3rd transfer?!

Hello everyone! Can you all believe that I just finished my second transfer?! Craziness!

This week was not nearly as crazy as last week. My week started with a super fun Zone Activity last Monday! We all went to the park and hung out and played sports and talked. It was so much fun to see everyone! I've been in Elko for the last couple weeks in a trio and it was great to see my district in Spring Creek and get to talk to them!

Tuesday and Wednesday were a lot of driving. And I mean a lot. My trio is me, Sister Hingano, and Sister Doyle, and Sister Hingano is the Sister Training Leader for this area. That means that they do exchanges pretty much every week with the different sisters in the area. So we drove halfway to Ely, which was about an hour and a half to 2 hour drive or so, to meet the sisters serving there. I got a good nap in both days and I also got a lot of planning and organizing done for my area!

It was super great because the sister that came to Elko on exchanges was Sister Paul :) She was my companion in the MTC, so it was great to see her and talk to her and catch up on things! She's so awesome. And she's going to be training this transfer!

Thursday was a lot of splits. I went out with a few sisters from the ward and we got so much done! We did a church tour with a couple of investigators we had and it was the first church tour that I'd ever done! It was a little weird because I didn't have a companion with me, but the Hadleys (who I went on splits with) helped out a ton :)

We got so much done on Friday too thanks to all of the sisters that offered to come on splits with me! It was crazy because pretty much everyone we tried was home. Definitely a blessing! And that night we went to the ward's Pie and Ice Cream Social, and I am totally good with free pie and ice cream :)

Sunday was great! The Elko sisters are in charge of 2 wards, so I got to take the sacrament twice! We also went to late night sacrament, which is sacrament meeting for those who can't come because they work in the mines. Not many people came, but it was great to feel the Spirit so strongly in such a small group as I took the sacrament for the third time that day.

Thursday was a little crazy too. We got a call from President Chesnut in the middle of the day, which is kinda weird. It turned out that Sister Doyle's visa had come in so she could go to Brazil! The super crazy thing is that she had to fly out at 6:30 this morning, so she had to be packed and heading to Reno on Sunday night. It was so sad to see her go :( she'll do great though!

Speaking of Reno, I'm being transferred there! Surprise! My new companion will be Sister Johnson, who came out with me :) I don't really know her but she seems super nice! Also, I've heard that the temple is either in or really close to my area. So I'm pretty pumped about that! That'll definitely make up for the culture shock from leaving Spring Creek, which is about 1/40 the size of Reno :D

My new address is 4350 Acadia Way, Reno, NV 89502. The crazy thing is that even though it's farther from home, I'll get mail faster than when you sent it to Spring Creek :) Also, thanks so much Grandma for the gift cards! :) We were super excited that we got to order some pizza on Saturday and have a mini fiesta for Sister Doyle :)

Our district leader will be taking over 2nd ward in addition to 4th ward. As of Wednesday, Spring Creek 2nd ward will have elders. It'll be a change but hopefully it'll be a good change!

I'll definitely miss Spring Creek. It's been a huge change from what I'm used to, but I survived living in a small town with not even a Walmart for 3 months :) The ward here is super amazing and I am going to miss all of the people so much. I'm so grateful for the Baileys for letting us live in their beautiful home and for the Hadleys for being the best ward mission leaders ever. I'll definitely miss my district and zone, who are some of the coolest missionaries ever :) I'll especially miss Sister Hingano, who's been a great companion for these last two weeks :)

Wish me luck in Reno! :)

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

Almost another transfer

Wow this was a pretty crazy week! Lots of things happened!

I'll just start with the biggest thing. I ate spaghetti this week. No worries, I still hate spaghetti. Oh wait, I guess that's not really important...

Well I'm in Elko now! Lots of crazy stuff happened last week and Sister Torres got sent home for health problems. That was really hard. I found out on Tuesday that she was going home and then she left shortly after and I didn't really get the chance to talk to her a ton. I miss her so much because we got along so well and we had a lot of fun but I know she's getting the help she needs.

Anyway, it has been an adventure being in Elko! Sister Doyle and Hingano are awesome and it's definitely an experience being in a trio! There are some interesting people here in Elko...But the really cool thing is that I've gotten to use Spanish 3 or 4 times and before this week I had never used Spanish on my mission! So that's been awesome!

Members bought us pizza this week too and that was an amazing miracle. Another member bought us Dairy Queen and got each of us a dilly bar and a blizzard. It was so delicious!

