6 Months!

Hello everyone!

So everyone keeps asking me about New Years Eve, so I'll clear up that confusion. We're having a party til midnight!! :) Just kidding, it's actually a lot sadder than that. We have to be in by 6:30 to do weekly planning. I can't really complain about having to do things on New Years though cuz we did nothing on Christmas. Well I guess I did stuff. I spent an hour opening presents because for some reason Sister Gali and I got a ridiculously large amount of gifts and packages. And I watched Mulan. And Lion King (which, by the way, is a quite sketchy movie. What the heck Disney?! It does relate somehow to missionary work though. Some of the elders made commentary the entire movie relating it to missionary work). Anyway I watched Meet the Robinsons too. And most of Santa Clause 3 (we had to turn it off at 10:30). I also got to Skype which was pretty awesome! Especially doing Elf Christmas grams with Becca :) I did do a real Christmas gram this week too which was excellent with my superb tone deaf singing skills. Oh and if you picture a medium sized UPS box completely overflowing with candy, that's how much candy I got this last week -_- if any of you send me any more candy y'all better be paying for my dental work for the next 10 years. Lovin' the treats though!

Really not much else happened besides Christmas. It was a really slow week. Like insanely slow. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that we spent a whole day in the rich part of our area that we hardly ever go to.

Well this week we have interviews with president Chesnut so I find out this week what my release date is for my mission. We also found out that we have the mission tour with Elder Robbin in a couple weeks! I'm excited for that! Personally I think they should just keep the trend going and have a general authority come speak to us every month or every other month at least. 

I'm attaching a picture from our zone white elephant gift exchange! Those are all the missionaries in my zone! :) I got A TON of candy. Christmas was so fun! The second picture is me with all the sisters in my zone and the Wanlasses. We all had breakfast together!

Sorry there's not a lot in this letter but I literally just spoke to some of you 3 days ago. More adventures next week!

Love and miss you all :)

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

P.S. Yes Nevada had earthquakes this last week. Yes I sleep on the top bunk and it rocked back and forth like crazy. Yes I have now slept through 3 earthquakes and an anti-Mormon mob (no worries, people in Nevada aren't that crazy, it was just on trek). It did manage to freak out Sister Gali quite a bit though, mainly because she thought I was going to fall out of bed.

P.P.S I will forever have the hugest scar ever on my leg from shaving. Yay me!

Yay Christmas Parties!!

This week was a great week! It started off kinda slow but got better as it went on.
On Wednesday we had a lesson with our Mandarin speaking investigator. This was the first time that I've been here to teach him since the church tour because we've been on exchanges and such. This lesson we discussed the Plan of Salvation and we gave him a Mandarin Plan of Salvation pamphlet. So that lesson essentially consisted of him reading an entire page of the pamphlet in Mandarin and then Sister Gali and I making comments that Hayley, our amazing return missionary from Taiwan, would translate for him. They would then talk back and forth in Mandarin and she would tell us what all he said. It was definitely the most interesting lesson I've taught! And I'm basically quadrilingual now that I've been to lessons in English, Spanish, Samoan, and Mandarin.

On Thursday we had the mission Christmas party for the west side of the mission. It was so much fun! This is the most missionaries I've seen together since the MTC. For the first hour or so we just all hung out and played games and caught up with all of the missionaries that we haven't seen in a while. I got to see my district leader from my first transfer and Sister Paul and a bunch of other missionaries I served with on the east side. Then we all walked over and went to the institute and had pizza and cake and hung out some more. I also watched Ephraim's Rescue, which I had never seen before. We also got Christmas cards from the First Presidency and a $10 Walmart gift card from the mission for Christmas presents :) I'm attaching a picture of my zone at the party.

That night we met with one of our investigators and he's awesome! He's preparing to be baptized on January 9th so we're super excited for that! His wife is a member so they've been studying the Gospel Principles book and a bunch of other stuff between visits.

The next day we had the ward Christmas party! It was so good! We had 4 investigators that we're teaching that came and a couple of them brought their families. We also had a few other members that we're teaching that we haven't seen at church in a long time that came to the party. It was great to see everyone there and it was amazing to see the ward reach out and fellowship all the new people. We would just walk up to members and point to someone and say they were new and they'd go over and talk to them. I couldn't have asked for a better ward that night!

Yesterday in sacrament meeting we had no speakers and we sang Christmas songs the entire time. Well, I guess Bishop got up at the end and spoke for a minute but other than that no one spoke. Our primary is a little smaller than the one in Plainfield. We had about 15 or so kids that went up. We're trying to find more boys because out of the 15 there were only 4 boys. It was still great to hear the kids sing though!

Talk to a lot of you on Friday! Love you all! Merry Christmas!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

P.S. There's a lot of crazy stuff happening in the world and I guess Plainfield especially. Things are crazy. But Helaman 5:12 resolves essentially resolves every life problem...so Merry Christmas :D

4 transfers down!

Hello everyone! I am getting transferred..in the future! I'll be in Mt. Rose ward for the next 7 weeks. I love this ward, so I'm pretty excited about that :) It's weird though..this transfer and next transfer will be 7 weeks each. It'll feel really long after having a 5 week transfer.

This week we got a text from a girl in our ward (she's probably in her 20s or so?). She told us she and her boyfriend had some news and asked if we could come see them that night. So we went, unsure of what the news would be but excited. We got there and she and her boyfriend announced that they were married! They also told us that he wanted to be baptized. So we've met with him about 4 times since Monday when they told us the news. He's planning to be baptized on December 26th!

