Three Weeks to Anaheim

Hola familia! How are everybody doing today and this last week? I'm just great. Siempre bueno. Gracias. Though I have to be honest, p-days are not my favorite ever. They just seem sort of unproductive and making sure we get everything done for the rest of the week. It seems like you have all this time but you really don't after laundry, and it really takes longer than it should to write letters. Oh well. I guess I should enjoy them. At least we finally get to go to the temple. Hooray! That's what p-days are good.
We have another new district tonight, so I get the wonderful privilege of again telling them all about what we do on our p-days. And then probably I will never get to know any of the new 12 elders since I really don't know any of the elders from the district that came 3 weeks ago. But we've all decided that they're a bit exclusive. We're losing one, maybe two districts next week-depending on if the one gets their visa. Not much happening yet though.
Yesterday in the referral center someone called in and asked me "why are we here." Well that's just one of those great, golden questions, yeah? He didn't have a lot of time, but I was able to explain a little bit about the plan of salvation, without using too many big weird words. That was nice because typically when we are in the referral center I call and call and call and nobody answers and I just about fall asleep.
Oh yeah, I never told you the story that we heard in the devotional a couple of weeks ago. Here's the simple and condensed version. So there was this guy, who worked on a train in Russia, and somehow he got locked in the refrigerator car.He knew how cold the car usually was and once the train got moving he knew he couldn't get out. So he started to pay attention to the way his body was reacting to the cold and was actually writing things on the wall of the car-counting down the days and saying things like "my body is shutting down; it should only be a couple of days" and basically just waiting until he died.
When the train got to its destination, they opened up the car and found the man dead in the car. And they saw all the things he had written on the wall. But the thing was that they looked at the thermometer in the car, and apparently it was broken, so the temperature that the man thought it was, wasn't correct. It was actually 56 degrees in the car. But the man had still died. Because he had basically made up his mind that he was going to die and had given in, he did die. He let himself die because he had mentally convinced himself.
Last night Elder Gene R. Cook spoke at devotional. It was a really amazing talk all about faith in Jesus Christ. He's quite the motivational type of speaker. Likes to walk around with the mike and get people involved. But he had a lot of good advice and stories. Like writing down all of your fears (about a mission) and doubts on a piece of paper, going to the Lord and praying about it and then letting it go. Honestly letting the Lord take care of those things. He also said that if we really want something from the Lord, quite often we are expected to sacrifice something in exchange and really that's what repentance is about anyway.
He also talked about having the right attitude as a missionary. Being humble and hopeful and just loving people. It was really a great devotional.
In relief society the other week Mary Ellen Edmunds spoke to us and I remember hearing from her in EFY and she's so hilarious one second and the other second bearing her testimony and serious.
We heard from another great speaker this week and I'm crazy and blanking her name right now. She's a religion prof at BYU and has lots of hair and I know you would know her name. Anyway, her talk was really amazing as well. She talked about being cleansed from sin (one of the topics in Preach My Gospel) and it was really great. Que mas?
Um, I got myself one of the mission t-shirts. Everyone gets one that says the name of where they're going with usually just the country or state name with the flag. So now I have a shirt with a big brown bear on it that says "The Golden State." Golden. Hmm. I can't believe I only have three weeks left. Next week we'll get our flight plans. And then I can tell you when I'll be in the airport so you know when to answer your telefono!
Keep up the writing though! Just know that I'm doing great and that even though I do miss everyone; they just keep us too busy for me to think about anything else!
Oh yeah, mom, THANK YOU for the pumpkin chocolate chip muffins. That was a miracle. I had actually told my comps about my bread one time and how I should have you send some sometime because it is glorious. I never told you that did I? I love you all sooooo mucho and hope that everything is going beautifully in your lives! Hug each other for me and make sure that the little people don't forget Mae Mae! Love you, hasta luego!

See Emily's favorite Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread recipe:
Chocolate Chip Pumpkin Bread – Makes 3 loaf pans
3 C white sugar
1 C oil
1-15 oz. Pumpkin puree
2/3 C water
4 eggs
3 1/2 C flour
1 T ground cinnamon
1 T ground nutmeg
2 t baking soda
1 1/2t salt
1 C mini semisweet chocolate chips
½ C chopped walnuts (optional)
Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease & flour 3/1pound size coffee cans or three 9x5 inch loaf pans.
2. In a large bowl combine sugar, pumpkin, oil, water, and eggs. Beat until smooth. Blend in flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda and salt. Fold in chocolate chips and nuts. Fill cans/loaf pans ½ - ¾ full.
3. Bake for 1 hour or until an inserted knife comes out clean. Cool on wire racks before removing from cans/loaf pans.

