November 23, 2009

Hello my family!!!!
Happy thanksgiving!!! time is going by sooo fast, I went to the huge market today with several sisters and picked fabric to have mongolian clothes made, really exciting, all the missionaries wear mongolian traditional clothes for Christmas. The holidays are coming so fast!! have fun at the cabin, if I could choose anyplace to have thanksgiving, (other than mongolia of course;) it would be at the cabin with you all. say hi to the family for me!!
Things are good here, I have a new companion again, a way sweet 19 year old girl. She can be with me for 4 weeks which will be really nice :) she joined the church 8 months ago with her whole family, and is a great missionary!! It is really fun to teach with her :) she is from a branch close to ours and work is going good! We have enough investigators to keep us busy and are finding a few more each week. I really am sooooo happy to be in a mission where we get to teach so much. The grandma and grandpa are still going strong, we told them the church is still closed, but then they told us that they went anyways just in case and knocked on the closed door. They are amazing! We will try and take them to a member's house next week. We are still doing sacraments in member's homes and it is a really neat experience. The young men in the ward prepare and pass the sacrament, very cool :) I have never realized how incredibly important the sacrament is! and I have been amazed by children again this week, two 8 year olds understood everything we taught so easily and clearly, I think the veil is thinner for them and the spirit touches their hearts really easily. I am really happy because these children can help their families which are also investigating this church. We were cutting wood for someone this week and as I was sitting on a log to hold it still it really hit me how cool it is to be sitting in mongolia, sawing wood with mongolian elders outside a mongolian ger, and looking at snow covered mountains and a little 2 yr old mongolian kid bundled up in hot pink clothes to the point where she could barely walk. (sooo cute!). I really feel blessed and have a lot to be grateful for this thanksgiving. :) and add the best family in the world, and I truly am one of the luckiest people alive ;)
It has been cold, it warmed up to 20 degrees a few times this week, it is amazing how warm 20 degrees feels after -20. Life gets really hard for people here in the winter, wood gets expensive and people need it constantly, many people don't have houses and will live in the man holes, and drunk people pass out and freeze before morning. We were walking one night and found a man fallen by a fence in the dark, he had been drinking, we were able to wake him up and after wandering for a while he was able to remember where his house was, and we helped him in. it is scary, a few hours and he would be dead, temperatures below 0 are hard. Alcohol becomes even more dangerous in the winter here. (he was a really cool man by the way! studied in russia and was a lawyer there for years, he showed us his degree and pictures once we made it home. we even sang some mongolian national songs together ;)
We are celebrating thanksgiving together this Thursday at the mission home, should be fun! :) I will keep you posted on our investigators, I hope we can see some baptisms before these 4 weeks with my companion are up! love you all sooooo much, things are well, and have fun with the family!! sister mansfield