Picture Book of My Life Here

#1: In the car on P-Day. In general, Hermana Brighton and I take the Edison Sisters to the typical P-Day activities: writing, eating, shopping, “p-day” at the church, etc. Sisters Hunt and Emery are great, and it’s crazy that I knew Sister Hunt when she was serving up near Ephrata, and it’s already her last transfer! D: AHHH!

#2: Sister Pyramid (minus the Edison sisters because they had to go home.) So Hermana Cortes (far left, bottom) and I found out that we have a TON of mutual BYU-I friends, including the famous, over-all wearing Nigel May.

#3. Zone picture last P-Day. A lot of these people are now gone, sad day, but the zone is still pretty awesome 😀

#4. Hermana Brighton and I at La Placita, our new favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant. They have this awesome salsa bar, and their carne asada is to die for 🙂 Hermanas Cortes/Gomez and us went there for a final hurrah last week before transfers

#5. Writing thank you notes for submitted donations at the Benton Franklin Humane Society. Hermana Brighton always takes the baby bunny out and lets it run around pooping on the table. The Edison Sisters and both sets of us Spanish Hermanas go every Wednesday at 1pm 🙂

#6. The chaos of writing the thank you notes, with the added awesomeness of the bunny.

#7. Baby puppy sleeping on my arm at a member’s house during a lesson. It’s too cuteee.

#8. Me with a beautiful rose bush in Felony Flats (where the South Gate elders live.) Kennewick has the most roses of anywhere I’ve ever been in my LIFE.

#9. Like I said, the most roses of ANYWHERE. This house is just down the street from the Buntin Chapel, where the majority of our meetings are. Last night Hermana Brighton and I finally got to stop and smell/take pictures of it. I WANT ONE.

#10. Yesterday was just take-a-picture-with-the-roses day, clearly.

#11. Hermana Brighton mocking the way I always pose always with everyone and everything.

And so that about wraps it up as far as the pictures go.

Hope everyone has a great week! 🙂

I’ve been in the same Kennewick branch for 6 months, now, and transfer calls say that I’ll be here another month and a half! With Hermana Brighton! This is not bad news at all. We’ve been pretty solid companions 🙂 The only change in the district is that Hermana Gomez will be transferred out to Benton City (Richland Stake) and that Hermana Jaccard will be transferred in! That is SUCH exciting news! We were in the CCM together, and she’s literally the most awesome 🙂 Ah! This next transfer is going to be awesome.
This week for us has been a little hard as far as meeting goals goes; we didn’t even have any of our investigators come to church :(. But we were able to meet some pretty awesome people and teach some pretty great lessons. But even though the outcome didn’t exactly fit the vision, that doesn’t mean that this week hasn’t been without some really great highlights!

Los Juegos Olympicos (Casi)

The “Almost Olympics” took place for our Branch activity this Saturday evening, and it started on Hispanic Standard Time (i.e. an hour after it was supposed to). The famous Migel Tobon not only did the DJing, but also brought a cotton candy machine and a popcorn machine! There was some awesome american food to eat, and it was just so exciting.There were water games, relay races, discus throws, javelins, you name it! The missionaries all ran the different stations, and corralling all the ninos was the hardest thing ever.
The most popular out of the events were the water games (super soakers and 200 water balloons), and the most popular target was Hermana Brighton. She had to take a time out after getting pegged hard in the back.

The kids had a great time, and the adults did, too. Hermana Hernandez’ mom (she’s like maybe 75?) was running all the races and competing so hard. The thing (beside her age) that made it so awesome a sight is that she’s always so elegant and classy! And all of a sudden there she was, leaping hurdles, sprinting and everything in her skirt! She just kicked off her chanclas and she sprinted for it! Haha Hermana Hernandez’ mom is one of my favorite, feisty people now.

Serving in the Adult Day Center:

We’ve gone to serve at the Adult Day Center twice this week, and I seriously can’t get enough of it. The clients are the most interesting, sweet people ever! What we do is hold a 1 hour meeting with about 10 women, to talk about nature or baking or something that is very neutral. But this week Holly, the director of the Day Center, had us do a Spanish Ladies Group, and let me just say it was AWESOME! Hahaha these ladies are completely there, and so sassy. There was no topic assigned, but even if there was, it wouldn’t have stayed on topic. There’s one cuban, and like 8 other people all from Jalisco/Guadalajara/Nyarit, so we ended up talking about Cinco de Mayo, different dogs people have had and just a bunch of other stuff. It was kind of an awesome moment to realize that I’m not actually terrible at understanding non-gospel related words. There were only a couple of times that Hermana Brighton and I were completely out of our league as far as Spanish goes.

