Howdy family and friends!! Another week (and a half) has come and gone! Times are changing. Another transfer is upon us. You will all be relieved to know that Sister Williams and I are staying in our area together. We are super excited to get the chance to keep working with our investigators. The exciting thing is that we are going to be getting a third missionary! A brand new missionary from the MTC! I get to be a trainer for the first time!
Now, in mission language, since I am going to be her trainer I will be her "mom" and she is my "daughter." So I'm going to be a mom tomorrow!! I'm super excited and nervous and all that good stuff. We met Sister Khaled last night - she got to come and have a slumber party with us right before she had to go right back to the mission home. She's spending all of today there doing training and stuff like that with President and his family. We didn't get much chance to talk because President finally let his two daughters come have a slumber party with us last night so it was quite the party and we were all pretty tired so we didn't stay up super late.
But, I can tell you that Sister Khaled is from Portugal and she's super pretty and seems really chill. She didn't seem nervous at all yesterday and seems ready to take on the world! Her English is really quite good considering she didn't really like it before her mission. This facilitated a lack of wanting to learn English but she's been in the MTC for nine weeks brushing up and she seems like she can do pretty well. The other good news is that she speaks Spanish so if she ever needs help with something in English, we should be able to work things out :) I'm super excited!! It's going to be a rocking good time. I don't know if I'm ready for another trio so fast, but ready or not, here it comes! I am very glad that Sister Williams and I will almost be co-training our new missionary. It will keep things hopping.
I love being a missionary! This week we've had a few pretty rad experiences. The most recent was yesterday. Sister Williams had a great idea last week for something we could do for Alex since she is so incredibly busy on the Romney campaign. She came up with an idea for a study journal. She doesn't have tons of time to read, but we thought it would be useful that she could write down what she learns so at least the little she does read, she remembers. She's also the kind of really smart person that likes to almost teach his/her self. So, we thought it would be a great tool. Well, we took it to her yesterday all decorated and with special notes in it from us. She seemed fairly happy when we surprised her with it but expressed that she was always SO bad at writing in a journal but has always wanted to start. We found out, secretly, from her friend that works there at her office that after we had finished telling her about general conference and gave her the journal, she was watching to/listening to talks online and furiously scribbling away in her new journal. Cool, eh?! We were SO stoked to hear that she was already using it!
One of our Chinese friends, Shanshan, met with us on BU campus and we brought a member along who speaks Manderin. It was a total success!! Shanshan has been pretty shy around us because of the language barrier and so she has clung to her 2 other friends for support in our lessons/at church. But at our lesson this week she really opened up to us a lot and is actually really good at English. She is just way harder on herself than she should be.
This morning as I was studying, I was reading in Preach my Gospel, chapter 10 all about teaching skills. I have been noticing that my listening skills are kind of not up to par so I read about that specifically. I definitely want to make listening a bigger focus over the course of the rest of my life. Listening, and listening actively and intently, really makes the difference in any relationship. With a missionary companion, investigator, member, and even with friends and family and random joes you meet on the street. I really want to become and expert listener. I think that therin lies the secret to really coming to know people's thoughts/desires/goals/hopes. I am going to be a better listener.
Drop a line if you haven't lately! I'm going to be better about writing back, promise!!
I love you all!!
Sister Palmer
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