ALMA ARKANSAS

Hello my family! What a week this has been! What a rare mood I'm in! Why it's almost like being in...Arkansas! lol how did you like my spin on that classic? ;) Well I am now in Alma Arkansas and settling in nicely. It is just as humid here as it was in Branson :) The mornings haven't been to bad the past couple days though. We have a trail out behind our apartments that goes up onto a hill and overlooks a beautiful lake. We walk on that in the mornings and I have been enjoying the cool air and watching the sun rise :) Alma is a good little place. Pretty small. Everyone has an accent here! It's great! AND I have a TRUCK! WOOHOO! The envy of every area that DOESN'T! haha Everyone one in the mission wants an area with a truck so it's pretty sweet that I get one. I will have to take a pic and sent it next week. The ward is great. Everyone is very down to earth and pretty much like you would expect people from Arkansas to be like :) So use your imaginations on that one. The roads here are crazy. Lets just say that I understand why we have a truck here! On my first night (Thursday) we had dinner with a recent convert and the road to here house was nuts! Good old dirt and rock uphill all the way and full of little hills and valleys. We were being jiggled around inside Teancum (the Trucks name) like beans in a rattle! We have two recent converts that we are working with. Helen Shriver and Myra Gourley. They are both super sweet and I love them already! Helen has a ton of questions for us every time we got over so keeping the lesson on track is fun! Myra has 4 dogs. They are very sweet for the most part but at one of our visits (my first day actually) they all four got into a pretty good fight. ...So that was exciting. We all just kind of sat there and stared for a second because it was so unexpected and then sprang into action trying to calm them down. ...Well Myra did anyway. Me and Sister Murray just kind of stayed sitting in shock. What was going through my mind was "no way am I getting in the middle of that!" Church was great! The building is FREEZING! And the temp is controlled in Tulsa for some reason and no one wants to bring the problem up to the big dogs in Tulsa so we all just have to chatter and shiver our way through the meetings. Someone just needs to man up and fix the problem! My new companion is Sister Murray. ...I think you already knew that but oh well. She is great! I am finishing her last 6 weeks of training. She is another pre trained missionary! I am so glad I keep getting those ones! She is a lot of fun though and we are having a great old time! It's always hard though, adjusting to a knew companion. At least I think it is. So on my first morning I was studying in the companionship unity section in PMG trying to get some ideas of what we could do to adjust more quickly. As I was studying I was thinking about a lesson we had had the night before with the Stuarts (they are great. Sister Stuart is a resent convert of about a year. Their home is pretty much our home away from home. We are over there every week for lunch I guess and we have a key to their house and we sometimes do our laundry there. Any way, they are really cool. And the have 60 chickens). We had just read a chapter with them in the Book of Mormon going around 3 verses at a time. It reminded me so much of scripture study at home! It was the best feeling ever! Any way, as I sat there studying about companionship unity and thinking about that lesson the thought came to me that me and Sister Murray should do that. We should take 10 minutes every night and read in the Book of Mormon together before bed. I brought it up with her in companionship study and she was all for it! So we started doing it :) It has been so great! Reading in the scriptures is such a great way to begin the day and such a great way to end it as well! On Friday night we got to have a "cottage meeting," whatever that means." In this case it meant getting a small group of recent converts and investigators together with some members and watching The Testaments and The Restoration and having a discussion about them over popcorn and lemonade. It was so fun! Movie night! The Testaments is so funny! haha I mean, I always bawl at the end because the spirit is super strong then, but the rest of the movie is just so funny! Kohor cracks me up! Any way, that was really fun and it started up some really great discussion. By the way, everyone is super excited that I am NOT from Utah OR Idaho OR Arizona for that matter. I love that I am from Oregon! It is an instant endearment for me to the members! haha Grrrr I'd better go. We have to email on library computers here (it is so tempting to read some of these books! But I can't! Ahhhh!) so I only have an hour now and I still have to email President Loveland and a less active from Springfield :) I love you all tons and bunches! Have an amazing week! Sister Cryer