(Not like this last week when I was talking about my mom Rebecca’s knee replacement surgery with a recent convert. I accidentally confused the English words for titanium and platinum, and thinking that the spanish word for platinum was platano, told her that she has a “rodilla de platano.” So what I actually said, directly translated, that means “knee of banana.” I was literally CRYING laughing on our recent convert’s couch when I realized what I’d said, and no one can let it go!)

I’ve just run out of time to write more, but Hermana Brighton and I have had the opportunity to, very thoroughly, plan for this next transfer. We’re excited for all the things we are going to be seeing in our area!

Attached are some pictures from our Branch activity! (The last one is supposed to be “modern art.”)

Love you, all!

Hermana Mrozek

“Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ,” 2 Nephi 31:20

Each week, it seems like I have more and more I want to say and less and less time to say it all. Entonces, mas bullet points.

Cosas Buenas (Servicio)

• Cristal and Jorge yard work project! This week, the Union elders, the Edison sisters, and hermana Brighton and I have been working with this non-member engaged couple to clear out their yard. They moved in about a week ago, and the Edison sister encountered them struggling to clean up the debris of 4 huge rose bushes and 4 cut down trees, overgrown with ivy. It’s been an awesome project, and I’ve had the opportunity to help remove an ENORMOUS stump (which involves awkwardly crouching in the trench around the stump and painstakingly sawing all roots in half by hand.) It’s been super rewarding, and as a couple buying their first house together, they’ve so appreciated the help.
• Hermana Brighton and I also had the opportunity to serve at the adult day center in downtown Kennewick this week. It’s kind of a day care for those while physical and mental incapacitates that make being left alone very hazardous. We pretty much were just there to visit with the women’s group, but we ended up staying to help serve lunch, too. While some of the people have mental challenges, some of them are just old and need an extra hand. One shining moment was when we were sitting at lunch, eating with a frail old woman woman who didn’t really seem to be too aware of reality. Someone was talking about Jesus beside us, and out of nowhere she hoisted her milk carton high above her head (white bendy straw gleaming in majesty) and with a voice like a battle cry, shouted, “HERE’S TO YOU JESUS! MAY YOU LIVE FOREVER!” She then proceeded to down the rest of her milk carton, and return to her lukewarm chili.
  Working at the Adult Day Center is awesome, though. Hermana Brighton and I have plans to go every week, as they’re in need of afternoon volunteers, and we’ve made some very amazing friends with some incredibly sweet spirits 🙂

Cosas Buenas (El Encontrar)

• We felt inspired to try by a very old enternigator/part-member family in our area last week. Because of that, we have since gotten two of the baptized children back to church (a MIRACLE!) and met a lady named Estrella who just moved in with them from Mexico! And when Hermana Brighton and I gave her a copy of The Book of Mormon, she told us that she had been meeting with missionaries down in Mexico (attending church with a friend a couple times) and that she forgot the bag with all her scriptures in it! And so she came to church yesterday, PARTICIPATED in gospel principles, and is incredible.
• There’s been some other great experiences that we’ve had – like finding a 14 year old named Fabi who has been pretty much living the life of Jospeph Smith (i.e. reading the bible, attending different churches, and praying to find the true church of Christ). After we shared the message of the restoration with her and her 6 year old sister named Genesis, she gave us the biggest, most sincere hug ever and invited us to come back. We are so excited to continue meeting with her, and to hear all about what she’s learned and felt while reading in the Book of Mormon (which she excitedly agreed to do).

The miracles experienced on the mission are incredible, and I am so grateful to be a witness of the hand of the Lord working in this area. Transfer calls are coming this Saturday, and I have to admit: I don’t want to leave Kennewick! But I will do what the Lord wants me to do, and go where he wants me to go 🙂

Thank you for all the prayers and well wishes on my behalf 🙂 Know that they are returned!

