San Jose Week 3

wow! i can barely believe that it has been so long....i month already in the mission...ok, where do i begin! we have had some great experiences this week!!! i will start with a few funny ones, the other day we were walking down the street trying to contact people, and just talk to everyone we could about the chruch, and we walked past this guy and were about to greet him, when u just said, "no, no, no, i am satan, dont talk to me or waste your time, i am the resureccted satan....its amazing what crazy lies people come up with to avoid talking to us!! haha, but it makes me laugh. later that same day, we met another man, and began to teach him about the gospel, then as we testified that we had a living prophet on earth, he got really angry and yelled at us and told us that thomas s. monson is a false prophet and that so were we....it was really sad, all we did was testify to him the truth, but he is so lost!!!

 

anyways, some great experiences we had were...we had a service project cleaning this guys house that is more like a shack, and we invited the elders in our area to help us, but when we gotr to his house we didnt realize how bad it was because we had never actually been inside, basically they lived in mud, and threw their trash on the floor everywhere and had bugs and straw and nasty stuff all over, it was a disaster...and after the service project the elders laughed at us and thought that the project was pointless, because it looked like we hadnt even made a dent in anything, and basically i kinda thought the same for a moment, that they are never going to change and are prob going to continue to live like that...but guess what!!! this man, who hadnt been to church in 20 plus years....came yesterday!! and he had showered and shaved and was wearing a suit!!! he looked like a commpletely different person, and when we saw him, we felt so grateful that our efforts no matter how small they were, werent in vain! he changed somehow, and that is what this gospel is all about, making us better people!!

 

 

sorry i dont have much time...i will be writng you all more next time, and more letters will come! with details of everything!!

 

 

love, hermana moyes

One Month

we made brownies to celebrate my one month date in the mission...this is our kitchen in san jose!

 

 

love, gioia

San Jose Week 1

hey, guys...

i have some news...i will not be able to email anybody but parents...however anybody can email me through the following address...they will print your emails and send them to me from the mission office..so if you can tell savannah to post my email on facebook or something...the only thing is that i can´t respond to anybodys email here with this account i can only write back to my parents...but i still want  to read all of your emails so please write me! it has been a really hard week, and i havent had anbody write me or email me for the past 2 weeks, i know you are all busy, but i really miss you all and still want to know how everyone is doing. so if you guys can forward this email to everyone else that would be great...when i get your emails i can print them and write you a letter back through the mail, its just going to take a while for u to get a reply. but i love my companion, and i love the work we are doing here...its nothing like i expected, but its all worth it. thank you all for helping me get here and for making this mission possible. my first area is called san jose, it is in a zone they call las piedras...it has rained everday and night for the past few days, but we are still able to find a lot of good people even in horrible weather. if i didn´t believe this church was true and that this work is the work of the Saviour i wouldn´t be here...i know that all these expereinces are going to bless the lives of many people, and i am grateful to be a part of it. here is a pic of my first trainer her name is hermana enamorado. and also i have 2 pics from the mtc with my companion hermana da silva...my comp now is from honduras.

love, gioia

Uruguay

omorrow morning i am flying to uruguay, so they gave a a few minutes to write before we head out!!

 

 

love you and miss you all, i will prob get to write more when i get there and will tell u where i am assigned and who my comp is!!

 

love, gioia

MTC Week 2 (last week, then its off to Uruguay!!! )

ok...first off the first day of proselyting was AMAZING we talked to sooo  many people the first 2 people we found walking in the street were way nice and one accepted an appointment, by the end of the day we had given 14 lessons and  contacted about 26 people this saturday we have 15 different appointments from people that wanted to hear more, among the good experiences we had a few funny and scary ones, but i learned that u cant walk up and ask if they have a few minutes to hear our message, you cant ask them if they want to hear it at all, because they will immediateley say no, they dont have time, or they arent interested, so as soon as we walk up to somebody and say hello, we testify as soon as we open our mouths, so that they pretty much listen to our message whether they want to or not. it is so effective though! when u arent direct from the start they wont let you speak. 

this is one experience that was my all time favorite of the day!!

so me and my comp had stopped and sat down on a little brick wall to eat lunch during our day of proseletismo and we were sitting on the corner of a small street that had a little fruit stand/produce "store" as we were eating 2 guys walked by us and i heard them saying something about us and they pointed and said  " son evangelistas"  basically they thought we were evangelists, but my companion didnt here them, and they had already passed us by quite a distance, i dont know how i  heard and understood them while my companion didnt, so i turned around, and they looked over and i kind of raised my voice and said, "no somos evangelistas, somos mormones." something like that, and i signaled them to come over and talk to us, so the one guy came over he looked super surprised that i had heard him, but he seemed intrigued and happy that we wanted to talk with him. so i began to explain....somos representantes de la iglesia de jesucristo de los santos de los ultimos dias.....and we began to teach him about our church.,,,,as we began to get to know him we taught him about how god is our loving heavenly father and he is there to help us etc, they he began to get very contemplative and told us if god loves me, and is my father, and sees me and guides me like you say then why isnt he helping me right now, we found out that he lived in the streets, and basically had nothing, and then my companion offered him her lunch and then i gave him what i had left. i handed him an apple and a sandwhich and some cookies and when he saw the apple in the bag, he looked like he was going to cry, he just stared at it and said, "an apple" you are giving alll of this to me??? he was so excited and grateful that he would be able to eat, and not have to spend money, 

