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.

Happy Easter

So many things.   I am being transferred to Monte Plata.  It is about an hour north or inland of where I an now.   I don't know to much about it but I hear its very Campo (country). So I am guessing it is small in and the country.
 I am excited to get to the area with my new companion.  She is from Brazil. I've talked to her a few times before, she is very sweet.

I am so excited to go to my first new area. It only took me an hour to pack all of my stuff. 

This past week I was reading in "Jesus The Christ".   I read each part for his crucifixion and restoration on the days that they happened. It was very uplifting and testimony building,  I don't have time to explain it all you so you all need to go read it, but Jesus literally died of a broken heart. How amazing. I love this book so much.

I love the mission so much I am so excited for this new adventure!

I hope you all have a good week! I will put up some pictures next week.

Love,

Hermana Shepherd

Semana Santa

Hola,

So this week is Semana Santa, It's the week of Easter and they celebrate the whole week. From what I hear it's just a big party week with lots of drinking, so well see how it goes. 

This week was good.  It went by so fast again. Oh,  I hit my fourth month this week so that was crazy. It's all going by so fast. 

We had a Noche Blanca last night so all the people that were to be baptized in the stake got baptized. It was so amazing. We had an investagator for this date, but she fell through. She should be getting baptized very soon.

This is the last week before transfers, so I will figure out on Monday where I am going or if i am staying in Mendoza. I hope I stay here with Hermana Stoker. She is so great and weve got some really good people here. 

It seems that everyone here is getting sick, so I hope I don't get it too. One of the missionaries had a really bad fever and passed out while walking. He is better now. So far I feel great but my companion has a really bad sore throat. Nothing we can't handle. 

We went to the temple with some of our investagators on Saturday. It was so good. We had a member come with us that is preparing to go through for herself so she was able to get more information.

Overall, this week was great.   I put some pictures on dropbox of us at the temple, and one of the ocean.  It is so beautiful here. 

Love you all,

Hermana Shepherd

Me and Hermana Stoker at the temple.

Such a beautiful and peaceful place.

The ocean.  I live in paradise.

Four Months

This week I will hit four months in the mission, HOLY COW!

This last week went by so fast, I dont even know what happened. We are teaching so many people that we don't really have time for all of our appointments. I can see myself getting better and better at talking by the spirit and knowing what to say and when to say it.

My Spanish is coming along quite well.  I can say basically whatever I need.. I might have to talk around it because I dont know the vocab but I can say a lot!

We are teaching an investagator and she knows it all and has read so much and does everything but she wants to wait to be baptized. AHHH!  Also, this week we had to drop a lot of people because they were not progressing enough.  That was really sad. One is the cutest family that I have ever seen, but they just refuse to get married. 

We went to Los Tres Ojos today!  It is a series of freshwater lagoons amid 50-foot tall limestone caves.   Wow, it was so pretty!  We met some kids from Harvard there so that was neat. One of the sisters asked them to take a picture of us in Spanish and they looked horrified becasue they had no idea what we said. 

The cat calls this last week were not fun. We got a lot. We should have counted how many. 

It has been a little cold here from the iceburg thing, but today was so hot. I have been sweating  all day

Overall, a really good week in the DR

I miss you all! I hope you have a wonderful week!

Love,

Hermana Shepherd

Templeee!

AHH this week was crazy!

We went to the temple on Wednesday. Wow, it was so pretty.

We got a new member in our companionship so we were in a trio for a couple of days. Her name was Hermana Lluberes. She is a mini missionary from the DR. She was only with us for a couple days, but she had to go home because she got really sick. We miss her a lot and its weird not being in trio now. 

This week was good. in general, I learned a lot. This has probably been my favorite week in the mission.

We have a lot of people getting ready for baptism and we don't really have enough time in the day to teach all of them. We are working so hard. 

I love the mission. Every second of it. It is so hard physically and mentally but it is so rewarding. 

Sorry I don't have pictures this week. I took a lot but I left my camera at the house on accident.   So sorry!  

Next week I will post some

Love you all and miss you bunches!

Hermana Shepherd