April 11, 2011

Another week has come and gone! How are you all? Good I hope. I'd
love to hear from you! Any letters are good letters, and except for
Mom, I haven't heard from most everyone in several weeks, and from
some of you it's been several months. I miss hearing about you.
Having a greenie companion has helped me remember what it was like to
have mail on most days of the week... And I miss those little
reminders that life is still normal and that events are happening in
the lives of my friends and family. So PLEASE WRITE!!! In case
you've forgotten, here's my address:

Sister Reid
8583 Watt Ave
Antelope CA 95843

Anyways. Enough with the chastisements. :) The work here is going
great. We had a really eventful week with lots of opportunities to do
service. Which has been a nice change from tracting, which I don't
really enjoy, although I know that it needs to be done and is
sometimes the only way we find people, but it's also nice to get a bit
of a break too. :)

So on Tuesday we did some service for a lady that we met a couple
weeks ago tracting. She's about 900 years old. lol. Really only
about 95, but still. And I think her house is older than she is. It
needs some serious attention. So we offered to help. We went there
on Tuesday and she asked us to help her clean out her pantry. She's
been putting canned goods in there for 30 years and never taking them
out agian. She told us she thought there might have been something
that exploded in there a few years ago, but she never investigated.
So we put on some gloves and went to work. We couldn't even open the
door when we started. Yikes. And we found almost nothing that hadn't
been expired for at least several years. We found at least 20 cans
that had exploded or leaked, and a bottle of ice cream topping that
expired the same year I was born... in case you don't know... that's
1983! That bottle was probably older than me! GEEZ!!! And we found
a bottle of MSG. That's right. Neurotoxin in a can. LOL. It was
lots of fun. But there was also lots of mouse poop in there, and a
mouse's nest that we cleaned out. We were very careful not to breath
it in, or to touch anything without wearing gloves, and we cleaned our
hands and arms very well. But I did make a joke or two to Sister
Barfuss about contracting the Haunta Virus. I think it scared her a
couple days later when she caught a cold. hahahaha. But no worries.
She's fine now. :)

We also had an awesome opportunity to help in the community this
weekend. We got a call on Friday night to come and be part of a huge
project of painting the ground at the playground of the Elementary
School on Saturday. There were probably around 100 people there.
They designed a HUGE program that involves tons of learning activities
and Physical Education programs that are all painted on the ground.
It looks really cool. There's a map of the US that's 20 feet long, a
solar system that's to scale, and literally 80 other games and
learning tools that we helped chalk out and then paint onto the
blacktop. It was AWESOME! The pictures are going to be so cool when
it's done! And we got to talk to a lot of the moms and other people
in the community, who were really surprised to see us there in pants,
willing to help in a school where we don't have any kids, in a town
where we won't live for longer than six months. We made some really
great contacts and built some major community trust! It was awesome.
Of course, Sister Barfuss and I are really sunburned today, and super
sore from getting up and down off the pavement, and my knees are so
sore from crawling around on the asphalt! But it was WAY worth it.
Especially when we stopped by on Sunday after church (they didn't
finish it on Saturday) to see how it was going and nearly everyone
recognized us and were excited to see us and show us how it was
turning out. It was so cool. I can't wait to get some pictures, so I
can send them and you can see what I'm talking about. :)

In lessons this week, we had some great breakthroughs with a few of
our investigators. First off, we met with Leslie again this week.
She had gone over the weekend last week to see a good friend of hers
who is dying named Dru. Well Dru is LDS, and used to be a member of
the Colusa branch. Leslie has known Dru for 30 years, and Dru
actually gave her a Book of Mormon a long time ago. Well, Dru, in her
parting words told Leslie that Leslie's already a Mormon, she just
won't admit it. It's crazy how much that's affected Leslie's
perspective, because now she's thinking about what life could be like
for her as a mormon. And she's changing faster now that she was
before. Which is cool.

Also, Diana, our fastest progressing investigator completed all the
lessons this week. We had her baptismal interview yesterday, and
she's getting baptized on Saturday!!! Hooray!!! We're so excited we
can hardly stand it. :) I'll be sure to send pictures next week. :)

That's pretty much it from Colusa this week. I'm excited to hear from
all of you, and I appreciate all of your love and support and your
prayers. I know that I couldn't be doing this without all of you, and
I'm so grateful to you. :)

Love, Sister Reid