Sister Riley Dorrance's California Arcadia Mission: Week 48-49

Aaron! My buddy!

Baptism! Left to right: Rick (ward mission leader), Manuel, Sister Kang, Sister vanSon, yours truly, Victor

Alrighty kiddos.

This week was so funny. Thats kind of all I can explain it as... SO.

I didn't write an email last week because I didn't want to, buuuuuuut we put Manuel on date two weeks ago, AND HE GOT BAPTIZED YESTERDAY. It was truly a beautiful day he's so cool. For those of you that don't read every single one of my emails (aka everyone except my mom and my grandma), Manuel came to church because he talked to missionaries a year and a half ago and decided he was missing something in his life so he thought he'd check it out and we put him on date for baptism his first lesson but he got super busy and wasn't able to meet with us for about a month but THEN HE DID TWO WEEKS AGO and we put him on date for yesterday and it was wild. We had his interview on Saturday and our mission president recently made a rule that people need to be keeping the word of wisdom for two weeks to be baptized but because we had put him on date for such a close date we weren't able to teach him that principle until last Monday but he wasn't even addicted to coffee, he had no problems whatsoever keeping it but he had drank coffee on Sunday and so our district leader told him he had to make a new goal to be baptized and he was so sad and so we set a new date and everything but we were like "heck no, he needs to get baptized tomorrow" so we called our mission president and told him the whole story and he WAVED THE RULE. It was a miracle and a tender mercy if I ever saw one and it was the greatest. So he got baptized yesterday and it was BEAUTIFUL!

Thursday was pretty funny. So we went to visit Alisa because the second ward was having a garden party and we wanted her to get to know the ward better so we went over there to get her to go and she wasn't going to go because she hated her hair and she didn't have anything to wear and so we said, "well, sister kang knows how to dye hair and sister vanSon knows how to sew so her son Eric went and got some hair dye, and Sister Kang dyed her hair and sister vanSon waved her magic sewing fingers and fixed a little romper thing into a cute tunic type dress thing! I was in charge of moral support and comedic relief and despite some of my worst work, we got her to go to this garden party! It was a beautiful day and they had this peach lemonade there and it tasted like unicorn pee or something it was so good.

On Friday we went to the weirdest birthday party ever. It was for one of the people we're teaching and they had completely authentic Chinese food so I got to try chicken feet and pork stomach and cow liver and bamboo and pork with the skin still on and it was all pretty gross but that's okay because the lady topped it off with some apple juice and cheesecake. So that was interesting. Our friend really enjoyed himself though so that was good!

Today we went to the Korean market! It was so fun! Sister Kang was so excited because she found all this stuff that she used to have when she was little and we got some really good Korean food at this food court thing and it was a party and a half. She's gonna cook us dinner!

Alright, I'm out of time!

Don't forget to read your scriptures!

- Sister Dorrance