El ES LA DADIVA - He Is The Gift, Rosaria

Since the Church was showing this video in Times Square New York(picture below) we thought let's show it on our Big screen in Rosario! Missionaries received pass along cards to #sharethegift. We have shared these cards with many cab drivers and a few people we have met on the street. We also posted the video on Facebook in English and Spanish. And Alan sent it to his friends in China in Chinese.

We pulled a TV out of a class room at our office and played the video non stop in our building entry. Lots of non members come into our center to find jobs. Pictured below is Norma who cleans our building and is a member. Norma also decorated the Christmas tree with sparkling lights!

For our premier showing of the video on our out-door wall at our center we invited one of our Missionary Districts to help. We are missing one Elder and two Sisters in the pic below.

We made a street sign and unlocked the security gates on our center. As I rolled back one of the gates I got teary eyed and felt like we were totally welcoming all to our center (kind of like opening up Temple Square gates around the Temple).

 

 
We showed the video 3 separate nights and we had to wait till it got dark. And then we discovered that we had a lovely street light that created wonderful shadows on the wall.  The pictures show the shadows more than when we were just watching the movie. We started at 8pm and ended at 9:30 (people our out late down here). With 3rd World extension cords we had a little fire that flared up on my hand when I moved the cord.  I then tried to stamp out the fire with my shoe and quickly decided that my skirt was going to start on fire. We ran and bought another cord and we were back in business! I was in charge of keeping the lap top safe (I needed a security baseball bat)!

On Wednesday Dec. 10th we had 8 Missionaries and 24 people off the street came in and sat down and watched the video at least 2 times through and secured 5 solid referrals. December 11th we had 2 Sister Missionaries and 13 people came in and watched the video numerous times and 5 solid referrals. Monday December 15th it was really raining but lightened up right before 8pm!  We had 4 missionaries, 6 people off the street watched the video and we got 5 solid  referrals and 1 first discussion was given and many conversations were taking place on the sidewalk in front of our center.

The 2 Sister Missionaries that are located in our area are awesome at street contacting.  Sister Siapo (Chiclayo Peru) and Sister Cruz (Nicaragua).  They are short, cute, fabulous and great missionaries.  My favorite picture is the one below.  Sister Cruz was down the street when she first started talking to this lady. The people don't stop walking when the Missionaries start to talk to them so the Sisters just start walking with them. By the time they hit our 2nd open gate Sister Cruz got this lady to stop and watch the video multiple times.  The lady didn't want to come in and in the end she gave Sister Cruz her name, phone number and address and wanted to know more. I love this picture because this lady is me. I would never go in and watch a video even if they said it was 2 minutes, even if they had cookies and candy (which we did).  The 43 people who came in and sat down to watch the video are very special people.  We had many people who would watch the video from across the street and at the street corner and at our gates but not come in. You could here the music from the video at the street corners.

We ended up one night bringing the projector home to our apartment and we have a huge blank wall next to our apartment so we shined the projector out the window (set-up below with our dish drying rack on top of the microwave) and showed it to the neighboring apartment buildings.  We had some neighbors out on their balconies and people watching from their windows and one gal was on her phone watching and pointing at the video. We have tried to do our part in Sharing The Gift and hope you all have Shared the Gift too.