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