Sister Watts: New apartment!!! 08/07/19

Namaste 🙏🏼

Oh yeah have I also mentioned that I'm the longest-serving Sister Missionary here now 😱

I was sitting next to a lady and I said I liked her earrings and she was like thank you do you want them and I was like oh no and she was like here take them and starting to take them out of her ears and I'm like no no no it's okay you can keep them they look pretty on you. Haha it's not the first time I've complimented someone and then they've been like here take it for 😂

There is a less active member that everyone kinda forgot about since she stopped coming to church years ago but we just happened to find her and I don't even know how. It's kind of a miracle that we were just looking through our phone contacts and we see someone named LA(less active) Veronika so we have her a call and that's how we came in contact with her. She's super confused how we got her number too because no one has seen her in years! Crazy right! She's really lovely though! We can see that she knows the church is true but that she's just had her feelings hurt really bad. Hope's not lost though!

She has a really fat dog named Daisy which has a diet of chicken and rice. She's really funny, whenever someone says bye she barks and gets really upset because she knows that means that someone's leaving 😂

I have decided that I really don't like E Rickshaws. They are so bumpy and whenever we ride on one it's usually for a long time so I just spend the entire trip bouncing up and down and groaning with each landing. I usually always feel sick during the ride too haha.

On Saturday we finally moved into our new apartment!!! It's pretty cute! It's just like a little cottage. It's the first time in my mission where I'm living in a house with just me and my companions 😱 There's also no stairs which is a plus! We are on the ground floor and have a little patio and front gate and everything! Before I've always been living in I guess more upper-class apartments and now this one is just like a normal home that people live in. The type of doors people have is different and now we have doors like that too and usually, they'll have a massive padlock on their door which we now have! There's four bedrooms, two bathrooms, dining room and kitchen! We use one of the rooms as a living room and it's kinda like a little parlour. Nobody has lived here for years and there weren't any air-cons! I don't know how they survived but I'm eternally grateful that they installed some just for us! We are the first ones to live in this house (weird to say house instead of an apartment) and so practically everything is brand new which is so nice!!

The neighbours are super nice! When we first came the neighbour across the road came and gave us big hugs and told us to come inside and she gave us cold water and biscuits! Anything we need help with we can go to them for.

Another neighbour was going for his evening walk and he calls the little ledge thing out the front of our house his bus stop where he sits and takes a break for a while. He loves to have a chat and he's like if I walk past your house and I see someone's home I would love to chat for a bit. I shook his hand and he was like it's very unusual for people to shake hands in India, just put your hands together like this 🙏🏼 to greet people. I'll try it haha. The plants out the front on this little park strip are looking pretty dead and so he asked us to water them. I've been begging for service so I'm excited to do this for him every day!

This morning I was out watering the plants and a lady in her car stopped her car out the front and we had a bit of a chat too! She was super nice and invited us to her home which is just next door on the very top floor!

Neighbours are just so lovely as they walk by with a smile and say hi, I'm excited to meet more!

Some other cool features of our house include: -A fancy chandelier in our parlour

-A temple room! Lots of people have like these little temple shrine things in their homes and now we have one too! We just use it as a cupboard for our suitcases though haha.

-If only you could hear our doorbell! When we go door knocking and we ring someone's doorbell and we hear this we know they're paka Hindu! (For sure Hindu) guess we're Hindu now because whenever someone rings our doorbell we have this song which is usually played while doing puja ringing throughout the house.

-I've never had to do this before in my other apartments but in order to get water every day, we need to turn on a water pump switch which pumps the water from the tanks on the roof down to us. There are set hours in the morning and night we have to do this and if we don't well then we don't get any water. I never knew but apparently, this happens everywhere in Delhi and all the times I haven't had to do it someone else has been doing it for me all along.

-When the water tank is full this alarm goes off in Hindi and English telling us that it's full and to turn the pump off.

-Not so cool but when I was looking at the bathroom I couldn't see a shower just a handheld showerhead thing and I was like hmm. I asked Sister Toone how this works and she explained that to take a shower we just have to hold it ourselves and use and I'm like oh no, please no. Luckily though I saw the other bathroom and there was a shower! It was a blessed and relieving sight!

-We have two big pot plants out the front of our side door because people will come and park right in front of the door so we can't open it. We have to water the plants every day which is fun!

Just like when we first moved to Vasant Vihar though, we got lost! We didn't know our address and then when we got it no one knew where this address was and on our first night we went round and round trying to find it! Took us like nearly two hours to find it haha. A member ended up picking us up with the Elders and tried to help us find it, was an eventful night! Coming back from church the next day we didn't want to risk getting lost again so we just booked an Uber but even then he didn't exactly know where he was going. I think we kinda know where we live now though and we know how to ask people to take us to the address haha. Finding addresses in India is a nightmare! If someone doesn't actually take you to their home you'll probably never find it unless you ask every person you meet how to get there Haha.

There was some pink rug and Sister Katru was like what is this and I'm like I don't know haha just because its pink doesn't mean its automatically mine. (Everyone knows pink is my favourite colour)

If our home group reaches 20 by November then it'll become a branch! How exciting is that!?!

There is a Morris family that I was teaching in Vasant Vihar and they moved to Janak Puri so I'm able to continue teaching them! Super happy about that because they're the cutest little family ever! They came to church on Sunday which was amazing! They just stayed for the first hour and then went home because they left their little baby twin girls at home so they had to get back to them. Their oldest Emma loves church! Especially primary! So when she found out she couldn't stay she was really upset and didn't want to leave. There's no primary in Janak Puri but they said they'd come there next Sunday so we've gotta have something fun for her there.

Love Sister Watts

I like boxes and popcorn?