August 22nd

Hey fam!!! Well I am already running out of time very rapidly!! So Im gonna have to make this quick.

So we have some good news and some bad news. Ill start with the bad news and get it over with. Our 2 families that we were teaching both decided not to get married yet. So we will not be baptising any families. SAD! I hate men (except for the exceptionally wonderful men in my life of course). haha Both of the wives want to get married and baptised so bad but they can{t. While one of the husbands was explaining to us that he didnt want to get married yet for a few more months. The wife was practically in tears. She has been waiting so long to get baptised. Poor thing. But the good news is...we found some more positive investigators. One in particular is especially. We met her on Friday and she came to church on Sunday! And we didnt even have to pick her up and walk with her. She just showed up on her own. We were so happy! Her name is Mari and she comes from a VERY humble family. She is 21, has a 7 year old daughter and is pregnant. She is the sweetest little thing in the world. Her profession is selling food in the streets. She walks around in the streets alllllll day long with a huge container on her head and yelling what food she is selling that day. She told us..."I was praying that I would find you guys in the street on Saturday so that I could give you some of my tamales". hehe Cutest thing ever! She wants to get baptised but not yet. We{ll see what happens with that.

As far as nursing stuff goes. We went to another zone this week. Its called Coatepeque. It was fun. We just taught a little bit about health to the zone and then we did divisions with the Hermanas there. It is super fun to see other areas in the mission and to be able to do divisions with the sisters. I think my favorite thing about traveling though is the buses. They are hilarious! It is just pure craziness. Some of my favorite parts of a bus ride are - LOUD music, men falling asleep on my shoulder, SUPER fast driving, preachers jumping on the bus and preaching so loud that it hurts my ears, and chickens that people brought on the bus flying over my head. One person had a box full of chickens that they brought on the bus and they started to get out of the box and he didnt realize it. They started flying over our heads and finally someone told him so he was running around the bus trying to catch his chickens. When he finally got some, he asked me to hold a few while he tried to catch the others. HAHA! I LOVE it here.

Ok, Im going to tell you something scary that I found out this week but dont freak out or do anything stupid like call the mission to make sure Im safe or anything like that ok? I can assure you that I am perfectly safe and following all the rules and NOTHING is going to happen to me. But we have been visiting this inactive member and something very sad happened to her daughter. She was walking to buy tortillas with her 6 month old baby and someone kidnapped her. A lot of people saw who is was. It was a tuc tuc driver. And he shoved them both in his tuc tuc and took off. They have been gone for 17 days and the mom has not heard anything. Here{s the real sad part though. Everyone knows who the man is and what number the tuc tuc is (number 525 - dont worry, I have my eyes peeled for the tuc tuc always!) And the police know who he is and everything but they are not doing anything about it because the family has ZERO money to pay them. So the man that took them passes by their house and will stop and talk to them and rub it in their face that he took her daughter. And NO ONE DOES ANYTHING!!!!!! They dont know if she{s alive, where she is, nothing! The poor mom is always crying, poor thing. And this happened very close to our church in perfect daylight! I wanna beat those stupid policeman up! And the horrible man! That is the 2nd inactive member that we have visited that has gotten kidnapped. The other one has money though so she came back really fast.

Well now that I got that horribly depressing story over with.....I GOT YOUR PACKAGE! I was the happiest person ever! The Elders were very very jealous cause it was soooo huge! It was BETTER than Christmas!! Everything was perfect and fits me like a glove. I have already gotten so many compliments on the clothes and everything. I listened to the tape like 50 times at least. That was my favorite part. And dont worry,I am already filling up the other tape very fast. Thank you sooooooooooooo much! You{re the best!

Changes are next week already! I can{t even believe it! This change went by faster than alll the other ones I think. The baptisms have been horrible in the zone though. We have only had 3 baptisms in the entire zone. 2 of them were from us and 1 from the other Hnas in the zone. We usually have around 15-20 just so you know how bad that is.

Well I have nothing more of value to say but I love you all soooo much! Thank you for all your letters and love and support! Talk to you next week!!

Love, Hermana Kami Alyse Alston