Hurricane Erika! - August 31, 2015

Hello my familia! 

I don't even know how to describe this week... It was a week full of sickness, pain, laughter, fear of hurricanes and many miracles! What a week! To start this lovely week off I was kinda sick.. All the missionaries around here have been getting sick. One had bronchitis others had strep.. Luckily I only got a cold. But of course the week I get sick and feel miserable was the week I would end up with two lovely cold sores on top of that! Thank goodness for a loving boss who gave me a prescription for cold sore medicine before the mission! I had to rely on those pills because I didn't have anything else besides Chapstick to put on them... Don't worry though, the pills worked wonders and the cold sores are almost completely gone! Yay! I guess I will just finish with all the sad things that happened to me this week so I can get on to the funny stuff and the miracles. 

So on Saturday we spent our night out walking in the rain.. It's what we do when we have no car and can't convince a member that they want to spend their Saturday night with the missionaries! Haha Anyways, we start walking towards the church when the rain starts getting really bad and my foot starts hurting me. So we stop at the church call a few people for church and realize that it is basically time to turn back so we can make it home by nine. Well we start to leave the church and my foot is still killing me and the pain is just getting worse. Every step I would take sent pain across the bottom of my foot half way up my leg. The worst part was our apartment is 1.5 miles from the church. Well miracle of prayer happened because I prayed I could walk home with out having to get a piggy back from Sister Sorensen and I survived. My foot has not gotten any better though.. I am hoping it will get better once we get our car for the week and I don't have to walk on it so much. So ya, now you know all about the pain of my week. But as I tell myself everyday. I love tuff things, I'm the first to do tuff things, I do tuff things first! I looove being a missionary!!! It's what always keeps me going no matter how hard and painful things become. 

Ok so I hope y'all are ready for the exciting food story of the week! 

So remember how I mentioned that sister Sorensen and I had no money last week and we were basically living off of 10 dollars. We basically resorted to eating anything this week.. To start our week off we were at the church last Monday finishing up emails and we decided that we would try to find something at the church to eat. Usually they have large boxes that people can put food in for the missionaries. Well we looked in the boxes and all we found were garbanzo beans, opened graham crackers and then some pasta. After eating two bites of a very old graham cracker I resorted to opening a can of garbanzo beans and eating them for dinner.. We totally looked desperate and homeless because we just ate them straight from the can. Well, of course that wasn't filling so we decide that we are going to see what was in the fridge. We found 3 bags of salad mix. We may have sinned a little but I was so hungry! We justified that the salad would go bad if we didn't eat it. Haha This was not the only time this week that we stole food from the church. We came back on Wednesday and ate more salad and this time someone left some cake in the fridge so we ate that as well... If you don't want food eaten you shouldn't leave it in the church fridge because some starving missionary will come and eat it! Haha 

On Tuesday we ate dinner with Bethany Brown. She is one of the members we have been working with. She is so great! This is the exciting food I ate this week! So she took us out to dinner at a Chinese Buffet and sushi bar. Kinda sketchy I know... Well we ate all the crab legs we could and then we started in on all of the crazy weird things they had there. My plate consisted of some crazy sushi, one of which had fish eggs on it. Then I had some seaweed salad, frog legs, octopus, crawfish, and an oyster. Wow! Talk about adventure! Don't worry though we were able to capture some funny pictures of me eating all of this! Most of the pictures look like I am going to puke.. Haha I hope y'all get a good laugh at them! 

My week got really exciting on Thursday night when we had a giant conference call telling us that there is a hurricane heading our way and that we are going to need to prepare for it. Well this caused feelings of excitement because who doesn't want to be in a hurricane on their mission but also some fear because what am I going to do if a hurricane hit! Scary!! Thank goodness there was no hurricane and it has become a tropical storm. Now we are just dealing with some really bad rain like usual.. But here is where another miracle takes place. So Sister Sorensen and I have been praying for food this week because well we were seriously living off of banana's and green smoothies every day and basically by Thursday we were out of all that. Well because they thought that the hurricane would come and it was scheduled to hit on Monday they loaded our cards with money on Thursday and told us to do our shopping on Friday and to get everything we needed for the week! Miracle!!! Prayers really are answered! 

