It's Not Over Til It's Over

It´s not over til they say its over!

So remember how we had changes last week? Where do you think I am? We´re not playing where´s Waldo, but where in Guatemala is Hermana Wetzel? Here´s the scoop. So I had had the feeling that I was leaving Amatitlan for about the last two weeks, I just felt like that was going to happen. Everyone else seemed to confirm these feelings. I was worried too that I wasnt going to be here for the big soccer tournament that I was in charge of planning as pasrt of our ward activity. We didnt start to say goodbye or anything but everyone was pretty convinced. Then on Monday night, after hearing what Presidente Baldwin had told me, I told my district leader to just tell hna Marin she was staying...and he goes hna wetzel, you will never believe whats going to happen with changes...... he tells me, Hna Wetzel YOU´RE STAYING!!! haha! I was so happy!!! I couldnt believe it! But here I am, six months later still livin it up in La Mariposa. Thats why I say its not over til they say its over, or that the ball hasnt gone out of lthe line until the ref calls it because everyone thought i was leaving, including my president. But from what my bishop told me, some phone calls were made, whether it was some other bishop telling presidente that they didnt want me in that area or it was my bishop saying he didnt want me leaving, that will never be known until maybe I decide to tell when I get home. But the rest is history for now. All we know is that Im so happy to still be here beause we have so much going on! This month is going to be rockin. Im also so excited to be here for another General Concference! I wonder if I´ve set some sort of record, being here for 2 general conferences is pretty good! especially cuz i was here one month before confernence last time too. But life is great...here are some pictures of the awesome people we are teaching...

Gaby Zacarias, 13 baptism 8 am
Heidy Ochoa, 20, baptism 3 pm
Ulfa Bamaca, 50, baptims 3 pm, Ulfa is the wife of Hno Rene that got baptized on Christmas! You could say that this was another Christmas miracle that Ulfa was baptized this day! she is incredible!
These girls were all baptized last sunday. It was a crazy but fulfilling, satisfying day like you have no idea! We were running around having them get interviewed, pictures, drying the skirt inbetween baptisms etc. great day!

Evelt Cabrera, 42, baptism yesterday 4 pm

Andrea, my bff and the bishops daughter and I have the samw headband! They came over on Sunday night to take pictures because they thought I was leaving!

Hna Padilla and I, she came in at the same time as me and this is at the hermanas activity that we had and made these scarves!

So the work goes on in La Mariposa, pray a lot for the Familia Obegon please! Have a great week! Love you all!

Hermana Wetzel.

A Clean Apartment

ahhh familia! como estan? wow...another amazing week en La Mariposa! Right now I´m typing in the semi dark because the guatemalans like to save on the light bill apparently in this little internet cafe and I cant see the keybpard very well. But we had interviews today with president and they were, great and interesting. We dont fidn out intil tonight if we have changes and he said some things to me that make me think i will stay one more change or taht im out on wednesday. Because he also told me when he came to inspect our impeccably clean house after, well hermanas, we´ll see ya, soon! ah! who knows. But can I tell you about a miracle that we had this week? well one was that the attendance in sacrament increased by ten again, its kind of like a contest amongst ourselves now to see if we can keep getting it to go up because we definitely never want it to go down again! But heres what happened on saturdaay.

So we worked in the morning to clean our house to get ready for cleaning checks and we just had no time to finish it. so we left the house a little disorderly to go out to our appointments, thinking that we would go back in the noche and finish it. To our surprise, after having a great day with our ROCKSTAR investigator heidy ochoa and Ulfa Bamaca...thats a whole nother story for the birds when I get home. But anyway, to our surprise, when we got home, our desks had been moved a little, that was the first thing I noticed. And then I noticed the pile of dust wasnt there either. I then realized that someone had been in our house and cleaned the whole thing!!!!!!! The bathroom sink looked like a new one had been put in, the windows washed, floor mopped, everything! This was the biggest tender mercy we could have received in this moment because Heavenly Father knew everything we had been doing this past week and how busy things got with the things and people we had to coordinate for Sundays events and it literally was just not possible. The only people that have keys to our house are the pilas familia Morales, they are our landlords and one of our favorite familias in the colonia. I never thought I would say that I could sleep on a guatemalan floor or kiss it, but this one, I could have, but didnt :) This family is incredible and truly understand what it means to serve and be instruments in the hands of the Lord. If any of you are praying that there are angels around us or that we will be taken care of, you can thank Heavenly Father in your prayers that we are more than better taken care of!

Other events that took place this week were awesome. Tell Nathan Warner and Elizabeth Rhondeau I say hi! The pictures, I cant remember which ones I sent but the road rash was definitely a goal scoring skid(accidentally of course Mol) on turf fields. I loved it though, we played soccer for three hours on pday three weeks ago and it was awesome. Thanks for my shoes mol, they made all the difference! I hope I dont have changes because we are planning a soccer game with the relief society vs, priesthood and Im in charge of planning this activity! I love our ward, they just keep adding on to this activity...ok great at 4 we´ll have the baptism, 5 soccer game and at 6 we´ll start the other activity! says our bishop when we ask him what we can do to get our investigators more involved. Life is great, Jesus is the Christ and Heavenly Father hears and answers our prayers. May he be with you always, is my humble prayer.

Love you!
Hermana Wetzel

Recent Pics

Happy Valentines Day

Feliz dia de Cariño!!! There are about fifty million different names for this day in Guate, and yes they do celebrate it! We are looking forward to a normal day of work here filled with lots of love of the Savior. haha Anyway, we had a great week this week. Yesterday we broke the record again and had even more people in church than ever before. Our new bishop rocks! Im so glad you got to see Guate in the training meeting! We had a ward council meeting yesterday with over thirty leaders with our Stake President there to capacitate us, so I can imagine that that is similar to what you saw. But thats how the people are! Love them.

