Soeur Gardner's Caribbean Adventures

Bonjour!!! This week was CRAZY but SO fun! It started off a little bit sad because I said goodbye to the wonderful area of Sainte Rose!! Leaving behind members and friends that I've come to love SO much is really really hard, but I luckily will still get to see some of them around from time to time :) We had a DREAM lesson with our recent convert Junie and our friend Wilens! Working with Junie was aboslutely incredible and I was so so happy to do missionary work and hear her explain the Gospel to somebody else! She's amazing <3 We also saw one of my favorite Dominican ladies ever named Debra, she is sooo wonderful! We got to meet her mom and her sister as well and they're the cutest, sweetest people ever. A few months ago she told me she looveed my skirt so I decided to give it to her before I left and it made her day :) On Wednesday we did the TRANSFER SWITCH!! We picked up Soeur Herrera, my new companion, up from the airport and I LOVE HER! Of cours...

BONJOUR!!! As you can tell I'm very excited because this was an incredible week!! :) It actually started off on a bit of a weird foor-- we ended up having to spend a lot of our time running things around to other missionaries and doing little errands since 2 of the cars broke down including the Zone Leaders, and the Senior couple got back from the youth conference in the Dominican Republic this week. So the week was pretty crazy at first and Soeur Kitchen and I were starting to get hungry just for a nice long day of normal missionary work without any things coming up taking us away from our area. But the last few days of the week have been  WONDERFUL ! On Friday we had Zone Conference!! Soeur Kitchen and I shared my love of Hawaiian haystacks and the newfound cream of chicken soup in the foreign foods aisle haha. We made lunch for the whole zone which was a little crazy but everything turned out good!! :) Zone Conference was incredible as well. We talked a lot about the...

Hello!! Bonjour! <3 This was another wonderful week here in Sainte Rose! On Tuesday, we had a combined district coucil, which made it basically a zone conference minus the prescense of President and Sister Fisher. But the Elders were late, so us and the other soeurs ran to the little bakery across the street and bought some French pastries to snack on as we waited... I love being able to do that :) But the district council was really great!! For the year of 2019 so far, we've spent every transfer working on training plans created by President Fisher about obedience and obtaining the spirit, using the Book of Mormon as a tool of conversion, using time wisely, improving our teaching skills, and helping others (and ourselves) make and keep commitments. We all shared things we've learned from the training plans and got pumped up to keep applying the things we're learning. I've seen a lot of growth in the mission as a whole and in myself as a missionary since we...

BONJOUR!! Comment allez-vous?? Fun fact: As American missionaries speaking French in the Caribbean, lots of people think that our accent is German because we take the "R"s a little too hard sometimes. So this week I got asked a couple times if I was from Germany and once if I was from Norway! Anyways, we had a great week! The work of the Lord is definitely moving forward and we are feeling it.  On Wednesday we had the special opportunity of having Elder Gamiette, a local 70, join our district council. He listened to us discuss the people we're teaching and counsel together on what we can do to help them. He gave some great input, and at the end shared a very powerful message with us about the power of setting a goal and being truly dedicated to it. We were talking specifically of having a goal to invite  every person  we talk to to be baptized. It takes boldness and longsuffering to accomplish big goals like that! He also said something that shook us a littl...

Salut ! Comment ça va ? We were very busy this week, but it was full of meeting super cool new friends and sharing the Gospel with them. We felt Heavenly Father guiding us every day, leading us to those who are open to hearing our message! We had a cool experience yesterday as we were looking for a woman that we found in the Area Book. We called her and fixed an appointment, but we didn't know exactly where her house was-- only that it was in this one neighborhood. When we got to the neighborhood, we tried to call her and ask her to direct us to her house, but she didn't answer our calls. We had no idea how to find her, so we just talked to some random people and asked if they knew an Elizabeth and if they could tell us how to find her house. As we were asking around, Soeur Kitchen noticed a lady sitting out on her porch and suggested we go ask her. As we approached her house, she went inside and grabbed two other chairs and a Book of Mormon in her hands!! We asked,...