9 July 2008

Buenos dias mi familia! Como estan? Estoy bien, gracias! Another week has flown by. Honestly time really does go soooo fast, too fast. If being out on the "real mission" goes faster than this, then I don't even know how to handle that. So muchas cosas to talk about this week. Um. First of all, we're back to a threesome companerismo. After H. Hansen left last week, I guess she was the only hermana down at the Guatemala MTC so they called and asked if H. Nuku would come down and join her ASAP. She said she'd do whatever, so they did some quick arrangements, she went and got a visa in Denver yesterday, and left today to go down to Guatemala, before they both continue on to Panama. Crazy. So we were a "normal" companionship for a week. I think for H. Chriswell and me though we are different and are the more dominant personalities, our styles still matched and we were super efficient last week and I think we were both really happy with it. And we taught the second lesson-plan of salvation last Friday (though the TRC was closed for the holiday so instead of teaching volunteers we taught the old/new district in our zone) and we taught to their needs-so we related the plan to being missionaries and our struggles. It went really well. And now we're back in a threesome and we're adjusting again.

Usually one of the most effective ways of learning how to teach it is we'll teach the entire lessons ourselves to the other companions. Then we really have to know it. Sometimes elders from other districts will come and listen. The other day we practiced giving the first lesson in Spanish and I think it went well. We don't have to do it in Spanish until next week, but we figured we'd try it out. We've been trying to speak all Spanish in the morning from breakfast to lunch, and today all Spanish. I don't find that it's that hard, but it's hard when my district doesn't keep to it that well. My companions always forget. But the two districts that are "older" than us are both trying to speak all Spanish right now, all week, so that's helpful. It gets funny because you learn how to mime pretty well. And you get creative with explaining things

Hooray! During gym at 4 pm (in which I always go outside and play sand volleyball and burn my feet; we could hear the stadium of fire sound check going on. Hannah Montana you know. At about 9pm we had a fireside all together-I think it was just to get us inside so we wouldn't hear the worldly music outside. We sand songs and they had all of these metal chime things that were numbered and categorized and you hit them with knives (strikers) at certain times to "sing" songs. You'd watch this bouncy ball on the screen tell you when to hit the #7 or the #9. We even had harmony. That was really pretty cool and it kept a bunch of 19 year old elders really occupied. Then we were allowed to go outside anywhere on campus and watch the fireworks. They didn't start until 10:15, so we were definitely up past bedtime that night. They were pretty good fireworks too. It was nice that they let us do that though.

Our branch president's wife bought the four of us sisters jackets that all match. It's hilarious. Apparently she was at Sears and found these $3 jackets that are actually pretty cute-blue with big buttons and kind of 60ish. She has one too. I'm developing a bunch of pictures today and I'll send some funny ones when they come back. On Sunday we're all wearing our jackets and making our district elders wear blue ties. We'll all be just darling.

Thank you everyone for the letters still. By real letters I mostly mean letters in general. Dear elders work. It's just fun to have letters especially with advice and funny things in them.

Love you, please forward this out to those friends e-mails. Love!