On Saturday we had a day full of service. We did some yard work for a lady over in the Mandarin 2nd ward. It was great we had our whole district there. We chopped up some wood for her. And then just pulled a ton of weeds and cleaned up the yard. I am so glad that I don't have to do yard work here very often. First off there was dog poop everywhere in this back yard.. So you would be pulling some weeds and realize you were grabbing poop or stepping in it.. Gross!! Haha not to mention that it is so hot here that you are just dripping with sweat! There were millions of bugs but luckily I am getting over my fear of bugs and I only scream occasionally now. I know I make service sound so great! Haha the best part of the whole service was I held a lizard! Yes, you heard me right! I caught and held a lizard!! I was going to let it bite my ear so I could wear it as an earring  but it was just a little baby so it wouldn't keep its mouth open long enough to allow me to attach it to my ear. But don't you worry! I will get a picture of me with a lizard attached to my ear at some point! After we did that service we had lunch and this is where our day gets funny. So we eat our lunch and we are about ready to go out for the day when we realize that we had a lunch appointment we were suppose to be at in 15 minutes. This cute old couple feeds us about once a month but they only make us the food we never get to eat it at their house. We always have to pick it up by 2 and then eat it later. Well they live kinda far so we had to call Grandma Matzke in the ward to come pick us up and take us to get food and bring us back home.. Awkward!! This is how our conversation went "Hi grandma, What are you doing? Would you like to take us to the Pardillo's to get our dinner?" Hahaha good thing all the old ladies of the ward love us!! 

Well after that awkward moment we decide that we will bring our food to our next service activity at the Stryker's home and we will just share it with them. So we brought our dresses to change into after we were done with the service and we just had them in a Walmart sack sitting by the food. We walk into the kitchen for like 2 minutes to talk to the elders and see what needs to be done when Sister  Stryker comes in with the food in one hand and Sister Sorensen's bag of clothes in the other and puts both of them in the fridge... Hahahaha as she is doing this both Sister Sorensen and I notice this and we are holding back from just bursting out laughing because she had just stuck my companions clothes in the fridge so we could eat them for dinner.. Haha well we were only able to hold back the laughter for about 20 seconds. We were laughing so hard and no one knew why so they were just looking at us like we are crazies. Well, we were unsure how to get the clothes out of the fridge so we just left them and began painting. Well when no one was looking we had to run into the kitchen grab the clothes out of the fridge and then hide them with my clothes. Haha I'm pretty sure we are the two most awkward missionaries ever! 

So my final story is a miracle! As y'all know I have basically found my best friend out here and her name is Sister Johnson. Most of my stories include her and it wouldn't be a good week without a Sister Johnson story. Well she has been so sweet and takes us out to our lessons about 3-4 nights a week! This week it has been such a blessing because we ran out of miles on the car.. The best part about her coming out is she is able to fellowship our investigators as well as listen to our lessons and strengthen her own testimony at the same time! Last night we had a lesson scheduled with our neighbors Bill and Gene. So we called Sister Johnson up and ask if she wants to come with us. She says she can't because she is babysitting her grand kids. Well less then a minute later our phone rings. It's Sister Johnson.. All she says is "Am I ok the way I is?" Haha it took us a minute to figure out what she meant but then we realized she was going to come out with us! Yay! We were able to have a wonderful lesson with our neighbor! Gene is so great! She read the entire restoration pamphlet including looking up all of the scripture and answering the questions in the back. She had also watched the restoration video and started reading from the Book of Mormon! Wow!! She is so elect! Sister Jonson and Gene hit it off really well and became instant friends. It was the best! We were able to teach the plan of salvation and it was the sweetest lesson. Gene said she use to be so set on her religion but now is unsure because she is meeting with us. She is very close to the spirit and i love seeing the changes taking place in her life because of the gospel! 

Oh I forgot about my last miracle! So we have been sending out a scripture text of the day to all our investigators and less active members we are working with and it is amazing to see how the scriptures truly can soften people's hearts. We have had like 4 less actives who we have not been able to get in contact with since being here text us and tell us how much they love our scripture texts and we have been able to set appointments and see them! Wow!! The scriptures are so powerful! 

Well that about sums up my week. Sorry nothing to exciting happened this week. Hopefully I have some better stories for you next week. Have a wonderful week! I love and miss each and every one of you! 

Love, 

Sister Webb