New Best Friends All Over the Place!

Hi!

 

So this week was pretty fabulous. It was great to hear from some of you and hear about life in the real world.

 

I've seen a ton of people I know here this week. I finally saw Ashten Cutler, after trying to find out which classroom she taught in since the day I got here so that was a wonderful surprise when I ran into her outside my residence hall. I also saw Elder Magelby on his first day in the MTC and he seemed to be doing well. Most of the people I run into though are my old Freshman Mentoring students, which is way fun but also sort of weird because I didn't even think about how many of them I would see here. If Laura and Shawna are reading this, I've seen Elder Stout quite a few times, which has also been fabulous.

 

I don't remember if we were teaching Juan and Ronald last week but that's who've been been teaching this week. Ronald just got married to his pregnant, inactive member wife and said that he would get baptised after the wedding. He lied. He now thinks he's too busy to get baptised. That was a struggle but then we only ended up teaching him once because our teacher who was acting as Ronald got a promotion and is no longer our teacher. Which is really sad, but we'll still see him around and I think our new teacher will be pretty cool. Juan took the lessons three years ago and he really liked meeting with the missionaries and felt happy when they came but we're still trying to figure out what has been holding him back from getting baptized. Our lessons with him have gone really well though. Yesterday I told him all about the dispensations, Christ's ministry and the great Apostasy which I was pretty excited about because we completely skipped teaching that part of the lesson with Jean because we were too scared. haha But it went really well. We still have a lot of things we can improve on but our teachers have told us that we're doing a really good job so far.

 

Spanish is still a struggle but I'm working on it. We've made it a goal to speak Spanish 100% of the day, which never happens but we keep trying and one day we'll get there. Hermano Walton, our teacher that got promoted, was telling us that we are currently at the same point the beginning class is at when they leave the MTC so that makes me feel a ton better. I could never imagine how scary that would be to go out into the field barely knowing hot to talk in Spanish.

 

Our district has had a lot of illnesses going around. Luckily, and surprisingly considering my sickness record, I haven't gotten it yet. But we also all took a nap during gym time becasue I was the only one not sick and then I took some Sudafed, just in case. I seem to be fine so unless I actually start feeling symptoms, I figured I should stop drugging myself.

 

I have lots of new best friends. Our entire district is super close, which is awesome. And even though the elders do act like 19 year old immature boys sometimes, I really like all of them too and all of the Elders and Hermanas going to BYU after the mission have discussed how we'll be best friends. haha I also made a new best friends elder from Finland. He knows Finnish, English and is learning Swiss (at least I'm pretty sure that's what he said. Even though he is serving in Sweden so you would think he's learning Swedish, right?) This is the first time he's been to the U.S. And he's super legit because he knows so many languages and because he's from another country. And the day after I met him, he said 'hi' to me in the hall way so obviously we're best friends. haha Just kidding. I just really love how many people there are from all over the world here.

 

I think that's the extent of the week. I feel like this was a more  boring letter than previous ones, so I apoligize for that. I love you all and am looking forward to your letters!

 

Love,
Hermana Parkin