Great Leaders and Cupcakes

My new skirt and a new Peruvian scarf.

I just wanted to start off again by thanking everyone for the birthday packages and letters. Thank you so much! I love all of the chocolate, books, letters, and love. With some of the money from my Grandma, I went and bought new speakers because mine are dying, as well as a couple of cute scarfs. Yay!

Hermana Larsen was super great and bought me pickles and peanut butter for my birthday -- ha ha! I'd been wanting a pickle peanut butter sandwich so badly, and those two things are super expensive here, but Hermana Larsen surprised me by giving them to me for my birthday!

Hermana Larsen approves of
pickle peanut butter sandwiches

Our neighbors, Sol and Aurora, who are recent converts,
gave me these gifts for my birthday. I named the toucan 'Roy.'

Yay for Thanksgiving! Not sure if they really do anything down here in Peru. It might just be a holiday in the USA. Well, maybe Hermana Larsen and I will eat potatoes on Thursday to celebrate -- ha ha. It would be nice to make a pumpkin pie, but they don't have pumpkins here whatsoever! They don't even know what a pumpkin is! Craziness, they don't know what they're missing out on!

Yup, still living in the garage and walking 20 minutes to get to our area. We're also still getting to know a lot of the members, but one thing I have found is that a great, caring leader makes all of the difference. In the current ward I am serving in, they didn't have a Young Women's president for over 3 months, and there were only about 3 girls coming each week. Finally, the bishop called a new president, and last week, there were at least 8 Young Women that came! It is amazing how much difference a great leader can make.

This is the bishop's wife, Hermana Sarah, and Hermana Margarita
at the Relief Society cupcake activity.

We were also able to finally make cupcakes with the Relief Society sisters. We had visitas de trabajo that day, so Hermana Agle was with me. It was lots of fun and we had some investigators and less actives come and join in the activity. It was great! Yummy!

Me and Hermana Agle making cupcakes.