Thanksgiving and

12/3/2013

For thanksgiving we dressed in coordinating fall colors!

The best thing about 5 sisters living in 1 apartment complex is 5 closets to pull from. No one shown in this picture is wearing clothes that actually belong to them.

 I love these girls so much. I really lucked out big time by getting to have them as companions. We have so much fun and laugh nonstop which means that we don't pause long enough to let the craziness of what we're doing stress us out. We found out today there's a 4th sister who's been called and is coming Cambodian speaking in the end of March/beginning of April. At which point we'll finally be two separate companionships! Hopefully by then we'll have some sort of branch or at least a group to work with. Right now we're not assigned to any ward, so we just try to get all the inactives and investigators to come to the wards which are in there areas, and then pick which ward we want to go to each Sunday. But we don't have a bishop to work under or a ward mission leader or ward missionaries to work with. So we're just pioneering it and hoping eventually we'll get enough people to church in their respective wards that it'll legitimize a need for a single group that all the Cambodians go to. After all, we cover all the wards in the mission but we can only translate in one meeting at a time! 

The work is slow moving. We're getting dropped a lot (the term for investigators deciding they no longer want to meet with us and instead pretending they're not home). Also we spend a lot of time just trying to find out where the inactive members live now because most have moved at least 2x in the last 8 years and very few have kept in contact with each other. A huge problem we're finding is that many of these inactives didn't understand the gospel when they were baptized back in '82. They weren't really taught, at least not very well, and so they got baptized to thank the members of the church who helped them make a life here when they moved from Cambodia. But they think that Buddha and Jesus are the same, and that it doesn't matter which path we follow because true happiness comes from having a lot of money. This is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. I don't know who the missionaries were who served here in '82, but we seem to be doing a lot of clean-up from instatisms (instant baptisms, without teaching lessons first) they performed.

I've been in the WA-TAC 27 weeks, and the church is true here too!

-Sister McQuivey (the tall one in the picture)