...ha ha ha... no.

Wednesday morning we got lost going to Janina, a member. It was pretty entertaining though because I got sang to. I contacted this old man on the street. We started talking. He wanted to go to English class. He began to count for us in English. "four-teen five-teen six-teen seven-teen eight-teen nine-teen twelve!" "twenty." "twenty. twenty one (and so on)..." Sister Sutterfield left to take a call so I was able to enjoy his company. He told me about how he is an artist and works with marble. He told me about a statue he likes in NYC and about the KGB. He then started to sing. Very loudly. I said I had to go and left. We did eventually make it to Janina's apartment. She is a nicer lady in her 50s who is really lonely. She was so cute with her tea cosies all ready and some little pancakes for us. She really appreciated our visit. We went and visited our ward mission leader, Gatis Senkante at the firm he works at, Vindex. He had some good ideas for help with investigators. Today was a day of crazies. We were walking by some apartment buildings and this lady approached us and started talking to us. We of course talked about the Book of Mormon and she asked how much it was. We said it was free and then she tore the copy that Sister Sutterfield was holding from her arms and began to kiss it. She also repeated this with the calling card and pamphlet that we gave her. And with us. We tried to get her name and number. She wrote down her name for us but told us that we didn't need her phone number...okay. We had a really good meeting with our baptismal date investigator Martins. His answers are so good. He was telling us that he didn't need to pray to know that the Book of Mormon was true because he already knew that it was! He is struggling with smoking, so currently his baptismal date is April 9th, his 22nd birthday!

Thursday was quite the traveling day for us. We went out to visit a less active member Ineta Lidace. She has three cute little girls. We helped her clean up around the house and then she fed us potato pancakes and some really really good vanilla-orange tea. Her little girls were cute helping to clean up but were throwing balls everywhere when we were trying to give our spiritual thought. She still really appreciated it though. We went to pick up some food to drop off to poor people from one of the center members (Velta) who owns a NPO. We carried these 30-40 pound bags all over the place. We had Latvian class with Inga today. She was apparently really mean to us masas, especially Sister Sutterfield. Luckily (maybe?) I didn't understand when this bashing was taking place. The elders said they wanted to slap her (oye-vay!). We went over to Anda's house and helped her dye her hair. She really appreciated it (Anda got in a car crash when she was 18 or so, she is in a wheelchair now and doesn't have full use of her hands. She is brilliant though and I think she'd love Aunt Becky.) She gave us some fish and Sister Sutterfield did a puzzle while I dyed hair.

On Friday we had another meeting with Martins and also helped to set up for this big temple conference that they are having. President Blums invited the temple president of the Stockholm temple and his wife to come.

Saturday morning we made some delicious scones and visited Ilze and Ainars. They are a couple (with two children) who come to our English class (English was canceled due to the temple conference). They have a GORGEOUS house and it went well. They fed us apple crisp and ice cream and gave us a ride home (it took us 60-90 minutes to get there). It was a shame, if we would have known, we could have done a longer spiritual thought. So we went to the church to get some things from the library and this little boy followed us and said "prison" and then shut the library door. Which locks. Automatically. Long story short we got locked in the library and we had to telephone the Russian elders to unlock it. They thought it was pretty hilarious. So did I. We took Maja, a member, to Cili Pizza today since she helps us a lot and is always busy. It is hard on the members here because they have to be so involved because there aren't a lot of them. It was really good food. On the way traveling back we ran into a dozen hooligans who didn't think we spoke Latvian. Once we told them we did all eyes were on us and all their English came out. My personal favorite was, "Where did you get your Hollywood smile?" We had another District Meeting (new program) and it was a hoot. And really spiritual as well, once we got over all of the laughing. It was about the Holy Ghost in conversion. We read some really good scriptures. We went and taught English to Raitis and Sanita. They gave us walnut ice cream and we taught them a little English and talked a lot of gospel. There is definitely some potential with them although they have a lot of questions and think we are too young to know.

On Sunday church was really good. In the morning we went and picked up Leanna and went with her to church. In Sacrament meeting the Temple president and his wife spoke (with translators). It was really nice because they spoke English and then they had it translated into Latvian, so I got spiritually fed and a little Latvian lesson. None of our investigators came like they said they would, but all of the less actives that we visited this week did come! We went and visited Ingrita, Sandra, and Maris today. They all had headaches and had obviously talked to their pastor. They wouldn't let us speak and if we asked them to read something, they'd read it to themselves first. She also read us ALL of the last book of revelations. And Ingrita was being rude and interrupting and bashing my testimony. We left. They felt bad and called us at like 11pm and texted us around 4am last night. They aren't open to the gospel though. Sad, but good to know so we don't waste the Lord's time.

We are His servants and his work will go forth. The snow is melting and the puddles are growing and it is a lot warmer!

Love,
Sister L