16 July 2008

Hola! Como estan ustedes? Come fue su semana? In order to not sound repetitive, I won't mention how fast time is going by. But it is. Usually I will take notes throughout the week about things I want to mention in e-mails, but I didn't do that this week, so I'm going off of whatever is in my head right now. We had a great devotional last week. L. Aldin Porter. We seem to be getting a lot of emeritus members of the seventy. I'm not so sure what emeritus means, but they're usually good speakers. Mostly he spoke on teaching by the spirit and working to receive that spirit in your life. He quoted Brigham Young when he was talking about the missionaries who taught him. He said that he could've spoken better than the missionaries and they weren't sophisticated but "their testimony was like fire to my bones...it bore witness to my spirit and that was enough for me." I really liked that. Fire to my bones. That's what we're all working really hard to have happen here, learning how to really teach with the spirit. Which is obviously what Predicad Mi Evangelio is really about. But it's still hard. Because we still get used to our lessons and the order they are in, and some people really struggle with the idea that it's okay to leave certain parts of the lesson out, if it doesn't feel like the "investigator" needs to hear it. The second lesson is still hard. We're better at it than before, but it's still a struggle to feel like you're not just pushing doctrine on people and giving them way too much info. Because that's not the point. We've also begun to teach the first lesson in Spanish. I don't find that too hard at this point. Yeah, there are parts that I'm less sure about, but I try to just come up with stuff out of my head.
We've also started doing this "progressive investigator" thing here. You go teach a teacher as if they're investigators and you keep going back and teaching them and they don't really give you feedback-it's supposed to be as real as we can get in the CCM. So we did that on Monday. I think it went well. His name is "Miguel" and we taught the first lesson. I was really pushing for us to not cover the entire first lesson because I knew that if we tried to start and cover every principle, then we wouldn't get to the restoration and then what's the point of the lesson? H. Chriswell was a little hesitant, but we did do it and committed him to read and pray about the Book of Mormon. Whether or not he will really "do" it, we'll see. But he said yes. He asked us some random questions like "I know popes aren't apostles, but I thought Peter gave his authority to Linus (or whoever)" and he quoted the scripture in Matthew that said that Peter is the rock and the church would be built upon him and the gates of hell wouldn't prevail. Yeah, I tried my best to give him an answer for that one. It was a good experience to do. And yesterday we went and worked with a teacher on contacting. He gave us lots of good advice. Contacting is hard! And we're only in the CCM (read: MTC). So it will be harder I'm sure. We're just trying to use our resources now.
What else. Um, one of our districts-the oldest one is still here. They were "supposed" to go to Mexico this week but visas are hard to get so they'll be here in the CCM for probably 3 extra weeks, and then maybe get sent somewhere in UT until their visas arrive. Plus last Friday one of them found out that he had torn his ACL the week before so that very night he went home (his dad lives in SLC) so he could get surgery and start recovering. They're hoping that about the same time he's all good to go, that they'll have their visas. That would be soooo hard. We haven't gotten a new district for a while because we don't have "room" for one. But this oldest district doesn't have a teacher anymore, they have to supervise all of their own studies at this point. That would also be hard. They're trying to be optimistic though. H. Chriswell made a deal with one of them. She's always complaining that she eats too much sugar, so she's not eating sugar the rest of the time here, and one of the elders isn't allowed to complain at all because he's in the Mexico group and it would be understandable that you'd get a little discouraged. I wouldn't make that type of deal! No sugar? But sugar to her means just that she can't have candy or dessert. Ha ha ha. So I sang in the choir for the devotional last night. I had my curly eighties hair-that is significant for this story. H. Chriswell was going to sing with me, and we were at practice, but when we came back from dinner, these new girls had taken our seats (I was a little bugged) and didn't say anything so there was only one seat left so H. Chriswell just didn't get to sing in the choir. And so we're singing. And they have these big screens that have video of the choirs and I happened to sort of look over, and right at the second they switched from a view of the entire choir to one of those close up shots were they start on someone, and then zoom out. And of course it was me. Fantastic. But I was sneaky and looked in the right direction at the right second. I think they picked me because of my eighties hair. I think I almost threw up. Apparently it made my zone laugh though. I'm happy to make them proud and represent. No, no, I'm not. I think I've fulfilled my choir aspirations now.
But the MTC is great. Missionary work is great.
Thank you everyone who loves me and writes me and thank you for the packages-I love them always and appreciate everything you all do. Thank you mis padres! I love you! I'll try to write some letters today too, because I'm sure I can say more. I have less than a month and I'll be in CA. I'm already working on my neck tan line here. It's exciting. But then I'll be sweating and sharing the gospel. What better life can there be? Okay, mucho mucho love for everyone! Thank you for you support and prayers and love and EVERYTHING! Love love love! ~H. Emily

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!

