Happy New Year!

Well Merry Christmas and Happy new year to everyone! It has been a great week here in Centreville as always! We had a great Christmas this past Tuesday, thank you so much to everyone who sent packages and letters or cards, you really made it feel like a Christmas less far from home for me! I can't thank you enough! We started off our Christmas day with opening presents and cleaning our apartment (which was much needed after all the present opening haha). Then we spent the rest of the day with a family in the ward at their home, it was great! Of course, as always, the highlight of my Christmas was getting to Skype home to my family! It was so good to get to see them! I was glad to see and hear that everything was going well with them and get to update them on how things are going out here, it won't be too much longer until I talk to them on Mother's day! So overall it was an excellent Christmas here in the mission field! It sure has cooled down here though, it has been very wet and windy lately haha. We've had 2 or 3 rain/snowy days this past week, we really really hope that means we will have a snow filled winter! Man has the slush made for some muddy riding though haha, lot's of clothes washing this past week as well haha. We got to be a part of Joon's confirmation yesterday at Church and also got to see him ordained to the Aaronic Priesthood too, it was very cool. A lot of people have been waiting a long time for Joon to have this opportunity so it was a very big day for our ward. Later that night we got to go up to the Temple Visitor's Center with a woman who we're teaching to watch Scrooge the musical put on by a lot of people in our ward. It was so fun to get to see, we have some really talented people in our ward. I've attached a few pictures I took while I was up there too, it was beautiful! Probably the most memorable thing from being up there though was talking to Brother Large (the man who was just Baptized who is from Sierra Leone) who very excitedly came and found us after the show and said that he had something that he needed to show us, so we went with him to the humanitarian effort display that the Visitor's Center has up and he showed us the section about Sierra Leone. We watched a video about how the church just provided 7 million people there with fresh water and he told us about how great it was to him that his Church that he had just become a part of cares so much for his people, he told us about how he would have to walk 2 or 3 miles to go and get water every few days and how common that was among the people there. It was crazy to hear it first hand from someone who had been there. It was amazing that he had never really brought it up at all until that point, all the difficult things about home and daily life back and Sierra Leone, he never complained or talked to us about any of it. He just would tell us how great of a place it is and how wonderful their native food and things are. It was a major perspective change for me to see that kind of optimism. Brother Large truly is a great man. Well that's about all from this past week. It was an awesome one! Today should be good too, we are getting together with all the missionaries in a bit to have some New Years Eve fun and I think watch Brave, I don't remember for sure haha, but President Riggs approved some movies for us to watch tonight as a zone, so it should be lots of fun! Well I hope everyone is having a great day and week wherever you are! I love and miss you guys lots and I'll talk to you next year! (Bad pun I know, but I can't help it, I'm a Gronning haha)