Yesterday was an exciting day as I had to speak in church, we sang in a trio in sacrament meeting and gave the relief society lesson. They might have heard a little too much from me, but I learned a lot and was grateful for the experience. You all know how I love being busy!

This week we had some awesome lessons with Hermana Ulfa. Her name says it all, she is darling! She is so receptive to the gospel, knows its true and is grateful that God blessed her with two sons that were able to serve missions.So now she says she is ready to comply with God´s rules. Heidy Ochoa is also progressing and was so excited this week that she was able to find a skirt in the market to wear to church! The little joys of mission life like that are so fun because you see how excited and ready people are to change their lives, in the little ways for the sake of the gospel. Hermana Marin and I are doing great, both loving La Mariposa, there are a lit of exciting things coming up that will take place in March or in the next change. Life is great and I love Amatitlan.

Have a great week!

Never want to come home!

Hola Hola! Oh my gosh! Why is life so fun! Guatemala is nuts and I love it! Did I mention that I never want to come home? OOps....but Seriously, receiving the support and love from all of you, having the great companions that I have had and being able so serve amongst and with the people that I have met, it really is a perfect life and most days I feel like I could go forever! Even though I love all of you and will have to come home eventually, just want you to know that I know I have made one of the best decisions of my life by coming on a mission. You just learn so much everyday! I have started in my miracle journal, a ¨what I learned today¨section, because there are way too many things that pass each day that I want to learn from or remember to be a better missionary now and be a better person in the future and so I have tried to write at least one thing everyday that will remind of an experience I had or something. Only one because we know that there is no time in the night to get hardly anything done before lights out. There are so many things to learn in the mission, the only reason I feel overwhelmed sometimes is that I´m not learning everything I should/could be. but that´s what the spirit is for, is to help us remember all the things we have learned and been taught by the savior like it says in john 14:26. And if we believe that really we came from the presence of God and Jesus Christ, think of all the knowledge we must have had, sitting at the SAvior´s feet being taught the gospel. I think this scripture applies to all the things that Christ has said to us before and the things we have learned in this life. Pero hay que ser diligente tambien! We have to be diligent in all we do.

We had an awesome Sacrament meeting yesterday that was full of surprises....with one of the biggest asistencia´s La Mariposa has ever seen! There were 165 people there and they ran out of water! The Sacrament took awhile, which is nice to have more time to think about the Savior of course, but also it´s a bit nervewracking for missionaries because you are sitting next to your investigator´s wondering what they are thinking and just praying that everything will be normal or that they won´t think we´re nuts. But it always works out in the end because God loves his children. But the best part about it was that the chapel didn´t have any water yesterday and so when they went to go get more water, there was none! After about three minutes of awwkward eying going on with the bishopric on the stand, I caught on to the fact that one guy says to the bishop that he has a water bottle in his car...so hermano Juan goes to his car and brings in bright green water bottle discreetly trying to walk down the side aisle, when one of the priests comes walking in magically with 2 glasses of water!!! where he got the water we dont know, but at least we know that it was blessed! This is all after the Stake Presidency had just announced a new bishopric!!!! So there´s all this excitement, we will have an awesome new bishop, probably one of the funniest men I have ever met in my life.(Big day for us gringas when we can understand funny jokes in spanish ,)-) We will miss our bishop dearly, but we are excited for the changes. I hope I will be here for these changes so I can work with the new bishop, but I have six months in this area and who knows where the Lord will need me next. Heydi Ochoa is progressing so well, Ingrid is doing great and Isabel arrived an hour early to church yesterday because she didnt want to be late! love them. Time has been flying by way toooooo fast! Pray for time to slow down, that more families will be found so we can teach them gospel and they enter into sacred covenants with God! This work is the work of the Lord, Im so grateful for the opportunity to share his true gospel! There are always adventures and miracles everyday, so look for them! Love you all, have a great before Valentines week! You´re in my prayers,

Love always,
Hermana Peach Wetzel

Doing Great

Hi fam!!

How are ya?! I just hope you are all doing fabulous, you sound like it! I am so glad everyone is healthy and happy. Well this week was fantastic, we had zone conference, met la familia ochoa and la familia diaz lopez and Ingrid got baptized! It was quite the eventful week. Alegran let me just tell you how inspirational and cool zone conference was, it was incredible! This conference was my favorite and most inspirational conference yet. I don´t know why but these ideas were just flowing and flowing of people in our area, what we need to do better, ideas of specific examples we can use in certain lessons with poeople who arent progressing that much right now, just everything was amazing! The assistants gave an awesome lesson about prioritizing with our investigators and our time. They used a visual example that really made sense to me. I love using visuals and stuff like that in lessons because that´s how I learn and I think the people really like it and learn a little bit better when they can actually grasp and see whats in front of them rather than just words. I dont know if I can explain it all, but just know that this was an awesome conference and that the work is progressing in La Mariposa!

I cant remember if I told you about La familia Ochoa or not, but they are an awesome family where the mom, dad and daughter arent members, but the two sons are. What are they chances that we would meet the son who is a member but lives in the United States, in the street in La Mariposa when he was visiting and he tells us he wants us to come visit his family! Its a long story, but so cool....no time, but the moral of the story is that we met this family and they are awesome. We have awesome members here that help us so much, visit with us, give us food and tell us all their friends to go visit. Life is great, sorry this is short, but I hope you have a great week, you´re in my prayers! Keep on keepin on!

Love,
Hermana Wetzel