Another Great MTC Week

Hello all of my lovely family! Another great week! They're all great. They're all different and they all go by waaay to fast. We got our new district last week-they all seem sort of afraid still, even a week later. And we get another district today. I have to go introduce myself to the new districts-even when there aren't any hermanas. I tell them all about preparation day! Hooray! I think that's probably what they most want to know about anyway. So now we will have about 55 or so elders and 4 hermanas. Our other hermana just left to the Guatemala MTC on Monday so our companionships got a little rearranged and now only H. Chriswell and I are together. I think our teachers were apprehensive about the change because the other two sisters are the ones who have more trouble with the Spanish. H. Chriswell is doing really well; I've really noticed her progression. So they probably wanted to split us up and put us with the other sisters. But it was up the branch president and he chose it the other way. I was also a little bit apprehensive because we're the two with the "stronger" personalities, but I now realize that this is probably the best way because we both need to learn how to compromise better. And we've both been a lot more efficient with our plans in the last three days. It's crazy. Now the other two sisters are both Polynesian (H. Brown is Samoan, but from Australia, and H. Nuku is from Tonga) so they both are pretty laid back and are usually walking 100 yards behind everybody else just laughing. They're funny. And I think they're good for each other because they've both had to take more responsibility for what they do because they usually had companions who decided it for them. Basically it's all working. We taught lesson 1 on Friday again in the TRC and taught this little (very old) couple. It really felt good and our companionship (at this point the three of us) had really improved in unity and flow and teaching by the spirit. Our teacher who observed us later told us that we did really well and that the old man comes every week to volunteer and every week he falls asleep during someone's lesson. But he never fell asleep in ours and our teacher was really surprised. So that was an odd compliment for us. But now we're on L2-The Plan of Salvation. I feel good about it because I feel like I really have a testimony of it, but it's still hard to teach because there is sooo much in it. And we're used to getting into the doctrine of it all, but really, we should be teaching it simply, like to little kids. We try to go on "verb walks" just so we can go outside and walk around, quizzing each other on words. And we go to a computer lab and listen to stuff in Spanish. They have little "instructional" videos and it was funny, one of the girls in the video is someone that I know. Weird. Once again I got the pleasure of sight reading through some songs for the meeting, but I made one the new elders play one of the songs because I didn't feel like it. And our district also sang. We sang "te necessito si." "I need thee every hour." Um, it was okay. We practiced better. But that's typical. Every week we have to prepare a talk in Spanish (4 minutes or so) on an appointed topic and then the branch president just gets up and lets you know right then who is going to give the talk that day. So you just have to be ready. Only two talks a Sunday, so obviously all the elders won't speak, but definitely all the sisters will. I didn't do it this Sunday, but I won't be surprised if I do the next. It's easy to pick on 4 hermanas. Then we have district meetings-which is just Sunday school with your district. We all sort of took parts of the second lesson and taught them to each other. Then we went up to the temple and sat there for a while, then dinner, then fireside, then a movie then bed. Last night at devotional, Richard G. Clarke spoke. It was a really good talk. He spoke about SKWASH-spirituality, knowledge, work, attitude, skills, and habits. And he told all these stories and it really reminded me of you, dad, about how your attitude can really change your circumstances, and you need to work hard. If anybody has any advice on object lessons or stories or whatever on how to teach the plan of salvation or any of the next couple of lessons, then please send them my way! I think I heard another rumor that on Friday we get to watch the stadium of fire fireworks from the MTC field. Who knows. That would be past our bedtime. By the way, I haven't had any problems with getting up on time. I'm usually the first one out of bed every day and I've had zero naps and I really don't feel tired at all. Blessings? Miracles? Yeah, probably. The Spanish keeps coming along well. I'm trying to make sure I keep myself challenged. Thanks for all your love and support! Once again, I love it here, everyone's amazing, I'm learning a lot, and it's hard and I have a lot of areas to improve in, but it will happen, I'm not toooo worried. Please send me REAL letters if you at all can! But still, I love you oodles and boodles! Love your Hermana Emily.