Happy New Year!

Hope you all had fun New Year's Eve celebrations because I had none. :) It was just a normal day but that is okay. New Years has never been my favorite holiday anyway. To start the new year, the MTC celebrated by having a stomach flu "epidemic". I heard that over 300 cases of it were reported in the first day. People were dropping like flies! We would walk down our residence hall and it felt like a hospital. Seven people in my zone have been taken out of commission the last two days. YUCK! Thank goodness my companions and I have made it this long without catching it! And for some more good news, after being sick for over 10 days and being without a voice for 7 of those days, I am almost better! I have most of my voice back and only cough a little now. It has been kind of a rough week because of that. Another elder in my zone has the same symptoms and he was diagnosed with bronchitis. What a way to start out the mission! But I have had some miracles along the way. Several of the worst nights I spent awake coughing my guts out, unable to fall asleep because if I breathed deeply I had to cough. Hermana Edwards is a super light sleeper so I felt so bad. After about a million prayers for help to stop coughing I gave up praying for myself and started praying that my companions would be able to sleep through my racked. When I apologized the next morning for all of the coughing, both girls said that they had slept right through it and didn't even know that I had had such a miserable night. MIRACLE!

We have given a few lessons this week to some new "investigators". Osvaldo is an atheist so he had some questions. It is way hard to answer questions when you have next to no vocabulary! After I testified that God hears ours prayers and answers them with peace and comfort he said that he had never felt that peace and comfort. How do you feel it. Wow...how to answer this with the 20 words that I know? I ended up answering the only way that I knew the words to: when you learn more about the gospel you learn more about how to feel this way and what it feels like. Osvaldo is really one of my teachers, Hermano Bulloch, so after the lesson he gave us feed back. He said that my answer was actually a great way to teach the principle instead of just teaching applications. And also that my answer enabled we, the missionaries, to stay in control of the lesson. Who knew that having a limited vocabulary might acutally help be be a better missionary some times? Ha!

The spirit here is a powerful thing. I am amazed by how much it is here, how much it helps, and how much I can feel it. The Spirit is just amazing!. But this week I have tasted the fruits of missionary work without the spirit with me. It did not go well at all! I am humbled even more to be reminded again that I am worthless without the help of the spirit. And I think because I am a missionary, I am held to a higher standard and so I can loose the spirit easier that before. Again this is humbling and gives me much to work on.

My teach Hermano Harris- who was Enrique- challenged us all to memorize the condensed version of the first vision found in Preach My Gospel. Well I felt like he had thrust this challenge on me and I was not happy about it. I struggle with the idea of just memorizing sentences in Spanish when I have no clue what they mean. It is hard to make them feel heartful to the listeners that way. I want to ability to form the sentences on my own. But since I had committed I felt obligated to give it a try. Amazingly there were only like 3 words in it that I didn't know the meaning to. I looked them up and memorized the whole thing in an hour! There is definitely something to be said about obedience. What a miracle!

I had to go down to the police station yesterday to get another background check. I guess El Salvador wants one for the few weeks that I live in Provo while I am at the MTC. Weird! It felt like the biggest waste of time but it was nice because I got to meet the 2 other missionaries in the MTC that came in on Dec. 19th with me going to my mission. The other sister is a native spanish speaker so I guess it makes sense that I wouldn't be her companion. :) My estimated date to fly to Guatemala is on the 15th of January but it is still pretty up in the air if there will even be room for me to go down there. I talked to the travel office the other day though and it sounds like a visa shouldn't be a problem for El Salvador. I only need my passport to fly on there and they will give me the visa when a get there. That is a relief. I will let you know when I hear more.

Thank you for everyones' letters and prayers. Thanks Mom for the awesome key chain and my exercise pants. I hope all is going well there. Is it snowing at home like it is in Utah? We went to the temple for the first time this morning at 6:30 and I swear, it had to have been -10 degrees. It was SO COLD! The snow is nice though. I hope that everyone out there is a lot healthier than we missionaries in the MTC. I love you all!

-Hermana Heap-