And the new area is...

¡Alla la vida, familia, las sorpresas suigen!

I´m writing to you all from my new area: PANAMA. I´m right here in the heart of the city, the benefit of which is that we get to come to this fancy mall every week to use computers and shop and do all sorts of touristy things because we´re in the city. The perks are good in that respect. I´ll be sending you pictures of the canal soon, I´m sure.

My new companion is Hermana Calderon from Peru but right now we are in a trio with Hermana Zamora from Honduras. She´s only with us for a week before she leaves to go open up another area with my good buddy Hermana Kennedy. I tell you this mission life is LOCO. One minute I´m clear on the other side of the country and the next thing I know I´m back where I started. But I´m really happy to be here. I´ve worked with Hna. Calderon and Hna. Zamora before and they´re both great. The only thing is that I think I´m going to have some severe back problems in this transfer because little Hna. Calderon is about half my size and I have to consistently bend in half to hear what she´s saying. It´s quite a comic sight.

I do miss my dear old David, though. Since we´re so far away from the rest of the world, we receive the news of our transfers a day before everyone else so that we can get on the 8 hour bus for the city the day before transfers. This means we get the privilege of sleeping in the mission home for one night. Wow...let me just say two words: HOT SHOWER. I almost died from joy and I think I even sang God Be With You Till We Meet Again at the end of it. We also got to go running on the beach on the morning of transfers. President Ward gave us permission to skip our studies for the day and just go out and explore a bit. I love President. It was so strange to be back in the mission home and remember my first night there about 6 months ago. I felt like a new missionary again in some ways. Crazy to think about everything that´s happened in between...

So this weekend we had a baptism. His name is Carlos Wilson (not very Panamanian, I know) and he´s been investigating the church for a long time. His wife is a member, so now their family´s united in the gospel. Even though I wasn´t the missionary that taught him, it was a neat experience to be a part of that. People say the city´s hard but I know there are people here who are ready and willing to listen, so we´re going to find them.

Yesterday I had the unique experience of translating for a Haitian missionary who came to sacrament meeting. Apparently our bishop had invited her but her Spanish was only so-so, so he asked me help her out. That was pretty neat, but hard at the same time to go from Spanish-English, English-Spanish. It was a good brain twister. She was a sweet lady. She moved here from Haiti to preach the word of God, she told me. I respect her for that.

My head´s still spinning a bit from all that´s happened in this week, but such is the mission life. Don´t slow down, don´t stop. Say good-bye and keep going.
I love you all very much and am still very grateful for your prayers and thoughts.
till the next letter!

love,
Hna. Brewster

Tarantulas in the shower and other things

(letter from September 6)
¡Bueeeeeeenos Dias, Familia!

I hope you all are enjoying your Labor Day weekend (I´m assuming that´s still today, unless I miss my guess.) I just want to say quickly: Happy 34th Angie and Happy 36 years of marital bliss to los padres! Big weekend for the fam.

So as far as things here go, yes, as the subject line states, one of the biggest adventures of the past week was encountering a tarantula in the shower a few nights ago. To my credit, I did not scream. I did, however, dart quickly out of the bathroom and to my companion, who was on the phone, I made the internationl ´there´s-a-giant-man-eating-spider-in-our-shower sign. Bless her fearless heart, she goes in there with a shoe, I hear WHACK-WHACK-WHACK and she says, ¨Muerto.¨ That almost put me off showers for life here, but not quite. In fact, I actually cleaned out the shower after that and removed the dead spider by myself. This, to me, was a major turning point in my life. Thus I dedicated an entire paragraph to the experience. I hope you´re all impressed. I won´t be waking you up in the middle of the night to come kill a spider in my room anymore, Dad. I think I´ve finally overcome my fear. Now I know why the Lord sent me to Panama :). It´s a symbolic thing, really. We need to overcome the ¨tarantulas¨of life. Mine just happen to be real tarantulas. (¨For some, speaking in public might be our El Guapo...for us, El Guapo is a big ugly guy who wants to kill us...¨ I had to throw that in there.)

Anywho, back to mission-related stuff...this week was the last of our transfer. I can´t believe I´ve already completed 12 weeks here in good ol´David. I don´t know if they´ll send me to a new area or not, but I did find out that I will have a new companion. Whether that means I stay or go, I´m not sure, but changes are definitely going to happen. I would love to stay, in all honesty. I love the area here and the ward members really do feel like family to me.

