March 19, 2017

Hello Family and Friends,

I hope that everyone was able to have a good week! My week has been fun and interesting as always... haha.

So Monday I was with Sister Nelson because my companion was teaching English and so we were together that day and worked in Jargalant. That was an interesting day. I don't know that area at all really and so I wasn't much help and Sister Nelson was trying to find this person's home and we were kind of struggling. She was like I feel like such a newbie. Haha. Here we are at the end of our mission and still trying to find houses.... and then when she was asking from people for help they weren't understanding her. Gotta love how even after all this time people still can't understand our accents but on the bright side the people who are ready and actually try to listen to us do understand us. I mean I think it’s pretty cool that here we are as foreigners coming to this country to preach the gospel in their own language, to me that is pretty cool! I think sometimes people don’t quite understand that or forget that. But then you run into people and you just start talking to them and they think that your Mongolian is amazing and are so surprised that we are learning it and that we speak as well as we do for just being here as long as we have. Oh well... haha. For the most part though, people are able to understand us so that is nice :) Part of it I think just depends on the type of area you are serving in. So yea our Monday was spent getting lost in ger districts :)

Tuesday was our pday and I’ll be honest I don't remember what we did.... it got kind of messed up because my companion had to go meet with immigration so we had to move things around a bit... so not really sure what happened there:) haha

Wednesday was awful... we were supposed to go out to Baganuur and do a split with the sisters that day but I don't know what I ate but I got so sick. So we couldn't make it out there that day because a 2 hour nonstop bus ride did not sound fun at all to me that day. haha.

Thursday was a good day though. I was feeling a lot better! In the morning we went out to go visit one of our members who can't really walk. Her name is Lena. She is a sweet, we shared a scripture with her and just helped bring the spirit into her home and then we asked if she needed any help and she asked if we could go buy her some milk? but was it just any kind of milk? No it was some weird milk that we had to go find that was somewhere around her house that isn't a brand name. It like comes in a bag... I had never heard of it before but we were able to find it so that was pretty awesome! The second little store that we went into had it so we were able to find it fairly quickly. She really appreciated it because they were out of milk so she was grateful that we picked some up for her. Then we also met with Hyamtsetseg who is an RM who served in Mongolia. We were going to teach one of our new members at her house but our new member never answered so we just ended up meeting with her but turns out when we got there that her sister was also there who is a little less active and so we met with her. She has two kids who are really cute. So we shared a story with them and talked about faith. It was really good! We invited them to come to church and they said they would try and guess what! Sunday they came!! :) so that was cool. We don't really have any investigators right now. Work has been a little hard and tsagaan sar didn't help at all with that so hopefully it will pick up again! i guess we do have a couple of investigators now but none of them are progressing... but we meet with members and our new members and LA's when they can and so we stay busy by trying to meet with them.

Friday I taught my last day of English! yay glad to have that over with so that I can just focus on the work my last week! Friday night we ended up going to Baganuur and finally doing our split with the sisters. It was really fun. I was with Ulziitei and it was good getting to know her better! She is really sweet. She is new and just finishing her 12 weeks this transfer so I got to go out with her and see how she was doing. The elders, Epsinoza and Bird ( from my group) also happened to go out there that same day to do a split with the elders out there and they ended up leaving Baganuur at the same time that we did and so we sat by them on the bus and got to catch up with them a little bit. At first sister guild and I didn't have seats next to each other but this old man saw that we were trying to figure out how to sit together and he actually ended up giving his seat up so that we could sit together. It was really sweet! And then the guy behind him was talking and he was surprised when he saw we could speak Mongolian and thought it was the coolest thing ever and when we got back to the city he told the elders to make sure that they protect us. haha it was really cute. Sometimes it’s nice being a white person :) it has its perks here sometimes. lol.

Sunday was alright... the bishop called us Saturday night and was like hey so our person cancelled last minute can you two give talks tomorrow? So of course we were like suuuure.... so we ended up giving talks in our sacrament meeting yesterday... that was fun. I have given so many talks on my mission... I talked about the atonement because that is something that I have been studying this transfer a lot and it was really good. I have learned a lot about the power of the atonement and the strength that it can give us. It is such a great gift from our Heavenly Father and I don't think that we always are able to recognize it as much. It is something that we should be using every day. A gift is always better when it is used. And if we aren't using the atonement, we aren't showing our gratitude for the great gift that it is. I continue to learn new things as I study this topic and it truly has helped me be able to do all the things that have been asked of me. There is no other way that I’d be able to do it.

Another picture from Tsagaan Sar week

I hope that you all have a great week! I love you all!

Love, Sister Kerby