Sister Elizabeth Ashley Smith: Day 26 Hermiston, OR -Letter with a bunch of pics

hola family!

First off, CONRATULATIONS AMANDA!!!! Holy crap. I am so stinkin excited for you!And I about pooped my pants when I got to hear your voice and talk to you!!! I was running aruond the kitchen with my companion afterwards freaking out. Gah. So awesome. I'm sending you a letter today. :) (for all you peeps reading this who don't already know, my little sis got her mission call to the Philippines Tacloban mission!)

Anywho. So I am now in Hermiston, Oregon! We are the very first sisters in the area from our mission, so that's been fun. My comp is Sister Hovorka, and she is super great. She's from Highland, Utah and has been out for about 10 months. We live with Bishop Blackburn, his wife, and their 33 yr old daughter Mandy. They are AWESOME. (If you couldn't tell by the fact that Sis Blackburn wanted to call you about Manda's mission call haha) We live in their basement and we like it there. Except okay...get this. The house is straight out of the movie 'Signs'. I'm not even joking. We are surrounded by cornfields, there's a creepy swingset, they have two dogs, and there's almost always this thick fog around here that just adds to the ambience. I'll attach a pic for ya. But the people here are super great and I've already got connections from home!! The ward mission leader's son and daughter -in-law live with them...and guess who his daughter in law is? Camilla Salcido! (Hannah and Amanda's older sister) AND Wes Cook's brother is the first (Second? idk) counselor in the bishopric here. Small small Mormon world. My comp makes fun of me cause I seem to know everyone already haha...I can't help it that I'm so popular ;)

Oh also I did get your package, which Elder Sam Metz so graciously took the liberty of writing all over before I arrived so I'd have notes from him. haha he's still the same old Sam! It was great to see him for a little bit!

So when we got here, the previous Elders only had two investigators for us. Which was daunting. One of them told us he was no longer interested, so that sucked. The other one was the Stubbs family. And they are cray cray. Both of the parents are not all the way there, if you know what I mean. We tried to go visit them and get to know them...David (the dad) wouldn't sit down the entire time. He just stood in the doorway and yelled at his kids every five seconds. The mom Heather just sat there and pretty much ignored us and sat there calling her baby a brat and yelling at her dog and stuff. It was interesting. Apparently the last Elders were on the verge of dropping them, so we'll do a lesson or two with them and see how it goes.

Miracle of the week: So we were talking to our ZL's about how we weren't finding anyone to teach and stuff, and they said (kind of jokingly) "Okay, then that's your assignment for today. You have to get a miracle by the end of the day and then call us and tell us what it was." So we were like yeahhhh okay. So we went through our area book and found a couple people from the potential investigators section from a couple years ago. One was named Vera, and she had gotten most of the lessons but then moved. So we decided to try to find her. Before leaving, I got the impression to kneel down with my comp and actually pray for a miracle...so we did. We plug in the address to the GPS, and it leads us right next door to.........The Stubbs. But we couldn't find the dang house, and so we were like fine. Let's go tracting. (This is in Echo, one of the creepiest towns I've ever been to in my life. We were there at 7pm and we didn't pass a single car. Not once.) So we went tracting for a couple hours, and no luck there. Mostly because no one answered their doors. Weird. But it sucked. Tracting is not my favorite. Anywho, it gets to 8:30 and we decide to give up on Echo for the night and start making our way back to Hermiston, but we wanted to stay out until at least nine so that we would have given it our all. The second we leave the town limits, David Stubbs calls us and said he saw us outside his house and was wondering if we were gonna teach him tonight. We explained we were looking for Vera but that she had moved. He was like "Oh Vera! I totally know where she lives! I can show you where it is right now if you want?" So we screeched to a stop, turned around, and he led us to this little house on the other side of town nestled away in the woods. Go Brother Stubbs. We knocked on Vera's door, we said "We're the missionaries!", she hung up the phone and ushered us right on in. We sat down with her and she said "I was just thinking about the missionaries for the past couple days! I haven't seen them in a couple years so I was praying that maybe I could see them again soon!" Boom. Miracle. She's a little odd cause she had brain surgery a little while ago and has some memory problems, but she is the sweetest lady and is very close to God. So we'll see how the lessons go! But we called the ZL's as soon as we got back in the car and freaked out to them. It was great.

I'll write more next week about our other investigators since we'll know a bit more about them and where they stand with things. Stay tuned. But yeah lemme know what else you want me to tell you in the next email! I just kinda ramble on about stuffs so hopefully it all makes sense.

Anywho, enjoy the pics! There are some of me and Sister McMurtrey (my MTC comp), me and Sis Hovorka (my comp now), me and Elder Metz, my MTC district/teachers, and other stuffs. Idk. Have at it.

Love and miss you all!! Pray that I won't get abducted by aliens out here! :)

Sister Smaisley Smith