Our Texas Girl: I feel weird typing english Letter from 9/2/15

LA FAMILIA!

Well, week 1 at the CCM (pronounced "say say emmay") has been crazy. I dont really know how to use this keyboard, so I apologize for all punctuation errors.

So the first half day was basically the worst. I didnt know what was going on and I felt like I had entered in to some forgotten city where a cult had inhabited and there was no escape. I was really stressed out. Andy by day two i had felt like I had been here for over 6 months. No joke.

SO MUCH SPANISH! I have learned more this first week then I learned my two years in High School taking it. Everyone here speaks Spanish or is trying really hard to learn it. My day teachers name is Hermana García and she is the cutest thing ever. I LOVE my district. 4 of the Elders here are going to Lubbock with me! We are like the only district that is state side. EVERYONE is going to either Bolivia or Ecuador. Ha! Have fun guys.

I have the best Mexican accent in our district. i am really good and saying things like "Hola" and "adios". You all would be really impressed.

Mi compañera is Hermana Huxford. I keep calling her Hermana Uxford because in Spanish you dont say the H. Shes cool with it though. She is going to be serving in SLC and is from Indiana. She is beautiful and super crazy. We love to laugh at the poor Spanish to English translations here like "beff" instead of "beef". We are a riot. She has such a drive to learn the language so thats good for me to have her help me. She tells pretty dumb stories. Haha.

There are FOUR Hermanas in my district which is apparently super rare. Their names are Hermana Lambert and Hermana Cloward. They are serving in Tempe Arizona mission! I love them so much. We are all in the same room together and its a party. My District leader, Elder Padelsky, is serving in Lubbock with me and we flew next to each other here. Also we have the same birthday. He is ALWAYS gone because he is really social. So i am our new district leader. :) its great.

The food here... oh my gosh. It is so bad. SO BAD! Everything tastes like soap and chlorine, haha. And there is so many beans. Beans and rice, beans and noodles, beans and toast...

All the Hermanas here get special treatment and I love that. We get to cut all the Elders in line for meals. (So we can get to the terrible food quicker). Its a good thing we pray over our food because I havent gotten sick once.

The CCm is GORGEOUS! So many trees everywhere, beautiful landscape. Its actually pretty cold here, so i packed pretty poorly. Oh well. It rains a TON its so cool. We play a really fun game here called "gunshot or firework" because there is always these booms. you can usually figure out what it is, especially if you pay attention to how many sirens follow it. WE LOVE MEXICO CITY! :)

Haha, funny thing. Mi compañera was getting a blessing from our branch president and he started it by saying "I place my hands in you head" HAHAHA. Their English is still 1000x better than our Spanish.

Oh also, the 2nd night I was here I had to teach an Investigator in Spanish. HA GOOD ONE! So Hermana Huxford and I wrote out this awesome lesson on the Libro de Mormón and it went so badly, haha. the spirit was really strong but right at the beginning of the lesson I asked him Como es su papá, instead of como está su papá... And he was so weirded out. So i basically asked him right off the bat to describe his father to me instead of "how is your dad". After our lesson we just laughed and laughed our guts out and came back and told our district and we just all laughed over how terrible we did. Our 2nd lesson went so much better. We had studied really hard and gave this killer lesson on José Smith and la returado el Evangelio. The spirit was so strong. our 3rd lesson was just the worst. Hermana Huxford and I had been kind of having an off day and felt like we didnt have the spirit. We kept forgetting to ´ray thoughout the day and before preparing our lesson for Ivan.. So when we went to teach him, there was no spirit and the lesson went terribley, My Spanish was worse than usual, we forgot to say an opening prayer... it mads us really understand the the Spirit is the real teacher and without him, we cant do anything. We learned a lot from that lesson and we teach him again tonight and we are going to do great.

Sunday was AMAZING! So spiritual. So many great devotionals and speakers. We all sang to the districts whos 6 weeks were up and they were leaving. God Be With You til We Meet Again, in Español. It was SO powerful.

A LOT of Nacho Libre quotes here. We are always saying "cant you see this woman is a NUN?" Haha, we have a blast.

It is really really hard work and The Lord is certainly showing me what my weaknesses are... But i am working on it!