Transfer time!

Good morning Mommy!!!! 

Thank you for your emails this week! It has been so fun to get them everyday, and my companion have been enjoying past Halloween pictures of Hermanita Croft. 

I don't know if I will have more time to write today cause we got a lot of things to do down here! Your guesses were pretty close. Hermana Smith is staying here to train her baby, Hermana McCoy is off to Elizabeth to be an STL (which is very exciting, because depending on how they split the areas she might be assigned to go on exchanges with Hermana Smith and I), I won't be going back to Red Bank because they are closing down that area (nothing was happening there and they have more missionaries going home than coming in this transfer). I will be off to Kearny, a walking area.*  And guess what, I get to go to Ellis Island! Probably not a ton, but once or twice during the transfer! Yay! Also, apparently it is kind of a hood area, so that should be interesting. 

Your pumpkins are absolutely beautiful! I love the día de los muertos designs, they look awesome! In celebration of the holiday our members have given us some pan de los muertos (day of the dead bread), it is delicious and also kind of creepy as it is baked in the shape of a corpse...

Love you! Hopefully I will send another email later today. Tell everyone happy Halloween for me! 

Love,

Hermana Croft 

P.S. Yes, we do have curfews tonight and tomorrow.

* Kearny is a suburb of Newark...Newark being the area that is supposedly behind why New Jersey is called "the armpit of America." She'll be able to give a first hand opinion as to whether she feels it merits the motto or not...should be interesting. ha!

 Car selfies...

 I have no idea what is going on in this picture...

 Looks like maybe they were caught in the rain?

Trio Life

Hello Hello Hello!

Wow. What a week it has been. Let's go through day by day, shall we? 

Monday: Whilst doing P-day activities President Hess called Hermana McCoy and I and told us to pack up our stuff and drive up to Morristown to be emergency transferred. We packed, cleaned up everything and then drove an hour and a half to the mission home. We slept over that night with Hermana Smith and her sick companion. 

Tuesday: Wake up and immediately drive the two and a half hours down to Toms River with all our stuff. Unpacked a little bit to get settled in and then we were off to some appointments! Hermana Smith is still in training (we came in from the CCM together), but leading out the area like a pro!

Wednesday: Our first full day as a Trio! Hermana McCoy and I tried to memorize all the names and people as we spent the day in appointments and learned how to work in a trio. The Sister Training Leaders, who had planned an exchange with Hermana Smith and companion before everything went down, decided to come and double work our area to help us out. So that night we had not three, but five sister missionaries sleeping in our apartment. Every inch of the bedroom floor was covered in makeshift beds to accommodate the visitors. Sleep over!

Thursday: Hermana Smith and I spent the day knocking doors with one STL, while Hermana McCoy left with the other (a major feat, considering neither of them knew the area at all). They left that night after a successful but somewhat stressful day. 

Friday: We made the hour drive up to my old area (Red Bank) for interviews with President Hess. This resulted in all three of us being very anxious about transfers next week. From what we were able to piece together from the different things he told each of us in our interviews, the trio will be dissolved after this week. We are all a little sad about this. 

Saturday: Up at 4:45 to get ready and drive back to Morristown for the all zone conference with Elders Buckner, and Bennett of the seventy and Elder Rasband of the Quorum of the Twelve! Super cool! We each got to shake his hand and take a picture with him as a mission. *Side note: For the picture they had us line up from tallest to shortest. And yes, in case you were wondering, I am the shortest missionary currently serving in the New Jersey Morristown Mission.* The coolest thing he said was near the end: "I want you to hear this from my own mouth, The Saviors voice is no stranger to the leaders of the church." Yeah. 

Then that night we had three dinner appointments in a row. So. Much. Food. I made the unwise decision of wearing a dress that was a little snug that morning because I wanted to look nice for Elder Rasband. During second dinner I was so full my dress was begining to really constrict my ablity to breath. So when the  member left the room for a second to get something I wasted no time in grabbing Hermana McCoy and having her help me unzip the death trap (yes, it was tight enough that I couldn't undo it on my own). Luckily I also had on a cardigan, so you couldn't see that my dress was fully unzipped for the rest of the night. Needless to say, I  don't think I will be wearing that dress again any time soon. Maybe fast sunday. We all felt super sick by the end of the night.

