fotos :)

First:  Noche de Rama (Branch Night) activity - learning how to paint nails.  (The men played soccer)

Second:  banana pancakes for our collaboration meeting with our branch mission leader in the home of Teresa because she is just awesome

 (Our branch mission leader is named David Legal.  And he's a lawyer.  No joke.)

Yeah, she's my favorite :)

How was Elder Bednar?  (We heard last week that he would be speaking to the missionaries in her area, as well as the surrounding missions, via satellite).

OH! Elder Bednar was incredible! He is my favorite apostle! (I say that now, but when Gen. Conference comes around they're all my favorite.) But we learned so much from him! I think that we learned more from his example, because he taught us as if he were the missionary and we were the investigators, than from what he actually said. For me, kind of the theme of the meeting was to learn as agents. As children of God, we are endowed with power to act, not to be acted upon. For example, when we study the scriptures, are we reading just to know what they say and fill our heads with information, or are we actively seeking revelation and inspiration, answers to the questions in our soul? And when we teach, do we invite the people we teach to become active learners, or do we treat them as objects, trying to fill their heads with information? He commented that one of the foolish traditions of the church is to play "guess what's in my head" - a game where the teacher asks questions looking for specific answers and the student tries desperately to guess what the teacher is looking for. When Elder Bednar taught us, he asked us several questions and had mikes running around the chapel so that the missionaries could respond to his questions. And none of his questions was looking for a specific answer. (For example, he had assigned us some reading, and he asked us what we learned from the reading. He wasn't looking for a specific theme from the talks we read or a key phrase or anything, he just wanted to know what we had learned.) So my companion and I are now working on teaching investigators as agents to act and not as objects to be acted upon.