Russian Monopoly

Hello family, it's been quite a week! Before I left Baliwag I think I had about 6 birthday parties with members and missionaries..ha So it was actually a great birthday! I'll miss everyone in Baliwag so so much. SO...On Wednesday we traveled to meet our trainees!

I am now training Sister Surio, and let me just say Heavenly Father loves me. She's absolutely amazing! She was born here actually in this mission, then when she was 9 her family moved to San Francisco, so she's fluent in Tagalog and English. She went to BYU for 2 years before coming here and she was in the nursing program...Let's just say I feel a little inadequate like she is more beautiful and smarter and greater in every way. ha Just joking, but she's absolutely amazing I feel like I'm not even training. We get along great too.

We are living with two other sisters, Sister Criste who is training Sister Bautista from Las Vegas, and we have a blast together! I really just feel like I'm living with my best friends. It makes opening the area a lot easier, because even though the work is so hard and I'm really stressed with trying to train and open up the area here in San Mateo, it is just fun being with the other sisters. We found this Monopoly game in our apartment, but all the names are in Russian! So we have this on-going game of that and it's hilarious!! Sister Criste (filipina) was picking her piece to use and was so excited when she picked up the dog and said "I know this one! I want the horse." I started laughing SO hard and told her "aso iyan!!" which means "that's a dog!" but maybe it was funnier in the moment... But I think these next few months I'll really learn a lot, and especially improve my Tagalog because we all try to speak it to help Sister Bautista learn it, but I think it'll help me just as much. Sometimes I think about the fact that I'm actually bilingual and it's amazing to me :) ha Crazy really!!

Our first day in the area we were just walking around getting lost trying to follow this map, ha but we were blessed to accidentally meet this amazing member that brought us around to meet people..it was a true answer to prayers!! And by the way I'm sorry if any of this doesn't make sense, I'm finding it a little hard to speak in English...spell check is saving me right now! haha But anyway, after that we didn't have much work because we finally got to watch General Conference!!! It was AMAZING. I felt the spirit so so strong, it truly was an incredible weekend. I agree with President Monson that everything was so inspired. Actually one thing I love about Sister Surio is she loves talking about deep doctrine, which I've really learned to love to study on my mission so we have some Great talks..but we were talking about the second coming and how close it really is. But after conference I really felt that you could give it a title of "Just hold on a little longer and do the simple things, the end is almost here" I just really feel that it's coming so fast. It's such an exciting time!! But I really am so grateful for all the blessings I've seen just in the last few days...When I think about what I've been asked to do as a trainer and in an area I don't know, leaving all my friends I feel that I should want to cry, but I'm just SO Happy and feel completely great about it. I love it here :)

So sadly I don't have too many stories yet, but this will be a full week of work and actually finding all our investigators and those we teach so I'm sure I'll have some good ones next week! I love you all so so much, thank you for all your support! It really makes it a lot easier to be here knowing I have you all at home. Love you so much!!  SO glad to hear Grampy's surgery went ok, tell him I love him and am praying for him!

Love,

Sister Benesch