The members in Spring Creek are awesome. The three of us have to cover 3 different wards now and it's been a little bit of a struggle. I sent out a mass text asking for sisters to come out with me and go to lessons or go tracting and almost 20 sisters responded saying that they could! The sisters in Spring Creek 2nd are really the ones that are going to keep the work moving!

Well not much else is going on here. Sorry my letter is so short! I hope you all had a great week!

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

Hello!

Hello all!

This week was a pretty great week. We've been out knocking on lots of doors and have been finding quite a few people to teach! Well, not every time we knock on the door is a great experience. I've learned a lot about what different drugs smell like so that's been an interesting experience! 

I've clearly been teaching Sister Torres a lot. When people ask us what we want for dinners and such she's been requesting burgers! It's been a great change :) Considering she was vegan before her mission, I'm going to consider this the biggest accomplishment of my life. We've had steak a couple times in the last couple weeks and I've learned that steak is really good! Also, our ward mission leader, Brother Hadley, is pretty awesome. He got our dinner calendar filled for the whole month! We're pretty excited about that :)

The other day we were teaching a lesson on an awesome member's porch. Sister Torres was talking when suddenly she started freaking out. She then pointed out to us this spider web. Apparently she had flicked a fly right into a spider web and she was watching the spider jump on the bug and wrap it in a web. We're both a little ADD when it comes to seeing things like that...

The other day I realized again how every lesson in Relief Society can lead back to a discussion on marriage. Our lesson on helping the elderly was really just a lesson on marriage in disguise...Can I go back to nursery yet?

Spring Creek has been growing on me more and more. I'm not saying that I could ever live in such a small town, but the people here are definitely awesome! Members come with us to most of the lessons we have and it's been great seeing people begin to feel the excitement of missionary work. The people that aren't interested 99% of the time are still nice and will have a conversation with us. As we've been working hard all day long we have seen so many miracles throughout the week. Here are some that I wrote down in my planner (we write them down every night):

Miracle from last Monday: We finally got to meet with a less active family that we've been trying to contact!

Miracle from Tuesday: We had a delicious lunch at Costa Vida and then we got to meet with an investigator that we haven't gotten to meet with in a while!

Miracle from Wednesday: We had dinner with this amazing member! She's pretty awesome, she's like my 4th or 5th grandma or something :) She has an amazing testimony he is getting ready to go on her mission to the Family History Center

Miracle from Thursday: We got a text out of nowhere from someone that we didn't know asking us if they could give us information so that their daughter could start going to Young Women

Miracle from Friday: We've been teaching this awesome 7 year old named Daisy. Her family is super active in the church and they came to us and asked if we could teach her in preparation for baptism. It's been helping us a ton because we're teaching an 8 year old whose family is less active and we've really been learning how to teach simply. We had dinner with Daisy's family last week and it was great! Afterward Daisy tried to repay us each for teaching her by giving us each a dollar. She was adamant that we should take the money but we finally convinced her to keep it and just color us a picture or something instead. Daisy is super awesome!

Miracle from Saturday: We had some delicious burgers for dinner and we also got a new investigator (kind of).

Miracle from Sunday: We had investigators and less actives that came to church! In case you were wondering, not much can make a missionary happier. We also had an amazing lesson that night with an awesome family! They're interested in learning more and they're feeding us next Sunday!

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

It's September!

Hello all! Happy labor day!

For those of you wondering, labor day is just like any other P-day. I mean we could go do something but that's a lot of effort and all...

Anyway, some great things happened this week. First off, last Monday I was in Little Khoury's (the only grocery store within 15 minutes or so of where I live) and as I was checking out the lady in front of us insisted on paying for me. It was such a miracle! Last Monday was the last day of the month and we don't get more funds until the 1st of the month. So I was down to no money and was going to have to use personal funds but she paid for me! Such a miracle :)

We also had Zone Conference this week! Zone Conference consists of car inspections starting at 8 and then meetings from 9 until 4. We had training from President and Sister Chesnut, the assistants to the president, and our zone leaders, and then the stake relief society fed us! It was an awesome day! I learned so much on how I can better develop Christlike attributes as I set goals and study up on the attributes in Preach My Gospel. We also talked a lot about the Atonement! Man the Spirit was so strong in all of our meetings that day!