i wish u could have been there, i can not explain how strong the spirit was!!! he really had sincere doubt, the "questions of the soul" does god know me, and love me etc,....and to be able to stand there and testify that christ lives and that god loves him and will take care of him was  so amazing, he looked at us as if we were angels and we couldnt get his contact info because he had none, but we wrote down the address to the church and told him what time the meeting were on sunday....wow, it was so great! he was so skeptical at the beginng, but as we walked away, and as he walked the opposite way down the street, he kept yelling how greatful he was and saying how beautiful the experience had been, it really was unforgetable, i dont know if he made it to church or not, or if the church can help his situation, but i know that at least he left knowing that god does know him and love him, and for that precise reason we were there eating lunch at the moment they passed by us, we were there to testify that God loves him and has not forgotten him, and that the church of jesus christ has been restored and it is the true church. 

anyways, its crazy that this saturday we will be teaching so many lessons, i was surprised that we were able to make so many appointments on our first day of proselyting, by the end of the day we were exhausted, but we met some amazing people with great potential. i hope that they will accept our message on saturday and that we can find even more people for the missionaries in that area, well, its crazy to think, but i will be leaving here on tues really early in the morning...so the 13 i will be in uruguay!!!

thanks for everything!! i´ll let you know how it goes when i get there!!

love, hermana moyes

MTC Week 1

ok guys,

where do i even begin? so many things. well, first off, i got really lucky. i love my campanion, and even better she is the only sister here that came from... guess where? montevideo, uruguay....so i have been asking her a lot of questions....she will be serving in the argentina resistencia mission....anyways, we have a lot of things in common, and she is way helpful with my spanish!! its been pretty hard, because they put me with all the latinos, the classes are all way condensed and every night that i go to bed, i pretty much collapse, it never seems like there is enough time to study everything i want. the mtc here is a lot smaller than i imagined,

only one other american girl that i met on my flight to slc was with us the entire trip...there are only like 20 missionaries here, not too many, so we have all gotten to know each other pretty  well. and the food is amazing, we each a ton of meat (beef), and potatoes in every form imaginable, sometimes fish, its pretty good. i have the best teachers ever!! i can not even begin to describe how powerful they are, and i love going to class....it was really hard the first few days getting used to the schedule,

literally i have every second of the day planned and accounted for, and i have been waking up and hour earlier at 5am to study more and catch up on spanish....one of the things that was really hard at first was having to give our mock lessons, i got frustrated, because i felt like i had good ideas prepared, then i couldnt explain it as fluently as i wanted  to in spanish, so i kind of doubted myself, but yesterday me and my companion did really well in our second lesson! i realized that i need to trust in the material that i have prepared and just speak what is in my heart and say what i know to be true even if its not perfectly said, and even though it was a pretend interview yesterday, me and my companion left feeling like we had really helped someone, and the spirit was stronger than i could have ever imagined, i knew what to say and when to say it in every part of the lesson, and my teacher said after the lesson that i sounded like i had spoken spanish my whole life. i honestly didnt think i was capable giving a lesson like that, but i know that because of our study and willingness to share our knowledge, the spirit was speaking through us.

 tomorrow we are go to be proselyting in the streets of buenos aires, they are going to give us a map and pretty much drop us off in whatever part of the city we have assigned to us at 9 or 10am then come pick us up at 5pm, i am way excited!! we pretty much are contacting as many people as we can, and trying to set appts for next saturday, because we will return to that area the following week and be proselyting in that area again...its crazy to already be so involved in the work....but i know that after tomorrow i will have a ton of  things to tell you ;) time has kind of disappeared here, i like it, but it doesn´t feel like i am in south america, i think it is going to be quite a shock tomorrow in some aspects, mostly because we are so closed in here at the mtc, that i pretty much feel like i am in utah, except that we do everything in spanish and most of  the missionaries are latinos.....so tomorrow is pretty much the first time i have even seen any part of buenos aires....the drive from the airport wasn't very far, so i havent seen anything.

when we got to argentina, there was a member waiting for us, and we didn´t know who he was, he happened to see my as i was on my way to the bathroom, and told me that he was there to pick up the missionaries, so i led him back to where me and the other sister had been waiting.

well, i love being here, i can´t wait to teach tomorrow! and i love you all!

love, hermana moyes