Sunday: Up early again to head up to stake conference in East Brunswick. We had to be there early because of the special guest. That's right, Elder Rasband chose our stake to visit out of the six he was offered. Why? Because it is where he served when he was a missionary. You can read a cool story about his experiences in Scott's Plains NJ in his last conference talk by "Divine Design". I have gone to that area twice on exchanges, so that's cool. The spirit was super strong when he gave an apostolic blessing to the stake. 

Other things:

*Transfers are next week. We will definitely be split up, because Hermana Smith has been called as a trainer! She is going straight out of her own training to teaching a new missionary! She is a rockstar!

*There are a TON of Jews in Toms River! It is one of the biggest Jewish populations in the world. 

*Hermana Smith told the ward my favorite food is vegetables and now all the members are making us veggies. They are so sweet! And we are a little bit healthier for it :)

Have a great week! 

Hermana Croft 

Unexpected transfer

Buenos Dias!

You should be getting an email from Hermana McCoy with a video. Why? Because my life has changed since I emailed you this morning. (Julianne emailed a quick good luck message early this morning to do with something she knew I had going on today.) We are getting emergency transferred to the very south-est area of the mission. I will be in a trio with Hermana Smith from the CCM so that will be cool to spend some time with her. Her companion has been having medical issues the past two transfers and now they are sending her home on a plane tomorrow for emergency surgery. I don't know exactly what is going on, but she was dying (finishing her mission) this transfer anyway, so luckily she is only leaving two weeks early. Hermana McCoy and I are packing up our stuff and leaving our apartment today to move in with Hermana Smith in Toms River. We were driving to the grocery store when President texted us asking us to call him. 

So, got to go pack. Then say goodbye to the neighbors. Then probably drive for around 4 hours to get the other sisters to the mission home and then back to the south again. Who knows if I will be coming back to Red Bank after transfers, so it's a little sad I can't say goodbye to any of the members. We might be coming back up to Red Bank once or twice to meet with an investigator, but other than that the area will have English missionaries, but not Spanish for the next two weeks. Our ward has Spanish elders as well but just in a neighboring area, so they will probably take care of the members in our area for the next little while as well as their own. So it should all be fine. It sure is an adventure! Hermana McCoy and I are going to try and hit one of the restaurants here that we have been meaning to try before we leave. 

A few other things that happened this week:

* A member called me fat during dinner together (because Hispanics are just super honest about that stuff) and then 2 hours later one of our new investigators who can't pronounce Croft, called me Hermana Cow. That was a rough day. 

* My companion and I were trying to find a less active last night, but his address was impossible, mostly because they changed all the street names. So we asked a man sitting on his porch for directions and ended the conversation 30 minutes later with him offering us $100 just for whatever we needed because we told him he couldn't take us out to a fancy dinner because it was Sunday. No he wasn't hitting on us (He was actually going to invite his girlfriend to dinner as well), Hispanics are just very very giving people. 

* I watched one of the members eat a chicken foot with the nails still attached and everything. Luckily I didn't have to eat the foot myself, just the chicken it used to be connected to cooked together in the same pot. 

* We met a woman one the street who stopped us and told us she was a member, but hadn't been to church in three years. She then gave us her name, number, and address and told us to come over that week. Super cool! Definitely a miracle. She speaks english so we will be passing her on to the English sisters.

Sorry I don't have time to write more! Have a good week!

Hermana Croft

Happy Autumn

Buenas Tardes! 