Speaking of the ward members, one of the girls in our ward, Vivianna, is leaving for her mission to Ecuador in two weeks and this past weekend they had a ¨Maleta Abierta¨for her--a sort of farewell party where people bring things to fill the suitcase of outgoing missionaries. There are songs, cake and comments from friends and family. It´s fun. Since Vivianna´s been a good friend of ours and helped us go out to teach a lot, we did a special musical number together called ¨Cuando Regrese con Honor¨ (it´s actually a Jance Kapp Perry song that´s been translated in Spanish). The thing I love about singing here in Central America is that it doesn´t matter how well you sing, it only matters how LOUDLY you sing. Every Sunday is a lot of fun for me :). Sometimes I have to listen to cds of MoTab to remind myself how the hymns really go...

The good news is that I finally made a cd of all the pictures I have so far, which I´ll be sending to Mom and Dad and they can then share them with yáll. There aren´t too many but that´s because my camera´s memory´s not so great. I´m looking for a new one.

Anyway...yesterday we had 7 investigators show up out of the blue to church. This always happens on my last Sunday of the transfer. Not sure why. We´ve got plenty of work to do here, so here´s hoping I get another 6 weeks to do it in dear little David. If not, well, there´s work in other areas too. Venga lo que venga, voy a disfrutarlo.

Les quiero mucho,
Hna. Brewster

Doo wah diddy?

(late post from August 30)

Hola mi querida familia,

I´m trying that thing where I write to you all BEFORE I read the other emails so that you all get a fair share of what´s going on in the life of Sister Brewster and it´s not just two paragraphs of apologies for lack of time. !Está bien!

So the subject line for this letter comes from the fact that yesterday while we were eating at one of our member´s house, they showed me a book they have to learn English. There were two songs in the entire book that supposedly helped Spanish speakers learn English more easily: ¨California Dreamin´¨ from the Mamas and the Papas (I was so excited when I saw that) and ¨¨Doo Wah Diddy.¨ I thought that was an interesting selection. Try picturing Panamanians singing ¨Tha she was just a-walkeeng down tha street seengen DOO WAH DEEEDY DEEEDY DUM DEEEDY DOOO...¨ I just had to laugh. No wonder our language is hard for them! Oh, also, I got to teach the young women in our ward how to sing ¨The Climb¨ from Miley Cyrus because they want to sing it for one of the girls who´s leaving for her mission in a few weeks and needed my help with the pronunciation. I had to explain to them that Miley Cyrus speaks ¨bad English¨ (¨gonna¨ instead of ¨going to¨and all that) and then I helped them practice singing it. I felt weird and yet oddly proud of myself in that moment...
This past week was insanely packed with events. We had our first interviews with President Ward and let me just say right now that I LOVE him. I couldn´t be happier with another president! He´s so positive, upbeat and he absolutely adores the Hermanas--he´s got a soft spot for sister missionaries because his daughter served a mission. I honestly feel like between him and his wife, I´ve got parents in the mission (don´t worry Mom and Dad--you have not been replaced).

We had zone conference this week, too, where we get to sit in the freezing chapel for 8 hours and learn from all of the ZL´s and the president. The topic for this week was using the Book of Mormon and how we need to be looking for more opportunities to share it with people. I felt inspired by that and this weekend I gave away a copy of the Book of Mormon to a lady we contacted at a bus stop. We don´t generally hand out the books on the streets here but I felt like I needed to carry one with me that day and this lady that we talked to showed some genuine interest in the church, so I wrote a brief testimony on the inside cover and gave it to her with a promise that we were going to stop by her house later this week. We´ll see what happens.

The most important thing of note is Natasha´s baptism which was this Saturday. Even though all of our plans for the agenda fell through (our speaker got sick and the primary didn´t show up to sing their special number) it was still a special day. We bought a cake for her and lots of people showed up to support her. Pretty neat. She is now officially a member! I just hope she always stays strong.

Well I´ve given up trying to send pictures via internet because people tell me my card can get viruses if I use it here, so just expect some photos in the mail...soon :). Or, you know...surf the Internet. Someone´s probably already blogged all about this on a different missionary´s site. Nothing´s secret anymore.

I love you guys and I hope you´re all doing well. Happy 34th to Angie this week!!! I´ll be thinking of you.

Hasta la próxima,
Hna. Brewster

Panama canal...but can Al can Panama?

(catch up from August 23)
I´ve been thinking of that subject line for this entire week, I want you to know. I was so excited to use it.

Hey Fam!