We had exchanges again this week so I was companions with Sister Hingano again for a day! And I went to In n Out for the first time so that was pretty good! Her new companion this next transfer is Sister Anderson, who was one of my roommates in the MTC, so that's pretty cool!

Last night we went to a Christmas Singalong with the stake and it was so fun! It lasted about an hour and a half and it alternated between different ward choirs singing and all of us singing. We sang in Spanish too with the Spanish branch so that was awesome! The Spirit was so strong throughout the evening and it was a really fun way to end the transfer!

Sorry my emails pretty short this week but not a lot happened! I'll try to get some pictures to yall soon!

Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

Hola!

So this is gonna be a little short...In my defense it has been 5 days since I emailed all of you and your emails to me were super short as well.

I've gotten pretty good at Slaughterball. It's basically every man for yourself dodgeball with one ball. I just kinda stay in the background and not very many people throw it at me. When they do I somehow magically catch it almost every time. It's pretty fun! Anyway now that I got the important news out of the way...haha

We got 6 new investigators this week...? That never happens. So that was pretty cool! One of them is super solid and we taught him the restoration and we'll be seeing him again this week!

Miracle pf the week! This girl from the Mt. Rose ward (the ward I serve in) came home from her mission this week. In Taiwan. So she knows Mandarin. She's definitely going to help us a ton with Li, our new Mandarin speaking investigator! 

It happened. I overdosed on pizza this week. You all probably never thought that I would say that. I had pizza for lunch on Wednesday, dinner on Thursday, leftovers for breakfast on Friday, lunch on Friday, and dinner on Saturday. I think I may have gotten tired mostly due to the fact that only one of those times was Papa John's and one of those times was cold pizza. Update: cold pizza is still gross. Anyway, I took a break from pizza on Sunday so I may have pizza for lunch today.

In other news, Sister Gali accidentally introduced herself as me the other day. It was super funny. I introduced myself and then she says "Hi, I'm Sister Goot- Gali." And then she looked at me and I had to try so hard not to start laughing.

I'm not sure what time I Skype on Christmas. All I know is that I'm Skyping and that I get an hour. And that we can watch a G rated movie. And I learned that Elf is not rated G so my life is sad. So send me some suggestions for good G rated Christmas movies!

I don't really have any pictures to send this week...but if you look at nevadarenomission.com you can find some pictures that you may not have seen! If you just look at the pictures that the Reno zone are in, you'll find pictures of me with the missionaries I serve with.

I love and miss you all! I hope you all are as excited for Christmas as I am!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)

December!

Hello! This is a really weird week and it's all because my P-day is not on Monday. It really does throw off the whole week. What's going to be really weird is having P-day 5 days from now. Sorry, that's going to be a short letter!

Well I should start off with the most important. They've switched my mission language and I am now a Mandarin speaking missionary. Just kidding but we did find a Mandarin speaking investigator last week that seems interested. We got him some Mandarin pamphlets and everything. Now our job is to find someone that understands Mandarin because he knows a little English but it's still a struggle. We think we found someone to help us though :)

Thanksgiving was great! After our studies we had breakfast at our house with all of the missionaries! Sister Wanlass fed all of us pancakes and bacon and cinnamon rolls and fruit and it was delicious! Then we all went to the park next to our stake center and played football. Outside. In the snow. And I'm basically the Colts' next wide receiver cuz I scored a touchdown. Just kidding, I'm not good enough for the Colts. Maybe the Patriots. Just kidding. No worries guys, I still hate the Patriots

Welp it happened. I had to give a talk this Sunday. We were out walking and contacting people on Saturday when we got a call asking me to give a 5 minute talk the next day. I talked about the faith to be healed and the faith to heal. Being a missionary and all I flipped it so that it was a lot about having the faith to be healed spiritually. Ironically, that night and the next couple days I was sick. Yay colds! Luckily I'm a lot better now. The other good news is that I didn't have to give a talk at the mission tour because that was in front of a general authority!

The mission tour was pretty great! We had some really good trainings from the assistants to the president and the Chesnuts and the Snows. I learned a lot about working with ward members, the importance of companionship unity, and how to have more meaningful prayers. My favorite quotes from the mission tour are:

1. You're a lot better than you think you are but you're not as good as you could be - Pres. Hinckley

2. For every door you knock on, someone's baptized in Mexico.

They're basically both doctrine haha. There was also a big emphasis on writing in your journal...maybe I should do that more  I really wish we could do mission tours more often! most people maybe get one on their mission though :( oh wait...we got some amazing news in our district meeting the other day. Another general authority is doing a mission tour here! He's coming in January! I can't remember which general authority it was though. I think it was Lynn G. Robbins but I'm not entirely sure.

There's this recent convert named Kristina that is amazing! She has really turned her life around since she learned about the church and there are some pretty obvious results! A year ago she only had custody of one of her five kids. This week she got another two of her kids and they are adorable! It's really amazing to see how the gospel and especially the Atonement can really bless families.

Also, Sister Wanlass is amazing. She's doing this countdown to Christmas thing where every day she gives us a scripture and it leads us to a present that she's hidden throughout the house. She gave us super cute "from the sister missionaries" note cards and other cool stuff.

Hope you all have a great week! Love and miss you all!

Sister Ashley Gootee :)