January 19 Letter

Dear Family and everyone else who receives this e-mail,
How is everyone? Thank you so much for the details of everyone's lives, Mom and Dad! I really really do enjoy knowing what's going on! I'm glad to hear Kaden's hair is growing and Brendon is getting fat! WOOHOO fatties! =) Good luck with everything this week! It has been a super tiring week but holy cow I've learned so much! I can't believe I've been here a month already! I'm starting my fourth month. WHAT?! Where did my life go? Anyway, I guess I should start by saying I gave my very first haircut EVER! An hermana that I live with needed a hair cut last week on P-day. I need a haircut from her and then she asked me if I knew how to cut hair. I told her I wanted to try because I've never cut hair before. She willingly agreed to let me experiment. She is soooo brave! It was so fun but holy cow I was so scared the whole time! It was so much fun though and she said she really likes her hair! Not that that was hard, I cut it straight and cut like 2 or 3 inches off! It was so fun! I'm sorry to hear about Aaron's accident. Hurting your buns is definitely NOT the way to go. I had a similar experience on Tuesday. I didn't get in an accident, but my companion and I were walking through a road looking for the house of a woman we contacted on the street. There were about 3 or 4 dogs lying around (where aren't there 3 or 4 dogs or more lying around?), one or two came up to us and were just sniffing and of course we see that every day so we didn't think anything of it. Then the bigger one decided to go up behind me and got a nice big bite out of my butt! It hurt so bad! I was ticked! Dadgum that stupid dog! Of course we hurried to a spot off the road and far away from the devil's advocate to see the damage. I love garments. I can pretty much garauntee that I would have had blood if I wasn't one of the more fortunate wearers of the temple garment. He bit me hard because it hurt the rest of the night and the next day and I had a huge bruise and a little bit of a bump on my rump. I hate dogs. Really, being here in Argentina makes me second guess my love for them. We found a new invesitgator this week. Her name is Olga, she's 75-ish and she's so awesome! It's like I have 4 grandmas now! She and this other woman we talked to, Alejandra, had the question, "Why are there so many churches? There is only one God, wouldn't he have one church?" Yes, my dear friends, one Lord, one faith, one baptism. We're sitting there thinking, HALLELUJAH we have the answer!!! We even had the boyfriend of a girl we taught, Milagros, teach US about the apostasy! He knows there was one and that Catholics are crazy. That's what he said. I didn't say it. I didn't realize that so many people thought that way. We need to find them! It's been hard. People don't want to listen. Milagros told us, "if people don't listen to you it's because they're tired of the Jehova's Witnesses. When you tell them no, they keep pushing and come back the next week." Poor people. I am so grateful for those who will listen to us. Even if they don't want what we have after we're done testifying of it, at least we gave them the choice. If they say no, we invite them to the church and chau! It drives me nuts when people tell us there's not that big of a difference between the churches and that they are all good. We're thinkin, yes, all the churches have good things but don't you think ONE of them is going to have ALL of the good things and ALL of what God wants? I can't really say much because I don't understand EVERYTHING. I'm understanding more, but still I don't understand everything. I'm constantly praying for that. Dad, I have a question: Where did Alma, the priest of King Noah get his authority to baptize? Was it because he was a priest? I'm reading in Mosiah right now and when Alma was teaching he baptized and it doesn't say where he got his authority. I'm studying up on it, but I haven't found the answer yet. I'm sorry I have a few other e-mails to write to family members so I have to go, but I love you so so so so much and I'm so excited for when I get to talk to you on Mother's Day because this year it falls on my birthday! You get to tell me happy birthday and I get to tell you, Mom, Happy Mother's Day! WOOHOO! I'm so excited! I'm going to be 22...weird.
All my love,
Hermana Shumway