This week whipped by quickly. A few noteworthy things:
- I had my first Panamanian dentist appointment. That was...quite interesting. My tooth vocab´s a little lacking, but from what I can tell, I have to come back in two weeks to fix something with the something r other and it´ll cost me 20 more dollars. That much was clear. I was singing the ¨You´ll be a dentist¨ song from little shop of horrors in my head while the dentista drilled away at my poor tooth. It was a neat experience and I´m only lacking a photograph of it to make it perfect.

- We had a huge activity Saturday night in the chapel with all of our ward members and a few investigators and were able to get about 30 references out of it. The different auxiliaries put on plays and talent shows and then we had some games with candy prizes. It´s amazing what you can do when you tell people they´re going to have treats and entertainment. Perhaps if we had cake in sacrament meeting, our attendance would rise a bit?

- My computer still won´t read my camera card, so I dunno how I´m going to send you all photos of these things, but I´m working on it. Do not give up hope.
Happy Birthday to Caden and happy back to school week too!
In my next letter you´ll be hearing all about the baptism of Natacha, our 17yearold investigator, the zone conference we´re having and my first interview with president Ward. This week will be a busy one!

Love you all!
Hna. Brewster

Buenas noticeas!

Natacha has a baptismal date!!!

We were teaching her 3 Nephi 11 and before we could even get to the part about baptism, she asks us, ¨How can I be baptized?¨

We were elated. Really, though, I don´t feel like we did a whole lot. She was ready and prepared for us, we were just put in her path. I´m learning more and more what it means to be än instrument in the Lord´s hands¨-- sometimes I feel like I really am just a puppet whose strings are pulled (but I mean that in a good way). Anyway, that´s my good exciting news. Now we´re just praying everything goes well for the 28th of August.

In other news...we had a city wide water outage this weekend and let me tell you, life was GRIM. Thankfully, we had a few drops coming out of our faucet in the house, so we got by all right until Saturday night when it completely left. This was particularly frustrating because we were gross, hot, sweaty and dirty at the end of the day because we´d been tracting in the sun all day long and it hadn´t rained a drop (totally rare here). I wanted to cry. Seriously. Then I thought to myself, ¨Hmm...there´s probably some greater lesson in this...¨and of course there are various gospel applications to choose from. But thankfully, I am very happy to say that we had our water back yesterday morning, so it wasn´t too severe. BUT ENJOY YOUR WATER! Tis a precious, precious thing.

Other than that, I don´t have much to report from this week. I haven´t eaten anything crazy lately, just the same old dishes of rice, chicken and platanos (bananaish things). And the tan is coming along just great :)

This weekend we´ve got a ward activity to encourage references. It´s called ¨Noche de Dulces y Teatro¨which means that we´ll have treats, games and Biblical plays put on by the RS, the Elders Quorum and the young men-women. Should be a kick.

love you all!
hasta la proxima
Hna. Brewster

Con valor marchemos

(a late post - from August 9th)
Hi everyone,

We had a great Sunday yesterday. For the first time in a long time, we had a really positive investigator named Natacha (17) attend sacrament meeting with us and it was great. She sat next to me and I talked to her all about the sacrament, what covenants were, what the talks meant, etc. She was really interested and even was asking about baptism. We´ve got a family night planned with one of our recent converts and Natacha wants to come check that out. She´s a sweet girl and I´m really hoping and praying that she´ll accept the gospel into her life.

While I was reading the Book of Mormon (bueno, mi Libro de Mormón) I found a verse that never stuck out to me much before but now has special significance: Alma 29:10. It expresses my feelings of the mission perfectly. I always liked v. 9 but now I think 10 is my favorite. See if you can figure out why.

I know I promised pictures and more details for this week but my camera card won´t read on my computer and thanks to some technical difficulties, my time is shorter than it would have been to write to you all. I don´t think that´s going to make me very popular with you all, but I´m sorry. I´m doing what I can.

Now´s my turn to get to be the missionary and invite you all to read the Book of Mormon together and to have regular, consistent family nights. I won´t commit you to it but I definitely hope you all do it. It makes such a huge difference and since you´ve all got young kids (minus Mom and Dad--sorry, parents. You´ve done your job. And well done.) now´s the time to make the lasting impression. Can I just tell you all how grateful I am for each of you? What a blessing it´s been to grow up in the gospel with parents who taught us right and kept us on a good path. I really can´t wait to have my own family someday and follow the example set for me by all of you.
As the saying goes, ¨The church is true, the book is blue.¨

Take care of yourselves and have a good week,

love,
Hermana Brewster