On Sunday we taught sharing time in primary again. We taught about keeping the commandments this time so we played Simon Says and we related it to following the prophet. We added a twist to it so that there was someone representing the adversary and they were trying to convince you to not do what Simon Says and to follow them instead. It was a pretty fun lesson! The kids in this ward are so fun :)

We were out walking and walking a lot this week. We contacted quite a few people though! We have 600 people on our directory and we're trying to contact all of them as soon as possible! What we've learned is that there are really only around 300 people in our ward though because a lot of people haven't moved their records out of the ward with them. Luckily most people in Spring Creek are pretty nice so not many people are rude to us! :)

I learned a lot this week about the Atonement, shark and dolphin safety, Christlike attributes, and the differences and dangers of crocodiles and alligators. I guess I should explain...Sister Torres is from Florida so she knows quite a bit about such things mentioned previously. I said something about how you're safe if there are dolphins around when you're in the ocean. Note to all, apparently it's more dangerous if there are dolphins around. So that's something we land-locked peoples need to learn I guess! She also explained to me the difference between alligators and crocodiles. She said gators are completely safe and compared them to being like puppies and that they're nice as long as they're not starving. Crocs are terrifying though. It's good to know cuz there are so many crocs and gators in Nevada and all ;) Anyway, after that brief squirrel moment, we had some awesome training at Zone Conference about the Atonement. Really that was the focus of the day. We talked about how as we apply the Atonement in our life, we will have a greater desire to share the gospel with others. When we were talking about Christlike attributes, we got to listen to some great talks. They were great because I didn't have to share mine :) One of them was on hope and she talked about how when we say "I hope this happens" we're really saying "I expect this to happen." She talked about how great things will happen when we expect great things to happen. I also learned that Alma's pretty cool and that getting sick is definitely not fun. I was sick a couple days this week but no worries, I'm good now :)

Also, if you ever need advice for sending packages, my mom sends the best packages. Sorry, it's true. She sent me barbecue sauce, cash, Mountain Dew, and some other stuffs and really what else do you need in life?

Looking forward to another great week! Apologies for the randomness of this letter.

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

Is this the Krusty Krab?

This week was a pretty slow week. Really the excitement all happened on Saturday. The ward ended up sending out search parties for us and people were driving around the neighborhoods we serve in looking for our car. The ward mission leader even called the hospital to see if we had shown up there. By the time we got out of our meeting with a less active member, we had 3 missed calls and a few texts. It turns out that there was a miscommunication and a member thought that we were supposed to be at her house 3 hours earlier. We made sure to let the ward know that we were still alive and working and thank them for their concern for us.

Sister Torres and I seriously laugh about everything. We are in the habit of quoting Spongebob or other TV shows/movies and it's pretty hilarious. It definitely makes weekly planning go a lot faster when you can laugh along the way.

Something I learned this week is that Hot Box is a restaurant that not very many people are familiar with. I knew there were other meanings for that name but I just assumed that everybody knew about Hot Box pizza.

Speaking of restaurants we had an amazing miracle this week because we got Subway! Well, that's not particularly a miracle because Subway isn't the greatest, but as we were walking in a couple members were walking out. They insisted on paying for us so we ended up getting free Subway! The members here are pretty awesome!

Speaking of food (I'm pretty sure that's all I talk about), I had an interesting experience the other day. We got a text and a member asked us if Sister Torres was allergic to crepes. I had never had them before so I read it as creeps. I don't think that I've ever had crepes before but they were pretty good. Well, after I realized they weren't called creeps and started pronouncing them correctly :)

We biked a lot this week. And when I say a lot I mean like in one day we went 6 miles or so.

Last night we had another mini adventure. We had a moth somehow get upstairs, which is our living area. No worries though, as I'm so great with bugs it was out of there in no time. It only took like 5-10 minutes and a couple screams to get it caught in a cup and taken outside. Also, Sister Torres was more terrified than me so I was on my own for that adventure.

We had a great day at church yesterday! We learned a lot about keeping the Sabbath Day holy and the importance of fasting. It was a pretty great Sacrament meeting! Relief Society was combined with Elders Quorum and it was great! The Relief Society, Elders Quorum, and High Priests leaders each got 15 minutes to teach a mini lesson. We had an amazing one on (you guessed it!) visiting and home teaching! I definitely know that Heavenly Father sent me to Spring Creek so that I could learn the importance of visiting teaching and actually do it when I get home from my mission!

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)