This week began the official cherry-picking-season, and already our house is overflowing with them. What a wonderful problem: to have more fruit than you know what to do with it. Las Hermanas Trujillo (two of our awesome recent converts) started their 7-days-a-week, 3 week long, 4am-5pm picking shifts on Thursday – which is sad- but they brought us back tons of the sweetest, juiciest cherries I’ve ever had in my LIFE. Store bought cherries have nothin’ on these babies!
And as if fruit from the field wasn’t enough, so many people have cherry trees growing in their front yards, LADEN with fruit. Hermana Brighton, who is from Texas, gets excited to see two things: quails and cherry trees. So when we were on our way to contact a referral in a rather weather worn trailer park, and there was a magnificent cherry tree growing in someone’s garden right next to the gravel road, she stopped to ogle at it. As Hermana Brighton was ogling the tree, and it’s many deep red gems of deliciousness, the curtains opened in the window of the trailer (directly behind it’s branches) to reveal a very stern Hispanic woman, warning us with her face to don’t even dare think about touching those cherries
. We weren’t going to touch the cherries to begin with, honestly, but her scowl cleared us out from in front of her house just as quick as lightning, her eyes piercing our backs as we walked.
But, as we scurried away, we thought to ourselves: we owe it to her to compliment her tree, and explain that we were not cherry thieves, but missionaries! So when our referral wasn’t there, we walked back to her trailer, wrestled our way through the gate, and knocked. Her name ended up being Maria, and when we explained that we’re missionaries and told her how we didn’t want to steal her fruit but admire it, she very casually pretended like she never thought we were fruit thieves… heh. False.
So we shared the message of the Restored Gospel with her, and our return appointment with her is tonight at 6pm! 🙂 We’re super excited, and because we don’t know her last name, we just call her Maria de los Cherry. Just goes to show that sometimes you can’t judge a situation based on what you think would produce a negative result.
But still on the topic of fruits and vegetables, we’ve also been receiving a LOT of mangos. And they’re the best mangos we’ve ever had in our life. They’re smaller, more orange, and lo mas dulce! We got our first ones from our great investigators named Sabina and Hemilio, and then some more last night from our awesome new investigator named Cruz.
We found Cruz on Saturday night, while trying to contact a referral that was definitely a wrong-address-gone-right. Because there’s too much that’s awesome about Cruz, here’s some brief bullet points of our first encounter:
- He reads the Bible, and asked us where Cain’s wife came from (Because the account in Genesis says that literally only Adam, Eve, Cain and Able existed in the earth at the time.) In fact, he literally RAN to go get his Bible before asking us his question.
- He has been trying to figure out where to turn for answers about God/the doctrine in the Bible, and asked us why there’s so many religions -queue the Joseph Smith experience-
- After hearing the story of Joseph Smith, he asked how to pray. He was raised Catholic “creyente” (so, not practicing) but he didn’t know that you were allowed to pray something other than the Lord’s Prayer. He also kept referring to Joseph Smith and his experience throughout the rest of the lesson.
- He is so excited to read in the Book of Mormon, and last night at the follow-up appointment that HE set, he was excited to ask our members that we took with us questions about their conversion, and how they knew all this is true.
So that’s Cruz 🙂 We have to figure out where he orders those mangos in bulk. Probably in the same place that one could buy Chayote.
Chayote is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever had. It’s outside looks like… a foot-ball sized hedgehog. And it’s SUPER thorny. Mexicans love ’em! Me? I think they taste like zucchini flavored baby food. We also had the needle-skin chayote on the same day that Elders Doman/Laffiteau, Hermanas Jaccard/Cortes and nosotras went to do service at Norma’s house. What went from a simple carne asada lunch/rock moving project turned into Norma deciding to have us rip out all of her rose bushes! D: And, subsequently, rip apart all our skin. It was so very literally painful to torture those beautiful, blooming bushes. Granted, they were pretty diseased. But the disease in the plant added a certain je ne sais quoi to the coloring! 😦
We decided to start weaving the blooms into our hair, and the picture below shows how my head turned out. Jajaj while tucking a flower into Hermana Cortes’ french braid, I spotted an ENORMOUS earwig wriggling around in the petals at which point I gasped and pointed, saying “there’s a –
there’s a –
!!!!”
She didn’t need any more explanation, apparently, because Hermana Cortes let out the screech of a wounded she-dragon, and wrenched the bloom from her hair. When it hit the ground, we all watched in horror as THREE of the enormous earwigs scurried out for dear life.
Hermana Cortes didn’t put any more flowers in her hair.
We do a lot of service though, planned and unplanned 🙂 I don’t know if I mentioned last week how one Sunday we found this CUTE old couple named Marilyn and Galen trying to trim their hedges, and after some haggling, they consented to hand over the shears and let us do it. Galen told us how he loves to read, and so Hermana Brighton asked him if he’d ever had a chance to read in the Book of Mormon. After a very wonderful hour, we left them with a copy, he promised to read in it, and we hope the English elders have had a chance to stop by. Maybe we’ll swing in again when their wisteria looks like it could use another trim.
The last story I want to share is the story about the monsoon that took place here one night about a week ago. As we began our 9pm trip home, some AWESOME thunder and lightning started rolling in, along with some heavy storm clouds. By the time we finished our planning, it was raining furiously. We watched the storm from our sliding living room door, listening to the upstairs neighbors comment drunkenly on each lightning bolt and thunder clap from their balcony. It wasn’t too long before the temptation was too strong and we took off RUNNING into the rain. There’s this super huge basketball court about 30 yards outside of our building, and we had this great idea to go annoy the other Hermanas on the other side of the complex. As soon as we hit that basketball court to cross, though, Hermana Brighton slipped for all she was worth, and went down hard on the pavement. When it was assure that nothing was broken, we started DYING laughing. Because all of those drunk neighbors saw, and it was raining SO. HARD. and it was totally a wake up call to how stupid our idea was. So, obviously we returned to the safety of our home, and took a picture of us being soaking wet. Lesson learned: Sometimes the Lord lets you slip, so that you can realize you’re not where you’re supposed to be, doing what you’re supposed to be doing.
And so, the literal and spiritual fruit of this week has been great! Hermana Brighton and I are so excited to be working together, and seeing all these miracles together 🙂
Hermana Mrozek // Kennewick Washington Mission 