Hermana Mrozek

Hitting My 9 Month Mark and Other Buenas Nuevas

Hello, everyone! 🙂 It’s been a big week for us in the Kennewick Spanish Branch, so let me tell you why:

This Thursday, I hit my 9 month mark! According to how long I’ve been on my mission, I should be “well seasoned” by now! So that’s exciting. (Well, it would be, except that I don’t know if I’ll ever feel like a “well seasoned” missionary.)
In fact, the day of my 9 Month Mark was the day we had exchanges with the Sister Training Leaders, and BOY did I feel green when every. single. of. our. 6. scheduled. lessons. AND. backups. AND. triple. backups. fell. through. Even KNOCKING fell through, because I guess everyone sensed us coming before we arrived and ran. Sister Larsen, that champ, she was so patient as we went from place to place, looking for someone -ANYONE- to talk to. Hahah and in the end, it actually was quite the good day. We got a Slurpee at the 7-11 that sells the most Slurpees of any 7-11 in the country. And, you know, eventually talked to 6 new people, found a new investigator, and taught 3 lessons. So the Lord definitely provides. (We drove 60 miles, though, so whoops.)
Norma, Juan and Erick were confirmed yesterday, and we actually had other investigators come to Church! It was awesome! Hermana Brighton and I are in the process of finishing up the paperwork for everything, so we hope to get that mailed out either today or tomorrow. It’s so exciting! 🙂
Hermana Brighton and I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with someone who is actually Spanish. As in from Spain, Spanish. She talked to us using “vosotros” and complained about how she works around too many Mexicans who need to learn “real Spanish.” She ended up already being a member of the Church, along with her husband, who is from Argentina. She didn’t know there was a Spanish congregation in Kennewick, so we invited her to come to church. She said that right now she can’t because her work schedule is on the weekends rotation, and her husband is going back to Buenas Aires soon because his son from his first marriage just suffered a near-fatal head injury. 😦 But we plan to keep visiting with her because she is just too cool for words, and she needs love.
A lot of other things have happened this week, and I wish I had time to write about all of them, but here’s just one more other random experience we’ve had this week that I really don’t want to forget:

Having a TWO HOUR LONG dinner with a recent convert couple in one of the English wards yesterday (the Sabbath) and eating freshly delivered Papa Johns Pizza… while the wife cursed out her husband at the table. That was pretty interesting. They ended up giving us pizza to take home, which was alright with us, but as we were walking back to our apartment that night with the boxes, we passed the open sliding door of our neighbors who we had met/taught the day before. And they were sitting on their couch. And we made eye contact. And in that lesson we had the day before? We told them that we don’t go out and buy things on Sunday to show respect for the Lord’s day. And we talked about how there are hypocrites in the world but we still need to have faith in what we know to be true. Also, they told us that they always see us bringing home Little Ceasars and Panda Express… They told us that they’ve been judging us for a while, now haha. And so here we were looking like fatty hypocrites who bought pizza on Sunday. aksjdhkajsdfhksdfjhsk AHH. We’ll fix it.
But this week has been really, really awesome. We had 6 member present lessons, 16 other lessons, and 6 recent convert/less-active lessons. So we’ve been teaching A LOT. Plus, there’s the 30 new people we talked to this week, 8 of those being new investigators. So we’re very, very honored to be a witness of the Lord’s work rolling forth here in the Kennewick Spanish Branch, and I can’t wait until next week when there’s even more funny stories to share.

“Go ye therefore into the highways, and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage.” Matthew 22:9

This week can be summed up into two giant subheadings:

1. Wedding – Part One

2. Baptism – Part Two

Wedding

After weeks and weeks of inviting and preparation and sweat and tears and worry and SO MUCH STRESS, on Saturday, Norma and Juan were married in holy matrimony by President Hancock, and it was awesome. Here they are in front of their wedding arch :’)

We had to do a LOT of set-up on Friday night, not to mention the free labor performed by the Spanish Branch (cooking, decorations, cakes, you name it). The day of, to keep us busy and there on official missionary business, we missionaries worked as servers, bus boys, ushers, cake cutters, clean up crew, kitchen staff and so much more. Anything that we could do to stay away from the AWESOME Spanish dance music (and subsequently the desire to dance) was what we were doing.
(Their first dance was to Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran and I almost started bawling #TrunkCity.)
There was some awesome dancing going on, though. Jonathan Cosme and his mom have Latin dancing DOWN. I have so much to learn in 9 months. (Lamentablemente, I still cannot understand the words to The Macarena.)

