Midwood Companions

My first companion was Sister Allred, from Bakersfield, CA.  Like I said in an earlier post she spoke Spanish really well and was a great teacher.  I learned so much from her!  We were together from February 8, 2005 to May 1.  She taught me about mini-rewards - rewarding ourselves in small ways for working hard.  Usually we would go to McDonald's and get one of their $1 hot fudge sundaes.  She also always sang a song that she made up to the tune of _______ I can't remember right now, but it went like this:

Goin' tractin', goin' tractin',
Gonna knock on lots of peoples doors.
Gonna teach them 'bout the gospel,
Gonna ask them if they love the Lord.
Gonna teach them 'bout baptism,
Then we'll duuuuuunk 'em.

She also taught me a lot of interesting facts about the Jewish people (there were lots in NY) and introduced me to plantain chips.

I was also companions with Sister Allred when I dyed my hair for the first time ever.  One night we were waiting at a bus stop so that we could go home.  It was cold and dark, and a kind of scary looking guy stopped in a van and offered us a ride.  We said no thanks and raced down the street to the subway station.  Later Sister Allred said that when she was with her last companion people always thought they were Jewish since they both had dark hair, but since I was blonde, people bothered us more.  So, she said I should dye my hair brown.  I decided to go along with it.  I bought a box of hair dye and she performed the magic.  After about 5 minutes of having the dye in my hair I started freaking out because it looked really dark, so I washed it out.  It made my hair a little darker and evened out the color (as you can totally tell in the pictures), but it didn't turn out brown.  So it kind of defeated the purpose, but it was still fun.

Before

During

After

My second companion in Midwood was Sister Auna, from Kona, HI.  She was my greenie, and the best one ever!

We were companions from May 2, 2005 to July 25.  I was really surprised and nervous to be called to train already, but she was so great! She really wanted to learn and be a good missionary, and she was a lot of fun.  She loved snacking on cereal and gummy candy, finding the latest "ghetto jewelry" (jewelry at the 99 cent stores), and getting to know the Hispanic culture.

Once when we were tracting we made up a song called "The 12 Days of Our Mission", sung to the tune of "The 12 Days of Christmas".  I know it doesn't really make sense because there are way more than 12 days in a mission, but sometimes tracting could really drag and this kept us occupied.  It went like this:

On the (1st, 2nd, etc.) day of my mission, New York gave to me:

   A golden baptism

   2 dinner appointments

   3 children crying (we heard a lot of crying kids in the apartment buildings)

   4 dogs barking (same)

   5 locks on one door

   6 Jews a wiggin'

   7 ghetto stores

   8 Virgen Mary's (lots of Catholics)

   9 horns a honking

  10 ghetto snacks

  11 slammed doors

  12 cockroaches

Just to explain ghetto stores and ghetto snacks - in missionary lingo in our mission, we used the word "ghetto" a lot.  I guess because we were in kind of a ghetto area.  So ghetto stores were like little convenience stores, comparable to gas stations without the gas pumps.  Ghetto snacks were usually purchased in those ghetto stores and were usually individually wrapped Little Debbie-like snacks that you could buy for a quarter.

Another thing we found at a 99 cent store were these rockin' flip flops, so we got matching pairs.  it was kind of a tradition to get something as a companionship.  We had a name for it, but I can't remember what it was.

There are a lot of other things I could write about these two wonderful companions, but I can't remember anymore right now, so as I go through my journal I'll probably add more to this post.