I have too much to say, so I will try to summarize everything the best I can:
New Companion: Sister Dow! She is from Maine, so another East coaster! (woot woot!) Been out 6 months, has never been in another area. Pretty quiet, we get along pretty well so far.
New area: it's....an adjustment. Covering 2 wards is SUPER STRESSFUL! Sunday at church was ridiculous running back and forth between classes and meetings and having everyone try to stop you in the hallway to say hello to the new sister (me.) Bleh! It was definitely not a day of rest. But there seem to be a lot of really great people in the 2 wards.
The First ward is Golden Hills. It is basically the more rural outskirts of Tehachapi. They call that area Golden Hills because it sounds a lot nicer than Dead Brown Grass Hills. Actually, it is very pretty when you are looking at it from a distance. All of the streets are super random and confusing, so I felt lost all the time (thank goodness Sister Dow has a GPS.)
The Second ward is Bear Valley. So Bear Valley is weird. It is basically a gigantic gated community out in the mountains. I expected all of the houses to be very large. There are indeed many large houses, but it turns out there are also many normal sized houses as well. It is very pretty there, with lots of trees and a couple of ponds (apparently the locals call them "lakes." I scoffed at that when Sister Dow told me – I guess Californians have never seen real lakes before.) Many of the people that live there have horses. We also see a lot of deer and we've been told that there are also a number of mountain lions. Please pray that I won't be eaten by one. The ward boundaries also includes several other valleys in Tehachapi outside of Bear Valley, that aren't gated, but they are all very pretty and not very highly populated. Because everything is spread out we are spending a lot more time driving places than I am used to and it is driving me nuts!
The First ward is Golden Hills. It is basically the more rural outskirts of Tehachapi. They call that area Golden Hills because it sounds a lot nicer than Dead Brown Grass Hills. Actually, it is very pretty when you are looking at it from a distance. All of the streets are super random and confusing, so I felt lost all the time (thank goodness Sister Dow has a GPS.)
The Second ward is Bear Valley. So Bear Valley is weird. It is basically a gigantic gated community out in the mountains. I expected all of the houses to be very large. There are indeed many large houses, but it turns out there are also many normal sized houses as well. It is very pretty there, with lots of trees and a couple of ponds (apparently the locals call them "lakes." I scoffed at that when Sister Dow told me – I guess Californians have never seen real lakes before.) Many of the people that live there have horses. We also see a lot of deer and we've been told that there are also a number of mountain lions. Please pray that I won't be eaten by one. The ward boundaries also includes several other valleys in Tehachapi outside of Bear Valley, that aren't gated, but they are all very pretty and not very highly populated. Because everything is spread out we are spending a lot more time driving places than I am used to and it is driving me nuts!
Investigators: We are teaching an older lady named Bonnie. She is the cutest little old lady ever! She loves the Gospel and Jesus Christ so much :) Last night we went over to teach her a lesson but she had just taken some medication that was making her very sleepy and she was trying to stay awake so hard but she just kept falling asleep mid sentence. We ended up just sharing a scripture with her instead of a lesson. She is hopefully going to be baptized the end of September. We also have 2 other investigators that have already been taught for a little while, Hong (she's Chinese) and Mike her husband, but they have been out of town, and then sick, so I have not actually been able to meet them yet. We also started teaching a girl named Anna. She is in her 20s but is mildly mentally handicapped, so I'm not exactly sure how that is going to work out yet. I guess we will figure it out as we go.
Random: We went raspberry picking today. There is a member here that has a field of raspberry bushes that people can pick themselves and then leave money in the "honesty box." She told us we could come and get as many raspberries as we wanted for free, so we did.
Miracle: We were in between Golden Hills and Bear Valley last night when we realized we were out of gas. We had an appointment in Bear Valley, so we just continued in that direction, and decided we would just buy a little gas to keep us going, because we felt super bad about having to get gas on the Sabbath. We drove the 8 miles to the gas station on empty. Crisis averted! ......Except the gas station didn't have power. And it was the only gas station within 10 miles. We continued on empty until we reached a members house, who thankfully had some emergency gas in a can that they were able to give us. And, it was a double miracle because we didn't have to buy gas on a Sunday!
More random: There seem to be a lot of weird people that we talked to this week. One lady yelled at us and basically told us we should go to Africa instead of California because the people in California "already have Jesus". On the flip side we talked to a preacher who was very nice but he told us that the reason California has so many fires is because it's a consequence for all the wickedness here. He told us that what we were doing was very much needed in California right now. I would be interested to see what the two would say to each other if they met and randomly started talking about religion.
We were terrible about taking pictures, but here's what I've got for the week:
Also, look what this street is called!! :D
Have a great week!
Sister Daelemans
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