Aqui son los siervos: Elders Laffiteau y Doman. Hermanas Gomez y Cortes. Hermana Brighton y yo. Norma dressed us all.
We looked like we were going to prom. It was awesome.

And while the wedding was nice, and the cake was delicious, nothing could compare to yesterday night when the entire family was baptized.

Baptism
Everyone that went to Norma and Juan’s wedding the day before came to the baptism 🙂 I’ve never seen a room SO FULL. I made about 30 programs, and I should have made about 50. It was really amazing because so many RCLAs came out of the woodwork yesterday! Susana and Rafaela came to Sacrament, and so did Orlando (aka: he who said he’d never go to church meetings ever again.) Margarita came to TWO hours of church and then later brought her friend Mara to the baptism. They both loved it so much 🙂
We’ve also been teaching Norma’s married/27(ish) year old daughter Emily. She said she has high interest in going to the English ward (Spanish is not a strong suit and her husband/cute kids only speak English.)
Here is the best baptismal picture EVER:

Juan (the one with his tongue out and pretended to be “shy” forever) wanted the most obscure hymn ever as the closing hymn at the service. But he loved it so much that we couldn’t say no. He just sat there reading the lyrics printed on the back of the program, smiling, after he was baptized. It was “The Happy Day at Last Has Come.”
Ahhh I can’t even contain my happiness about them. We will commence teaching all the lessons over again this week, and next Sunday they will be confirmed.

As usual, I’m running out of time. But I just want to say that this was the best week ever! 🙂
We are so excited to have them be the best, most fiery recent converts EVER! Our relief society president will be moving back to the English ward this coming week and there are already people saying Norma’s going to get called to be in the presidency. She’s waited a LONG 6 months for this baptism! And her husband and son are just as awesome:)This week our focus is going to be finding finding FINDING! 🙂 Not that we’re starting from scratch, but with all of our focus having been on this huge past weekend, well, it’s exciting to keep the ball rolling 🙂

All my love – Hermana Mrozek

4/6/2015

Hello, everybody! 🙂 Here’s a fun fact: on this day in 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ was officially restored to the earth after almost two centuries of darkness and confusion on subject of religion. That is pretty cool stuff 🙂

Miracles:

– Margarita (our recently/miraculously found less active sister) came to Sunday morning conference and brought her friend Mara! 😀 We’ve been stopping by and visiting them both for a while, and have invited Mara to church and a couple other activities, but she finally came! And she wore the cutest dress, and she said she LOVED it! :’) Mara is so special. She’s about Margarita’s age (60’s?) has bad knees and bad diabetes complications but insists on doing kneeling prayers with us whenever we come – even though the floor is hard wood. Mara <3!! Ah!

– Two girls that I taught from December 4th until February 10th were just baptized the night of he 4th! Their names are Kimberly (9) and Anahi (12), and they are so amazing 🙂 Orlando (75), another recently/miraculously found less active brother, decided that he did, in fact, want to step foot inside a church building again, and he came! 😀 It was so awesome. Ricky Castaneda drove him, and Orlando had actually bought a new suit for the occasion. And the next day, he came to Conference!

Moments:

– Norma, our amazing Norma who is getting baptized on Sunday with her husband and son, played the CRUELEST April Fools joke on us last Monday after leaving the Library! She sent us a text saying: “Estoy triste, no podemos casarnos, no se concreto el divorcio.” Meaning! “I am sad. We can’t get married. The divorce didn’t go through.” (Juan needed a divorce from his first wife.) To which Hermana Brighton an I immediately FLIPPED OUT. We called the ward mission leader, we started making plans, we were about to call the attorney advertisement on the back of the phone book to make that divorce go through. And then she sent us: “April fools. You’ve been fooled.” …. !!!!@#$%^&* IT WAS MARCH 30TH!!! So of course we forgave her, and we still love her, but it was SO MEAN hahahaha.

– We shoveled more rocks for the city of Kennewick again this past Wednesday. It was a good 3 1/2 hours of my life. So many blisters. Such heavy rocks. So, service for the city of Kennewick “rocks!”

Aaand I just ran out of time to finish this post. But that’s okay. There’s enough to cover the important stuff, but short enough to keep it interesting. Like a mini-skirt, as Hermana Brighton would say.

Church is true! Love you! Stay classy!