The Three-day Thriller

This week was super stressful and crazy. There were some sisters in a nearby area who were really struggling with each other and their area. As Sister Training Leaders, it is our job to do everything we can to help them. When we heard about the struggles they were having, we talked to the Assistants to the President and determined that we should do a 3-day long exchange with them. We started the exchange on Monday night by having them tell us how they were doing physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. They both were having a really rough time. We helped them set some goals for what they wanted to learn on the exchange. For the exchange, Sister Ivie went to their area with one of them and I stayed in Elizabeth with the other one.

Throughout the exchange I did my best to work really hard and teach a lot of people and get the sister as involved as possible in the missionary work. She loved teaching our investigators and helping them as much as she could and we saw a few miracles. We visited a Carlos, a Dominican man whose family are all members. He has been taking the missionary lessons for a long time without any real progress. We were pretty close to dropping him. Usually when we teach him, his whole family is there and it is all very loud and distracting. But when we visited him this week, his wife wasn't home so we taught him outside in front of his house. It was just us and him with no distractions and that helped a lot. We shared a simple lesson about repentance and then I felt prompted to ask him what was stopping him from being baptized.  Before I could even ask, out of nowhere he said that he knows he needs to be baptized. I was really shocked and then asked him what was stopping him. He said "Nothing, I just don't want to rush. But I want to set a goal of when to be baptized." I knew that a baptismal date in the next month or so would be too soon and scare him, so I told him that my last Sunday here in Jersey will be December 13th and that I really want to see him be baptized before I go home. He agreed and though that day was a good goal. So know he is on date for my last Sunday here! We are going to be visiting him more regularly now and helping him work towards his goal.

The exchange ended on a rather dramatic note. On Thursday, the last day of the exchange, the sister went into the bedroom for language study so she could read out loud to herself in Spanish. When language study was over, I called out to her so we could start lunch, but she didn't say anything. I thought maybe she didn't hear me so I called out again, and didn't hear anything. I went into the bedroom and saw that she had fallen asleep during language study. She was sitting on Sister Ivie's bed leaned up against the wall. Her breathing was irregular and seems to be pretty labored, and she was making faces as if she was having a bad dream. I tried to gently wake her up but she wouldn't. I then called one of her former companions to ask if is was something that occurred regularly with her. She said that she'd never seen this happen before. I called the mission doctor and he told me to grab her shoulders and tell her loudly and firmly to wake up. When that didn't work, he told me to get a cup of water and splash it in her face. I got a cup of water and sprinkled a bit of it on her, and when that didn't work, I dumped what was left in the cup straight onto her face. She flinched a little but didn't wake up. The doctor told me to call 911. At this point my hands were shaking and I was freaking out. I remember thinking "I've had exchanges end badly before, but I can't have someone die on my watch!" I dialed 911 and explained what was going on, and 5 minutes later there were about 5 paramedics in our apartment. They were frantically asking me questions about her medical history and I was trying to explain to them that I didn't really know anything about her. After they weren't able to wake her up, they lifted her off the bed and carried her into the ambulance. They had me sit in the front of the ambulance while they were in the back trying to wake her up. It was my first ambulance ride so that was interesting. During the ride, President and Sister Taggart called and asked me what was going on (they had heard from the Mission Doctor) so I tried my best to explain the situation even though I didn't really know. She finally woke up while we were on the way to the hospital. She didn't remember what had happened and was understandably pretty confused. Sister Ivie and the other sister came and met us at the hospital and we had to basically just sit in the ER's waiting room for four hours while they were doing blood tests on her trying to figure out what had happened. The doctors still weren't sure exactly what had happened but it sounded like they thought it was some sort of anxiety attack she had in her sleep. After she finally got discharged, the four of us went back to their area to end the exchange and we went out to dinner because we were all starving and hadn't eaten since before the whole ER run happened.

So all is well and I am really glad she was okay. At the end the exchange, she told me that she was doing a lot better physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and that she felt like she had found her purpose again as a missionary :)

On Friday and Saturday, we had another exchange but this one was a lot a lot less dramatic. I was with a brand-new missionary and she is incredibly prepared and happy so it was a pretty easy exchange for me.

Wow that was long. Props to anyone who actually read the whole thing!
I love being a missionary!

<3 Hermana Hannah Harris