Week 5 in Hospitalet

Hello friends and family!!!

Things here is Spain are just doing great! We are having transfers today...but I am not moving gratefully and neither is my companion! I am so excited. Finally I will be somewhere besides the MTC for more than 4  weeks. Things here are great. We had Dafne´s baptism this last weekend as well as Bryan. Dafne is 9 and Bryan is 8 and is the grandson of a less-active lady. They are all doing well and were confirmed in church on Sunday as well. Bryan gave the most beautiful testimony in sacrament meeting as well. I just love kids and the absolute perfect faith that they have. It is really something that I need to try and have.

Okay....so you all want to know what a typical day here is like for me...so here it goes...

We wake up at 7:30 and go running. Come back and shower and eat breakfast. We start our personal study at 9 and have companionship study at 10, for 2 hours until I get finished with this 12 week training program that they started recently. It is fantastic. Then we got out at 12 for our visits or for contacting people. At 2 we come back to the apartment for lunch and language study. Then we go back out at 4 and have appointments and family home evenings with families, and contact more people and find more investigators until 10. No dinner break. We get home at 10 and plan and get ready for bed and go to bed at 11:30. That is a pretty typical day for us. But then there are Sundays which are different and days that we have district meeting and days that we have weekly planning and those are only slightly different.

So guess what??? Our apartment is finally clean!!!! Woohooo!!!!! We got a phonecall last week saying that we were going to have an apartment check and so everyone had to kick in and help me get the whole place deep cleaned!!! It was absolutely fantastic! The spirit was seriously immediately stronger when we finished cleaning! I love it and hope that we can all work together to keep it that way.

Well....I do have one request for you all right now...we have an incredible investigator that is having a really hard time right now. His name is Moíses. He was really learning and progressing really rapidly...but last night he tried to tell us that he didn´t want us to teach him anymore because he is really scared. He says that each time he has investigated a church in the past and tried to come closer to God, something bad has happened to him or someone close to him. And he just found out the other day that his friend has cancer. So he got really scared and said he just doesn´t want to mess with it. We had a really good lesson with him last night and left him with a prayer that really strengthened him. But if you could pray for him and for us that we might know through the spirit how to help him, we would really appreciate it. He is fantastic and really knows that it is true...he just is scared and has lots of questions.

Well...that is all I really have time for right now....except I should mention that transfers were today...but I am not leaving and neither is my companion at least not for the next 6 weeks. I love this area and love this ward. The people here are amazing!

Well that is all for now.

Love you all,

Hermana Eyre

also....The mailing address that I have for the next 6 weeks at least is this:

c/ Rambla Badal 64, 5, #1

Barcelona

08014 Barcelona

SPAIN

Week 4 in Hospitalet

Happy Easter!!!!

 

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter and were able to celebrate it in some special way back there in the states. It is definitely a different celebration here in Spain. The schools take a two week spring break basically just to celebrate Easter. And for a solid week they have these parade´s that go up and down particular streets playing devastating music and kind of creepy floats of Jesus with people in white robe´s (that scarily look like the klu klux klan outfits). But they really do take their celebration of Easter here seriously and I respect that. But all the stores have been closed pretty much for about the last week, and it is supposed to last much of this next week as well.

 

The weather here in Spain has been so crazy. It will look like it is going to be a beautiful sunny day and then we will be in a monsoon basically like 20 minutes later. But we haven´t had any terribly hot days yet. It has been pretty decent most of the time. But I here that the summers here in Barcelona are extremely hot...so hopefully I get to go up north for that where it is a little cooler. 

 

We are having a baptism this week!!!! Woohoo!!! Her name is Dafne. She is 9 and so incredibly smart and ready to be baptized. She just knows and remembers everything about the Gospel. We just barely started teaching her a week ago from this past Saturday. We are also helping an 8 year old prepare for his baptism this Friday as well. His name is Bryan. He lives with his Grandma that has been less active because of some knee problems she has been having. But we have been working with them and he is also ready as well. His Grandma is also doing really well now. She received a priesthood blessing this last week for the health and healing of her knee and she was able to make it to church on Sunday. 

 

We have also been working with some other less-actives as well...one of which stopped coming over a year ago because of some things that happened with another member. She was also a return missionary, so it surprised me that she was so stubborn about going back. But she also came this week along with a couple other less-active members.

