Greetings from Alabama!

Hola Familia!

Oh my goodness I have so much to tell you and so little time! I don't even know where to start! Well my P-Day is on Monday so be expecting emails on Mondays. Florence is so beautiful, it actually reminds me a lot of Indiana but it's a little bit more hilly. The weather has been pretty nice thus far. It's a perfect temperature, only a bit humid, and it's only rained last night. The mosquitoes love me and so I've been breaking out the Hydrocortisone a lot. We are near a small university, the university of north Alabama so we have a lot of students walking around and in our apartment complex.

My trainer is amazing. Her name is Sister Intriago, and like you've heard, she is a native. She is from Ecuador! She is originally a Temple Square sister (la manzana del Templo in spanish) and she learned english in the MTC because she was supposed to be an english missionary. They sent her here for a bit and now she is with me so she is pretty excited she gets to teach and speak in spanish. She is so sweet and so cute, I feel really blessed to have her. I get to help her with her English and she gets to help me with my Spanish so it works out well. (her english is 10x better than my spanish however). We speak in spanish as much as possible, but actually we teach in both english and spanish so I get to speak both quite a bit. It's kind of hard to switch back and forth but I think it will help a lot in the long run to switch so easily. I however probably won't be learning as fast as some of my friends who are only speaking spanish, but I know in time it will come.

I realized how incredibly shy I am even though I think I am not, but I have already had to learn to open up a lot more. We went tracking my second day here and I had no idea what to say and I didn't want to intrude, but Sister intriago was very patient and just said I just have to open my mouth. I have to remind myself this is salvation were talking about! were not selling vacuums or anything! We do a lot of service, as much as possible. If somebody needs something done, we are there. When we first got here we went to this old southern ladies house to help her put her plants in the greenhouse. I came home with a lot of bug bites and I'm sure some spiders in some of my clothes, but it really does bring a joy to serve these people.

The ward is great, small, but not small enough to just be a branch. Most of them are english speakers but we have a few spanish speaker's too. Oh! I forgot to mention, we have an english class every wednesday in the church, so the first wednesday here was my first experience with spanish. Some of them speak english pretty well, they just need help with pronounciation and some of the grammer, and others cannot speak english at all and we work with those ones. I help with the pronunciation and Sister Intriago does all the explaining :) 

I've come to realize how I like the Spanish speakers a lot more than the English ones. The spanish people are always very willing to open their door and listen to us and most of the english ones either slam the door in our faces (that's only happened once) or are to stuck in their ways to want to listen to us. (maybe it's because I can't understand the spanish speakers, but they seem a lot nicer). 

Hmm, what next.... OH! we have a baptism this Sunday. I obviously wasn't the one to teach the guy, but I'm excited none the less. He is a great guy who has been going to church for a while with his member wife who is in the relief society presidency. The ward has been waiting for his baptism forever! We also have a date for a couple people in a hispanic family. The son who is 22, we are almost positive will be baptized on the date, which is next saturday. We had a lesson with him two days ago I think and it was the most powerful lesson I have been in so far. We had a member of the ward who spoke spanish come with us, Hermana Margarita, who is amazing, and I couldn't understand everything but the spirit was so strong that all of us were shedding some tears and I do not cry easily. He knows I don't speak spanish very well so he was very patient with my testimony and teaching. His mom is supposed to get baptized next week as well but she is living with her boyfriend who she want's to get married to but he first needs to divorce his wife in Mexico, so it may be a long process before she can. 

We go into a lot of houses that are... old and reak of smoke, but the people we teach are always loving and kind. Yesterday we went on knocked doors in a trailer park with a bunch of hispanics and door after door none of them answered. We think maybe they knew we were coming ;) But I know that it was because we needed to talk to this one man who was working outside. When we went up to talk to him he was funny and said he had talked to missionaries before. He has a strong testimony of Jesus Christ and after a long process of Sister intriago and him talking back and forth I got the gist of most of what they said, but we think he is really interested and I am so excited to meet with him and his family! He works a lot so I don't know when we can, but hopefully it will be soon. Bah! I cannot even describe the joy this work has already brought me and how much I have already learned. I wish I could tell you all every little detail but it's so hard in the limited time we have. I have to get to work! We also work a lot with the inactive members because we really want to work on "The Rescue" which is what they call helping inactive members come back.

Basically our day consists of working out in the morning, which is hard because sister intriago is short and I am tall so when we run I have to do high kicks or something to get a work out because we run at such different paces. WE study for one hour of personal, two hours of companion (because I'm new, it's usually only 1), and one hour of language study, so it's a lot of studying. The rest of the day we have appointments and tracking.

We have some other sisters living with us in the apartment complex now because they couldn't find a place for them in their town right next to us. So our apartment is full.

Everything is great though! the first few days were hard and I am still so frustrated with the language, but it is getting better. One day I will be able to speak it! Hopefully. Love you all so so much! I hope all is well at home. Oh! if you have anything you need done at the house Mom, call the missionaries! you have no idea how much they love to serve! I hope you are all being missionaries as well. The members are always the best missionaries :) I love the south, love the mission, love my companion, love the gospel, love spanish ;) and love the Lord, so It can't get much better than that!

Love, Hermana Decker

PS.. so glad president Holzapfel told yall about the blog. Make sure to keep up with it. Also, I was able to get on facebook for like 3 minutes to become friends with the president and his wife and become part of the group on facebook. I don't know why, but maybe they will post pictures and tag us or something. OH! and make a mormon profile on mormon.org. We ecourage all the members to do that.

(phew! that was a lot of information there)