Wedding and Reception

Dear family,

Hey, how are you all doing? This week was definitely one of the craziest of my mission so far between teaching new investigators and getting ready for the wedding. Last Monday we went to Jarabacoa, a little town in our zone, to play volleyball and then we went shopping and then we wrote home. After we went to teach and then spent the last hour of our night following up on members who had agreed to bring food for the Polanco´s wedding. Each day this week we would pass by the Polanco family to see how they were doing and then we would hunt down members to talk to them about helping with the wedding reception (our favorite thing to do). 

On Thursday we went to the ¨junta¨, kind of like a court house here were people get married, in La Vega with the family Polanco and a family in our ward, the Diaz family, and we filled out all their paper work. After we got their papers done they got married. Actually getting married only took about 15 minutes and then the Diaz family signed papers as the witnesses for the marriage. Right after we got out of the building when they got married, Ramon got a call from his work saying that they had work for him and that he could start working that Friday. Both he and his wife, Isabel, told us it was a blessing for them following the commandments and getting married because he hadn´t had work for over a month. After this we headed back to our area and kept working.

On Saturday we went in the morning to go set up the wedding reception for the familia Polanco in the church. Phew, wedding receptions are stressful. Luckily, we got lots of help from the members here and it turned out really beautiful. We set up the tables and the members started to bring the food at 1:00 and we got everything ready. The wedding reception was suppose to start at 2, but true to Dominican style, it actually started at 4 so we were at the church for a long time on Saturday. Once everyone came at 4 we ate and they all danced and talked. I can´t say enough how grateful I am for the members here, they really are amazing, we couldn´t have done the wedding without them.

At 6:00 we had the baptism and it was my favorite part of the day. They all were very happy and I definitely felt the Spirit during their baptism. I´m so excited for them. We´ll keep teaching their other two daughters and hopefully they´ll decide to be baptized too. I know that when we have faith anything is posible, so we´ll see. 

Yesterday was Hermana Lynch´s birthday and we got to eat cake and leftover wedding food for her birthday. We had a few new investigators come to church and then after church we went out to teach. It felt nice to go teach after being focused on the wedding for most of last week. 

Today we went to Santiago and played soccer with two other zones of missionaries in an old airport runway that got turned into a park. We went to Wendy´s to get Hermana Lynch a birthday frosty and then went grocery shopping. So far it has been a good day. 

I´ll try to send pictures of the wedding, but for parts of the wedding I didn´t have my camera and Hermana Lynch´s SD card got a virus today so I´ll probably send more next week if we can get her card restored. I hope that you all have a great week. I love you all!

Hermana Schriever