Winter Cold, Independence Day, and Being Guided By the Spirit

So, first off, I totally forgot about Pioneer Day last Thursday until a ward member came up and talked to me about his son who is serving in Utah right now and was like, ¨Today is a holiday, right?¨ So, happy Pioneer Day last week to everyone back home in Utah!

Wow, it sounds from everyone's letters that it is heating up in the Northern Hemisphere, and in Utah in particular. Here in the Southern Hemisphere in Peru, it is getting colder and colder ... brrr! I think I've become accustomed to the climate because it seems I am a lot colder this year than I was last year. Also, now that we are in the middle of our winter, everyone in Peru has a cold. EVERYONE! So far, I haven't been infected. Last year I had the worse cold I've had in my entire life, so maybe this year my immune system will be strong enough to not get sick again. But just in case, I'm washing my hands and using a ton of sanitizer and wearing scarves almost every day. I do not want to get sick!!

The Peruvian flag on our building is just
outside our apartment. At least we have a view up here.

A view of all the Peruvian flags waving for
Independence Day.

So, today (Monday) is Peru's national anniversary, or independence day. In Peru, if you don't have a flag on your house you can get fined, so everyone has flags out. I took a picture with the one outside of our apartment (because we live on the roof). The bad thing about it being a holiday is that there's no work or school today and tomorrow, so lots of people aren't in their houses to be able teach them. But today we have a couple of Family Home Evenings planned so we should be ok.

I also got to start practicing the violin for the conference in August! Yay! Violin! However, no one here has a shoulder rest, and it's killing my neck! The hermana who owns the violin knows where we can buy one, but it's way outside of our mission, so we can't go and get it. I really need a shoulder rest ASAP so I can practice with it, so my parents said they will be mailing mine from home to me. Hopefully it will arrive in time.

I know that God is also guiding us to those people that He's prepared. On Sunday, everything we had fell through: all of our citas, fijas, and even our list of people to call and talk to in Church. So, we had to plan and try to think of all of the people we had contacted to make another try to meet with them. We prayed and asked for guidance. We went out and began proselyting, and we passed by the houses of some of the contacts we'd made during the week. However, no one was letting us in. As we were walking to another house, we saw a woman come out of a house of a reference that we had received about 6 weeks ago. We were never able to contact the family even though we had passed by many times. I'm usually bad at remembering names, but as we came closer to her, I heard something tell me ¨That's Jaime! Talk to her!¨ So I asked, ¨Hola, usted es Jaime? Somos las misioneras!¨ It was her, and her husband came out shortly afterwards and we were able to talk to them both and make an appointment. I know that God was guiding our steps yesterday and put us in the path to help us find this family. Even if our plans fall through, we just need to keep our eyes open and be sensitive to the Spirit and we'll be shown why we're in that area.

I started practicing for my musical number next month, but
no shoulder rest -- OUCH!!

So that's about it for this week. Thank you so much to everyone at home for your prayers and words of wisdom.