Vestel, Abigail T

This week has been pretty relaxed compared to my other action-packed weeks. I am getting a really pretty цамц (tsamst) (Mongolian traditional shirt) made by a lovely ward member in Uner. She came by the Tuuv Baier (my church) to get my measurements and she told us how she forgot to bring a measuring tape and how hard taking measurements would be. I suddenly realized that I had brought my small sewing kit, and out of sheer luck, there was a paper measuring tape in there. So cool! A cool fact about the Tuuv Baier is that it is the first church established in Mongolia! It's a nice peach color and was once a children's theater. It's super cool, you should look it up. My companion started getting shin splints because we were running too fast, so we had to tone it down this week. Oh, and we had our last class of English at the National Medical School! We had a lesson with a karaoke contest at the end! Saturday was no car day here in Mongolia, so there was no traffic and no cars i...

Hello friends! This week has been awesome. We have had some real spiritual experiences with our investigators, specifically our investigator Sainsanaa. She is quite a pill when we teach her. She gets distracted easily and will answer questions with basic answers because she is bored. Last Friday, we got to teach her about temples, and as I shared a really spiritual experience in the temple, I felt the spirit really strongly. The grandmother of Sainsanaa and Sainsanaa both talked about how they felt the spirit. The experience I shared was an experience I had in the Provo City Center Temple. I took a really recent family name to the temple. As I was sitting in the endowment room, I felt a really cold hand touch my arm. I looked around and found no one. I even checked to see if I was sitting under a weird blast of AC. I was not. I looked down at the name card I was holding, and the Holy Ghost touched my heart. I know that cold hand was Lisa C. Muntz. We were visited by Elder Soares twice ...

Hello everyone! This week, I wanted to take more charge in sharing spiritual decisions and lessons, so I taught a micro-lesson on Friday. I was teaching about the Liahona, the Broken Bow, and having faith. Our new member, the person I was teaching, started laughing hysterically when I was struggling with which case to put on a word. It was so funny. We laughed for 5 minutes straight. I was a little confused but joined in on the laughing because it was so funny. Anyways, my trainer, the new member, and I were all dying from laughter. Afterward, she told my trainer that when she heard me struggling in Mongolian, she was reminded of her English and how bad her English was. Apparently, she has been really nervous to work on her English speaking because she was feeling discouraged. I think it's cool that I could lighten the mood even if I was being laughed at. Anyways, English teaching has been going great! Our teaching at the medical college has been a little rough with getting everyon...

One of our Investigators is named Sainsaunaa, and she is only 12. Her mom and grandma were both baptized in the church, and they want Sainsaunaa to be baptized as well. Despite their desire for their child and grandchildren to be baptized, they are lost members and don't go to church. Anytime I teach, we will have a mom or grandma in the room listening to us as well. I always wonder why they are trying to get Sainsaunaa baptized but won't go to church or experience the gospel themselves. I really just want the mom and grandma to understand how precious the gospel is. My thought is this: take charge of your own faith. It is way too easy to make the excuses necessary to stop your personal spiritual progression as well as progressing as a person. Do not waste away your time, your effort, and your life making excuses for why you are not creating a more spiritually healthy relationship with your heavenly father. The small and insignificant things in life will be used by Satan and hi...

Hello all! This week was jam-packed with events such as a huge English conference for Mongolian English teachers that the church was hosting, a missionary English conference, and even a Vocal Point concert for missionaries, investigators, and church members. It was so cool! My companion and I also got to go to a random birthday party and we actually ate Chinese food for the first time, not the fake American Chinese food. Oh, and there was a HUGE festival happening in the large square in front of the big Genghis Khan statue. Sorry for the long email, but I promise it's worth it. Now for the story... On Wednesday of last week, we got out of English class and waited for the elders we are serving with to finish their class. We went downstairs, and in their class, there was a woman who recognized my companion and immediately started talking about being sent to English class to find my companion. Weird, right? Well, she ended up asking some questions about the church, so we were like, ...

Hi All, I am so glad to be able to send an email out this week! So many little miracles have been happening! But first, I want to clarify something from last week's email. I used the Mongolian word гэр (ger, said like pear but with a G). There is really no English word for this house structure. It is close to what we call a yurt or a hut. For future emails, if I have any Mongolian words like that, I'll put the English pronunciation next to it. Oh yeah, I'm killing my trainer. That's missionary lingo that means I'll be her last companion because this is her last transfer! She only has 35 days left of her mission! She will "die" as a missionary in the сэлбэ (seltheeb - the area I am in now). Last P-day was amazing! We rented bikes and were able to go through a park area! We saw a lot of roller skaters (really popular over here). We are teaching English not only in the church but also in Mongolia's National Medical University. We are really blessed to hav...

Hi all! I'm finally in Mongolia, and it's more surreal than ever! We headed out of the MTC on Thursday, 4/20/24, and we arrived in Mongolia on 4/22/24. So we completely skipped over Sunday, kinda wild. After more than 24 hours of travel, we got onto a party bus that had a karaoke machine inside. We sang some songs on the two-hour bus ride to the mission home. We had a full day of activities before a really needed shower and good rest. On Tuesday, we all got paired up with our trainers. For those of you who don't know, a trainer is another missionary who has been on their mission long enough to know the language and is able to train new missionaries. My trainer's name is Sister Katchner, and she is amazing! Her Mongolian is really good (even though she says different) and she knows the city really well. We have so much in common; we're both military brats, we like most of the same foods, and we would rather choose a night in putting a puzzle together than going out t...