What an absolutely lovely weekend it has been here in New Jersey. The weather has turned the corner into autumn, and I am thoroughly enjoying it. There are leaves to crunch underfoot and the sheer amount of acorns near both our apartment and the church astounds me. These are even more delightful to step on than the leaves, if you can believe it. I tried to refrain from crushing them at first for the sake of the squirrels that are collecting food for the winter (because there are seriously a TON of squirrels here!) But sometimes when you are knocking doors and having no luck, you need the simple pleasure of squishing an acorn to the pavement. 

The spirit was just in the air this conference weekend. We watched all four sessions at the church, 3 in English and 1 in Spanish. My notes from that session are a little confusing. They are all in Spanglish and I've got a lot of unfinished sentences where I couldn't quite understand what was going on. I'm sure I will get a lot from going back over these talks as I have time. Frankly I'm sure I will get a lot out of re-reading ALL the talks. I really loved Elder Jeffery R. Holland's talk, and Tad R. Callister's is perfect for a less-active we are working with. As I watched, taking my own notes, the names of people we are teaching would pop into my mind and I would write them down. By the end of the conference I had just about everybody's name scattered somewhere throughout my notebook. Needless to say, my lesson plans for the next couple weeks are going to be centered around the revelation we received this past weekend. 

In between sessions on Sunday we experienced some serious miscommunications with a less-active man we were supposed to meet up with to teach. After he didn't answer the door we wandered to the side of the house where we heard some men talking. They knew our less-active, but wasn't sure where he was. Upon discovering we spoke Spanish they asked if we were from Spain (cause, white girls) and when we responded no, we were American one became especially interested. I picked up the phone and tried to call the less-active again, so I wasn't listening too closely. Soon words like beautiful, and boyfriend caught my attention. I tuned in right in time to hear an approximately 40 year old Hispanic man propose to my companion. She declined saying she was only here to teach about Christ. He offered to listen to all the lessons if she would marry him afterwards. To which she responded that she was only 19 years old. All the better, he said as I tried to interpret both the conversation and answer the less-active who I had now got on the phone, in my brain. Using the phone call as an excuse, we left in a hurry. This is actually the second time Hermana McCoy has been proposed to on her mission. Apparently it is an easy way to become a US citizen. 

The war with the crickets rages on, and unfortunately the battle territory has grown. We are now experiencing attacks on two different fronts, with the little guys appearing in the kitchen and bathroom. I was all for continuing to use the 409 cleaning spray to keep them at bay, having found it to be effective in preventing them from retreating to safe ground (namely holes we have discovered in our baseboards) mid battle. However Hermana McCoy was feeling increasingly guilty about this after a less-active (whom we were attempting to bond with over funny bug stories) pronounced our methods to be inhumane due to the bleach component in our cleaning spray. We were left at a stand still, with Hermana McCoy refusing to use the 409, but also being unwilling to go out on the front lines herself with some other weapon. Luckily the Lord has provided for His servants, and in this our time of need, we were able to fall back on the skills we have acquired as missionaries. Thinking from the cricket's perspective, as we would when planning a lesson for an investigator, we started with the end goal in mind and worked backwards from there, weaving backup plans in as we went. With companionship unity as a guiding force, we were able to concoct and execute a flawless plan of extermination. When victory was certain with the bug securely trapped under a tupperwear box (that has now officially been dubbed the bug box, and will never again be used to hold food), we opted instead to extend the hand of mercy and slide a piece of cardboard beneath the box so we could deposit him outside (a great distance from the apartment). I felt a little like Captain Moroni throughout the whole process. 

Well, happy fall everyone! We have enjoyed listening to all the messages from conference, now it is time to apply them to our lives! I hope to be able to go in the the next General Conference ready for increased revelation having taken the counsel of the apostles to heart over the past six months and as a result grown more into the person God wants me to be. Love you!

XOXO

Hermana Croft 

This is one of the crickets. He is a little on the smaller end. In fact, come to think of it, this is the very cricket we captured and then let go outside. 

This is the park by the river where we ate sack lunches today and read emails.

Acai bowl: yum!

 The face mask is from last Monday.

  

 Pretty houses and a fun Little Free Library in Red Bank.