O Christmas Tree

December 26, 2019

O Christmas Tree

Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Hey all, sorry last week's email was kinda wimpy. We only had half a P-day, so this week's email will be a little more dense (and include pictures :)

District 7C

So like I said, we arrived at El CCM (Mexico MTC) Tuesday at about three or four. We promptly had a bunch of orientations, Costco pizza, and then a devotional and then we finally got to go to our Casas (houses). They have about five rooms in them with four beds per room, so there's about twenty elders in the house. The beds kinda suck though. They're hard as a rock, so it's a testament to how tired I am that I usually fall asleep right away. x) Every night we have a house devotional where we say a prayer, sing a song, share a scripture, and pray again. It's always an adventure because for some reason we have eight elders from Haiti who most only speak Creole, only two speak English. It's super cool, I love those guys so much :)

Sand volleyball pit

My district is amazing! We play a lot of hacky sack and sand volleyball, which is fun. My compañero (companion) is Elder Cornelius. He's from Fresno, Clovis specifically, but he says he didn't know John or Anna Leesa. He's going down to Argentina Buenos Aires East. He's super great, I'm so glad we're companions! The rest of my district is awesome too! They're from all over the US, so we have a lot of different ways of growing up in the gospel. We bonded so fast, I really feel like connected so well because the next few weeks will be a little crazy. Normally English speakers are here for six weeks, but for some reason with transfers down in Argentina, we're only here for five. So as of right now we're here for less than a month, we fly out January 7th.

Our teachers are fantastic! Our morning teacher is Hermana Cruz, who's only 21 and just got off her mission a few months ago. Our afternoon teacher is Hermano Rueda, who's only 23 and just got off a mission too. They are both amazing! Our first week they spoke about 50-50 Spanish-English. But over the next few weeks it'll be 70-30, then 80-20, and then in our last week we'll be speaking 100% Spanish, which is a little intimidating. However, I feel like our district is doing really well! Yesterday we had this activity called "¡Hablar con todos!" or "Talk with everyone!" They brought in a bunch of native Spanish speakers that we could talk with, and I felt like we could hold our own! A lot of the people there were teachers at the CCM, but two of the people were teenagers. Those were the people who I think I struggled the most talking with, mostly because they didn't know English so if we didn't know a word the conversation kinda died. It was still good to talk with them and be able to hear how a native speaks. There was even one teacher from Uruguay who spoke Castellano, which is the dialect of Spanish I'll be learning in Argentina, so that was really cool to hear.

Probably the saddest thing about the CCM is the state of the pianos x) I've been searching far and wide for the best piano here, but there aren't a lot of choices. All of them are just a little out of tune, especially in the higher notes, but I guess you make do with what you have. I'm actually playing for one of the districts in our zone on Sunday, so I'll let you know how that goes. They're all native Spanish speakers, so that'll be interesting I think.

Speaking of districts, our zone is getting razed. When we got here, we had four districts. One of them left yesterday, and two more are leaving next week, and I think we only get one more district in return. And so our district leader went from being called to district leader last Wednesday to zone leader this Sunday, after not even two weeks x) So that's more than a little stressful to think that next week we'll be the oldest district in our zone, but I think we'll be alright :)

The weather here is fantastic! Today is the first day that hasn't been sunny and 70 degrees. It's a little weird to think that Christmas is in two weeks because it is literally not going to snow, but we got a "tree" and we're putting ornaments on it and presents underneath it. It's not quite a Charlie Brown tree, but I'll attach a picture.