Happy Veteran's Day!

Tortillas de harina! I'm gonna be a pro!

The love and fun in the Campana House!

More sister silliness! Hra Gardner tried on Hra Bahr's glasses and said "This is my natural reaction" and Hra Escalante put on her headband as a "corona" (crown)

Again, points to Becca for my knowledge of American holidays. But also as a title for this week, I finished four months in the mission! That was pretty quick, right? It feels pretty quick here, anyway.

So this week was magical, of course. All of our weeks are magical. The rain has continued (YAY!). Someone asked me if I can handle this kind of weather and I said, "I'm from Seattle. This is how I live my life." And when it's not raining, usually it's quite a bit cooler. I've been using my raincoat and some scarves and one day (get ready for this) I even wore my sweater. Wow.

Last Monday I had another bread attempt. It went a lot better. Turns out eliminating the 5 hours in the refrigerator really helped. And I rolled out one of the loaves and put cinnamon and sugar in the middle, so we had cinnamon sugar bread. I need to experiment with that more, but it turned out pretty delicious. We demolished it in about 5 minutes. Especially because the grocery store was having a blowout sale on Nutella (one of the normal sized jars for 45 Lempira! That's hardly more than $2!) And EVERYTHING tastes good with Nutella on it. I think that jar of nutella might have been a bad idea, but I just won't buy another one, so we're good. We had another Noche de Hogar that involved making baleadas, and my tortillas are starting to be circular more often than not, so I feel pretty accomplished about that.

We were blessed to see two of our investigators be baptized this week! Denia from the fam. Mancia Garcia and Leyser, Heydi's younger brother, were both baptized on Friday. Leyser had really started reading his BoM on Tuesday and just like that he said, Hras, I want to be baptized. And then he stopped drinking coffee and started being nicer to his older sister and by the time he had his interview on Friday morning, that kid was crazy ready to be baptized. Talk about a mighty (and fast) change of heart. And Denia realized pretty early in the week that her husband would be working during her baptism, but she was determined to be baptized anyway. We went to visit her on Thursday night and we sang Abide With Me, 'Tis Eventide (still my favorite, though the following hymn, Abide with me, is a close second) and talked about how the Lord doesn't abandon us in the night times of our lives. And she said that she knew she needed to be baptized, and had prayed that her husband would be able to come, so she was just going to keep moving forward. So then on Friday, when we were leaving for the baptism and he still wasn't home, she was kind of down (we were all kind of down. Friday was grey and miserable all day long--I had to sing The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow more than once). But we got to the church and who was waiting at the gate? Denia's husband! It was a miracle of the Lord and true love! The baptisms themselves were kind of tough, because the kid who was baptizing hadn't had very much of a warning, so the words took a few tries, and Denia's first time in the water was no good. But the real trouble was with Leyser, because no one told him (or so he says) that he had to put his head under the water. So that took about seven tries. And I wish I was exaggerating. But he went in eventually, and both of them were confirmed yesterday (Leyser was blessed to serve a full time mission) so it all turned out well.

Diana and Jose Buh came to the baptism too! Their son is David and their little girl is Cesia

 Heydi and Leyser. They aren't really good enough friends to hug in pictures yet, but we're working on that!

CUTE picture of Denia and Jose--Jose loves having his picture taken! 

We found a goldmine of investigators this week: Last week we contacted a girl in the street (we kind of got in her way when she was trying to cross a bridge and shared the message of the Restored Gospel...we do that) and she invited us to come back and meet her family. There are SIX people in that family. Six! And all of them wanted to listen to us! Unfortunately, only two could come to church. But they are super ready to hear this Gospel. They have lots of questions, but they ask because they really want to know, not because they want to prove us wrong. And they were really receptive about the First Vision (although the mom, Maria, asked in the middle if we wanted baleadas, so we had to ask her to focus) and they were really excited for us to bring them a copy of the BoM. So we're pretty excited about them. But the dad, Marco Tulio, has some sort of problem with his left eye, so we're never really sure who he's looking at. It's led to some kind of funny awkward moments.

Also on the topic of great investigators, Angi and Heydi are planning to be baptized this Saturday. Angi is helping us to start teaching her mom, Maria, and we think being involved in the conversion process will be really good for Angi as she starts out her membership in the church. We've been spending a lot of quality time with fam. Buh, and we got a little scared for a minute, because they really were not pleased with the baptism on Friday. It was the first baptism they've ever seen, and the fact that there was so much of a struggle for the baptisms to get done and that the members present were kind of giggling at the sheer number of times that Leyser almost was baptized didn't sit very well with them. But we had a talk about how the Church is perfect but the members aren't and apparently the ward mission council (most of which are teenaged ward missionaries, and they're the ones who come to baptisms) got a stern talking to about reverence and setting an example yesterday. So hopefully that doesn't happen again. That's a kind of tough thing about the mission: you can work really hard with your investigators and do everything possible for them, but eventually you have to entrust them to the members...and you never know what's going to happen next. But we're all in this together, and it's fine! And Diana blew our minds yesterday, because we were started to talk about Word of Wisdom and we said, "So can you guess what sort of things God would tell us about how to care for our bodies?" And she pretty much hit on every point of the WoW. Talk about pilas!

We had splits with the Sister Leader Trainers on Wednesday and Sister Lopez told me she thinks I'll be a sister leader trainer (which is kind of like a female ZL but different) very soon. Terrifying! I asked her to take things one step at a time.

 Exchanges! I love Hra Lopez! (Mom, the first one is really just for you so you can see the skirt I bought. Pretty cute for an Honduran thrift store, huh? I think it's very Maddi Raleigh)

Mary, this one is for you and Jordan: we were teaching one of our investigators about the Word of Wisdom and he had a very casual attitude about throwing away his cigarettes, making a plan to avoid buying them, etc. He said he could just stop and that having them around wouldn't be hard for him. So I told him Coach Gelwix's story about Don't Play With Snakes. So now Coach Gelwix's wisdom has been imparted in Spanish/ in Central America. I thought you two might like to know.

I really love it here. We don't know what our cambios are yet, but Hra. Escalante thinks she's going to leave and I'll get a little Latina to train. I think that would be really scary but I'm ready to accept whatever job the Lord wants to give me! I love this gospel, I love this work, I love these people, and I love my Savior Jesus Christ. I am so blessed to be a fellow laborer in the vineyard (I read Jacob 5 in like 20 minutes the other day and it all made sense. I can liken it now!) and to have this time to be molded by the Lord. I miss you all but I'm so glad to be here and I know it's only going to be all the sweeter when we see each other again!

So much love!
Hra. Pickett

And I haven't had much use for my hat, because I'm not allowed to wear it proselyting, but it's pretty good for washing clothes in the rain.