Hello from the Big City!
I love Fort Worth! There are so many people here. It is so wonderful to meet so many different people. We are going to be able to contact so many people every day. It is so wonderful to be surrounded by people instead of cows and goats. :D
In addition to there being so many people here, there are also so many hispanics. As spanish missionaries we are really good at picking out which houses are hispanic. You can just look at many houses and know if the people who live there are spanish or not. In all of my other areas, there would only be 1 or 2 spanish houses in a street. Here there are some areas where all of the houses are spanish, with only one or two english houses. And even the neighborhoods that are slightly less hispanic, still have many more spanish people than in Denton or Stephenville. Stephenville may be God's country, but Fort Worth is the land of the righteous saints. :D
My new companion is Hermana Gomez, and she is super amazing. She is already super good at spanish and she is a really great missionary. We teach together really well. Hermana Gomez is from Toole (sounds like tawilla, but I can't remember how to spell it). She is 19. She went to BYU for a year and is majoring in BioChemistry. She loves Harry Potter, has run a marathon and loves the gospel. I am so excited to serve with her.
Our area here is gigantic. (Well, geographically Stephenville and Denton and Waco were far bigger, but we really only worked within city limits) We cover everything south of the 820 loop and west of the 35W, more or less. I am pretty sure that Stephenville was only the size of 2 of the grids on our map, and Dublin was probably only half a grid. I think that the civilized part of my area is 20 to 30 times bigger than Stephenville is. Sometimes, I say things, and I feel like such a country bumpkin. Like Fort Worth is my first area where sidewalks have been invented. Or being excited to see a Valero, or when I told my companion that I wanted to rope during our morning exercise sometimes.
There are so many people here to find, teach and baptize. I am so excited. And the ward is so big! There are so many families. I don't know how I am going to get to know everyone and keep them all straight. And we don't even have a ward list right now, because the zone leaders are currently working on fixing the ward list. But I love this ward. Everyone here is so nice and friendly. Really it is going to be amazing to serve here. This spanish ward is far bigger than Stephenville both english and spanish. There is so much work to do.
There are 4 companionships in this ward. 2 elders and 2 hermanas. One set of elders have a visa waiter, and the other hermanas have a visa waiter as well. (They are both waiting for their visa to come so that they can come to Peru, but until then they get to serve in Fort Worth!!!
I am starting to get to know our investigators. There is the Sanchez family, which makes me really happy because we share the same name. They are catholic but they want to know if the Book of Mormon is true. And then there is Yolanda. She is the sweetest abuelita (grandma) ever. She came to church this sunday, and we are really excited for her. There are a lot more, but I haven't really gotten to know them yet.
I think that the one of the best parts of serving here is that we work only in houses and neighborhoods. I asked my companion if she had ever gone tracting in a trailer park and she said no. She doesn't even know if there are any trailer parks in our area. I remember working in Denton and trying so hard to find investigators who lived in houses and no having much success. And in Stephenville we would work so hard just to find anyone who spoke spanish, regardless of where they lived. (Don't get me wrong the gospel is for everyone, and I have no problem teaching people who live in trailers, but I have found that generally families who live in a trailer park or an apartment complex will make commitments easy, but they will never remember to keep them, whereas families that live in houses are a little bit more hesitant to make commitments, but once they have made a commitment, they are far more likely to keep it. This truly is a golden area, with all of the spanish people living in houses.
We taught primary on Sunday, which was more or less a disaster. But at least the children didn't kill each other. On the fifth sundays, they have a special combined class for all of the adults, so they got the missionaries to teach the other classes. Both of the hermanas taught Primary. The elders taught Young Women.
Estoy super emocionada para servir aqui!
Nos vemos,
Hermana Julie Anna Sanchez
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