La Vega, Santiago, Santo Domingo

Hey Family,

I´m only a few days late, not too bad right? We didn´t write on Monday because we got a call from the mission office on Sunday and found out that I needed to go to Santo Domingo the next day for a visa physical. It was a crazy trip, but very cool. Monday morning we took a ruta (kind of like a taxi but they fit as many people as they can in each car) from Primavera to La Vega, then a gwa qwa (a bus) to Santiago. We rode on a metro (or a really big gwa·gwa) for two hours from Santiago to Santo Domingo. The ride from Santiago to Santo Domingo was super pretty, it was mostly jungle looking hills and farms with banana (or guineo in Dominican Spanish) trees. I had a physical in Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo is very pretty, and it definitely has a different feel than Santiago. Santigao is a lot more rural than Santo Domingo, but that has its benefits. We waited at the MTC in Santo Domingo so I got to tour the CCM there and see the temple. The temple here is beautiful. In the Santiago mission we don´t get to go to the temple until the end of our mission, on the Friday we leave to go home. I had my physical, we stayed the night in Santiago at the Hermana training leaders house, and then came back to Primavera Tuesday morning. 

Last Monday the elders in my district wanted to go shopping so we went to La Vega and went shopping in all of the little stores there. Most of the stores in La Vega are owned by Chinese families and are called tiendas chinas; you can find almost anything in them, it is kind of crazy. I even found a BYU hat in one of them, which I thought was funny. We went grocery shopping after and then came back to Primavera.  It sounds like the solar eclipse was really cool. We heard some crazy things from people about it a few days before it happened. We had one lady tell us that she read on the internet that we wouldn´t have any light for three hours during the solar eclipse and a few other crazy things. As missionaries, I feel like we sometimes hear the weirdest things. We tried to see the solar eclipse with sun glasses, but it didn´t look very different than normal here. 

This week we have been working hard to get to know the members here more and work with them to find and to teach. We have gotten a few references from different families in our ward and so far all of the references have been great. Usually the references are families, which is really nice because it is great to teach families all together. On Tuesday afternoon we bought a member with us to a lesson with a less active family and it was probably the longest lesson I have ever been in. Both the member and the mom of the family loved to talk. One talkative Dominican (most Dominicans love to talk) can talk for an hour straight, so if you put two talkative Dominican women together in a lesson you end up with a very, very long lesson. But it was good, they got along super well and I think it was good for the family to know they have a friend.

This week at church we had one of the families who was a reference from a member come to church and they are amazing. They have a twelve year old daughter who has taken all of the lessons and is ready to get baptized and now we are just teaching the rest of the family. The family of the return missionary and the Haitian family both weren´t able to come to church, but we are hoping for teh next week. This next week we will have to stop teaching a few of the people and families we are teaching because they aren´t willing to come to church or read the scriptures. It is really hard, but hopefully that will help us focus on the people who are ready to be baptized. We´ll see how it goes. 

This week was a good week and I was so glad to hear from you all. It sounds like it was a good week for everyone. I hope that school is going well for everyone. I love you all and hope you have a great week! 

Hermana Schriever