 

Next week, I think I will tell you about two of our amazing investigators that will hopefully really be preparing for baptism and have a date by next week. I will also try to tell you what a typical day here in the Spain, Barcelona mission is like. Things here have been really busy and we have been seeing a lot of miracles and blessings from the hard work. I love this work and this gospel is so true!!!

 

I love you all and miss you! But keep living every moment to the fullest...and be the best member missionaries you can be...it makes all the difference!

 

Love,

Hermana Eyre

Week 3 in Hospitalet

Hey all...

No time as usual...It has been a pretty good week and we have started to see some miracles in finding some really prepared people this week. I will try to write an update before-hand next time so I just have to type it up. Conference was amazing even though we didn´t get to see the last session. But I love you all, love the work and love Spain.

Love,

Hermana Eyre

Week 2 in Barcelona mission - Hospitalet

Hello everyone!

 

Life is pretty good here in Spain. It is definitely a huge adjustment going from the Provo Utah mission to a foreign mission. Things just operate a bit differently here. But I guess I will just need to be flexible and adapt to the differences. 

 

I have no time left right now, but I just wanted to write a quick note to tell you all that I am having a great time and love my companion. We have been able to take our violins around with us and when contacting people, we have been able to teach some people that weren´t interested until we said that we would play them a song. Then we teach, play, and they want us to come back. We were definitely put together for a reason. So apparently...according to a little sister of mine...I need to spice up my blog somehow. I have no idea how to do that though, with so little time to type. Any suggestions for me? I am apparently a very boring writer...Let me know if any of you have suggestions.

We were able to get our apartment clean enough this week to make it liveable, which for now I am okay with. But we will be making some more progress as the week goes on. Well, time is gone. 

 

Have a fantastic week and I hope you will all listen to General Conference! It is going to be fantastic! Come with a question and you will get an answer and get so much more out of it! That is my challenge for you all this week!

 

Love,

Hermana Eyre

 

This week is my birthday!!! I am turning 24!!! I feel so stinking old!!! It is ridiculous!

Week 1 in BARCELONA!!! FINALLY!!!

Hey everyone!!!

I am finally in the mission that I was called to! It is amazing and feels so right. It is seriously a cool place. My new P-Day is Monday... so just so you all know and make sure you write me before then. 

 

My area is a pretty small area in the suburbs of Barcelona. It is called Hospitalet. It is seriously so great being back in the field!!! I love it!!! And our schedule here is so awesome!!! Instead of the 6:30 to 10:30...we have 7:30 to 11:30. It is fabulous and so much more normal for my body. The strange thing here though is that there are only two meals a day. We get breakfast and then a semi late lunch at 2 after a couple hours of proselyting and then we have language study...go back out at 4 and don´t return to our apartment until 10. And there is no dinner. It is just not very custom here to eat dinner. They just have a fairly big lunch called medio dia. This will take some adjustment but I am stoked for everything here.

 

My companion´s name is Sister Reeder. She is awesome and we are basically the same person! It is crazy. She is the only other Sister in the mission that plays violin and we got put together. We got right to work and played in church on Sunday and plan to take full advantage of our musical gifts to bring people to the gospel. We are really excited. She loves to run and exercise like me and we get along just great. This is going to be a fantastic transfer!

Our apartment is a little bit ridiculous...and if I didn´t know any better I would think that I was serving in my sister´s mission in Bulgaria. Apparently it is way below the standards for the missionary apartments here. Our shower is literally 2 feet by 2 and a half feet. I can barely fit my shoulders in it. It is also a seriously filthy dirty apartment and every missionary that has lived there for the past who knows how long never cleaned and left all their junk there. We are working hard on getting it clean though. It will just take some time since we don´t have a lot of time to clean. 

 

Anyways...I am out of time but I love it here. President Hinckley is fantastic and I am so excited to be serving in such an awesome mission with such awesome missionaries and an awesome Mission President. 

 

Well time to go!

 

Love you all,

Hermana Eyre

Week 2 in SPAIN!!!...heading to Barcelona:)

Hey everyone!!!! 

