5 Months!

Heyyy, I have five months in the mission today. Time is going by so fast.

We have been teaching a lot and having a lot of activities. We have had three cosechas in the past two weeks. Usually our branch has like 20 people, but yesterday we had 56!!!!   A RECORD.  It was so great.  We also sang in the meeting.   Hermana Pereira and I are doing good.  We will have a baptism on the 30th with a joven, Joselito. He is very prepared for it. 

Not much has happened. I'm doing good, working hard. Traveling to lots of meetings and stuff. They give out Halls cough drops like candy here. It's very weird.   I used to not like them, but now I do. 

I ate Chicharon this week, and EWWW. It's basically chunks of pig with the fat and skin deep fried. (with the hair still on it). It was not good. 

I don't really have more to say.  The weeks are going by so fast that it has all blurred together. I was able to download a few pictures but most of them are on my other card and I didn't want to bring it with me today since we are 3 hours away from home and risk it getting stolen.  I am hoping to download them next week!

Love you guys!

Have a good week!

Hermana Shepherd

Me and Hermana Pereira

Lots of big bugs here.

It's not uncommon to see maggots here, they don't even bother me anymore.

Another week in Monte Plata

Hola!   This week was good. I had intercombios (exchanges) in Bayaguana with Hermana Taylor. Holy cow she is so fun. I love intercombios.  They help me see how other people teach and improve myself. 

We had a mini cosecha (harvest) yesterday. I went on intercombio with the Relief Society President.   She showed me where a bunch of less actives live and we were able to teach three lessons together. We had 20 people in church yesterday which is the average here. We are working really hard to reactivate people. 

We have no money!!!  We have to travel a lot to the other cities for meetings and such and we recently ran out of money, and we have to make it to Hainamosa on Thursday which is about 300 pesos. Yesterday, I made some homemade pancakes with some flour and coconut milk. They tasted like donuts. 

We are teaching a sister here, her name is Yuli. Her daughter died one month ago today. She was hit by a car. Very sad and very hard. 

We had to come in early a lot this week because the power was out and it was too dark. There are a lot of politics here which can get dangerous. We are very careful and very safe. 

love you all!!

Hermana Shepherd

I am working on getting pictures to upload with this computer so hopefully I can post some next week :)

Transfer #4

I am now in Monte Plata with Hermana Pereira, She is from Brazil and does not speak any English, so that's challenging. This area is huge and we have a lot of work to do. We had like no lessons this week because we had meetings and General Conference.

By the way, General Conference was amazing!   I got to watch it in English which is way cool. I wish every week was General Conference week. I love hearing from the apostles and having my testimony strengthened.  My favorite talk was by Elder Duncan (I think that is what his name was). I am going to print it out the first chance I get.

It is very, very hot in the DR and it will get hotter. woohoo...  We are so  far out in the country it takes like three hours in a guagua (bus) to get to our zone meeting. which is like 330 pesos total, which isn't much, but we dont get very much money.   There is a small branch here (like 20 people) so we are mostly working with the  inactive members trying to reactivate them.

I am doing great in the mission and receiving a lot of much needed strength from the Lord. I went to take a short nap earlier today and I was out for two hours. yayy!!!

Love you guys, hope all is going great.

Ps. I would love to get  letters in the mail from everyone so I can read them during the week to help build me up on those hard days.  Thanks!  My address is the same as it shows on the side of the blog.

Hermana Shepherd

Note from mom - the computer that is available for emailing on P-day will not let her upload her pictures so hopefully they can get it figured out so she can send some pics.  I attached a few of the area that I have found online just to give everyone and idea of where she is serving.

The yellow area is Monte Plata.