 

I leave Madrid for Barcelona at 6:30 tomorrow morning! I am stoked to finally get to the place that I was called to serve and to meet my mission President, President Hinckley. While these last to weeks back in the MTC have been a really hard adjustment to make, I am grateful for this time. I have met a lot of people and learned a lot from each of them, especially my district here...and I probably would not have met them otherwise, or learned all these things from them. 

 

We have had some really cool experiences with contacting people in the park and some not so amazing experiences. The other day we were talking to this guy who ended up being not very nice at all. He was atheist and would just interrupt us everytime we tried to say something. But while we were talking to him, this other guy came up to us and asked us about some church of Jesus Christ...But neither of us fully understood his question and when I looked to my companion she just had this blank stare on her face. The guy that we were talking to just told him no and that we didn´t know. And so the guy walked away...then the guy that we were talking to said that it was better that we didn´t understand that guys question when we told him that we didn´t understand...he was really not very nice and was obviously taking the opportunity to take someone away from us. Anyways..my companion felt like we needed to go after him...so we quickly finished up our conversation with this guy and started running in the direction of that guy. It took us a few minutes to find him...but we found him after sprinting across the park. We caught up to him and apologized for not understanding. He told us that he is from Columbia and is here with his sister. He has been looking to have God in his life again and was trying to find the right church...the Church of Jesus Christ. Talk about being a perfect contact! God literally led each of us in our district to someone like that that day. It was seriously amazing. We sat down and talked with this guy forever. He was way awesome and we were able to get his information so that we can send the other missionaries in Madrid to come visit him.  We also had a few other cool experiences at the park and on the metro a few days before that...but I do not have enough time to tell all that. But I just wanted to share at least one of these miracles that I was able to witness this last week. 

 

Anyways...Madrid is a super cool place and I am sad that I didn´t get to see more of the city here. But I hope to come back and visit someday. But I am way excited to get off to Barcelona tomorrow and back into the field! Wish me luck!!! I love you all and miss you all!!!

 

Love,

Hermana Eyre

Week 1 in SPAIN

Hey everyone!!!

I am in Spain! It is a little bit surreal and doesn´t really feel like I am in Spain because we basically never get to leave the MTC. It is really hard being back in the MTC and spending all day in class instead of out teaching people. It is crazy. I honestly am not a huge fan of the food here...there is not much option in this tiny lunchroom that we have and everything (main course) is potatoes or something fried or something with salsa and everything is cooked in tons of oil. I have been basically living off of fruit and yogurt for a week because I can´t stand the food. This is amazing...I have never considered myself to be a picky eater...but it certainly sounds like I am by all my experiences on the mission so far. I just like to eat healthy food though because I feel super gross and sick when I eat the unhealthy food that is prepared for us (all the places that I have been). You know...it is just cafeteria food! Not very awesome. Restaurants...that is a different story...I hardly ever hate things at restaurants or that I make myself...because they are made to a higher quality and are not made for the masses...so naturally they are a bit healthier. Anyways...enough of that. 

The MTC here is absolutely gorgeous because it is literally on the temple grounds. I have been seeing some of the most amazing sunsets and sunrises of my life here.

As for the first week here...it has been really hard. My companion was sick and we had to miss the first day of proseliting in the park, which also meant that I missed a few days of exercise and I have had a really hard time having a positive attitude about anything here. Exercise is so important!!!! It makes all the difference in the stress of being a missionary. It is crazy. But I finally found a sister I think that likes to run and she does happen to be going to Barcelona as well. Hopefully we will be companions in the future. We have about 15 sisters that came over last week...and it is crazy to me that only 2 of us like to run or really exercise hard. But oh well...at least there is that.

I don´t know how much else I have to share except that we did get a special surprise trip to the park, so we ended up getting to go and contact people. It was a really interesting experience and way different from Utah. People definitely are not as friendly here and will very blatently ignore you when you talk to them. It is a bit of a different experience. But we did run into a couple people that we were able to share a little with...but they were not Spaniards interestingly enough. One was from Columbia, another from Peru, and two from Malaysia that are living in London. It was a good experience nonetheless and the park is absolutely gorgeous and huge!!! Very comparable to many huge parks that I am sure you all know the names of. 

I am excited to be able to sign these residency papers in a week and get out of the MTC. I want to be teaching people everday!!! It is hard to be in class!!! 

Anyways...I better go now....time is up.

Love you all,

Hermana Eyre