Week 5

Well, no photo's this week.  For those that know Jayden well know that he is painfully harsh on electronics.  We were blessed to receive a package in the mail yesterday from him with his broken camera that he dropped.  Needless to say it will be another week or more before we get anymore photo's. (Gary)

Today is my last p-day in the CCM. (MTC in Spanish) My time here has been great and i have learned so much! Sorry about the camera. One of the people i handed it to dropped it and something happened with the lens. The mail room closed like 3 minutes after i got there so i had to do it really fast. I didn't think it would get to you so fast so i didn't worry about sending a note home i figured i would just email you about it. I guess the US mail system isn't as terrible as i thought. I'm not sure exactly what to do about the situation either. i just figured i would send it home and have you figure it out. Dad you are usually pretty good at fixing things so i wasn't sure if you could fix that or not. 

We got our flight plans on Friday. I have to be at the MTC travel office at 4:50 am on Tuesday. We fly out to Georgia at 9:50. Then a layover there then a 3 hour flight to panama. I should be in panama by 9 on Tuesday night. Nothing to terrible to worry about. I already emailed grandma and told her the time i was flying out. I'm excited to see her. I'm so thankful that she waited to retire until after i left. It truly is a blessing to have her work there. 

Lately my Spanish has been getting a lot better. Our teachers have been making us speak nothing but Spanish in the classroom and as hard as it is it is making me so much better. At first it was really hard to communicate and i was being very quiet but now I can pretty much talk about anything that i want. Speaking the language all the time is helping so much. My teacher always makes me read aloud in Spanish because i have the best Spanish accent in the class and i don't struggle as bad to read like the rest of  the class does. Also being able to roll my R's is great. I sound like i actually know what i'm talking about. Something that one of our teachers taught me is to say "ere con ere cigarro, ere con ere varill. Rapido caro los carros garguados, de azucar de ferrocarril." It doesn't mean anything but it helps me to speak with an accent and to roll my R's all the time. The only problem with that is when i roll my R's hard and say Perro. In Spanish Pero means "but" and Perro means dog. Kind of a huge difference between those words haha! Other than that Spanish is getting great. Me and my companion do lots of Spanish role play where one of us is an investigator and the other has to find out what they need and teach that principle of the gospel completely in Spanish. Its really fun and forces us to not only hear and understand the Spanish, but it makes both of us better at understanding each other. Sometimes i have a struggle understanding my companion. He doesn't conjugate his words very often, but he loves to talk all the time in Spanish. He says a lot more in every lesson than i do but my Spanish has better conjugations and i have a slight Spanish accent when i talk. 

I am so excited to go to panama in 6 days!! i cant handle the food here anymore!! i just need to get some organic real stuff!! everything we eat is so processed and gross. Almost all the meat we eat is turkey meat. Im pretty sure they tried passing off a turkey steak last week. No bueno. I have officially gained 10 pounds since getting here. Not playing basketball all the time really hurts. But my teacher said i will lose most of it in Panama just from sweating and walking and a major lack of eating. I will and do need to workout more in the mornings. I probably should have planned better for that. 

We were in a devotional on sunday and this guy was talking to us about when he first got on his mission. He said that his first apartment when he got there had tons of gray mold all over the walls. "dont have that in america!" He looked outside and it was pouring rain. His compainion told him it rained nearly everyday there in argentina.  When he went to sleep that night he lit one of those mosquito repelling candles. He woke up in the middle of the night and looked to see if the candle was still lit. He looked over and saw the flame had turned into just a small ember.  He went to relight the candle and when he stepped on the floor there were 2 feet of water. Apparently when it rained outside it rained inside too! Hence the mold and the moving candle!  He looked down at his watch, " wow! 2 more years!' 

That was probably the funniest joke i have heard in the MTC. Things here are pretty boring, so anytime something is generally funny we all laugh really hard. Or when we watch our movies on sunday nights. We watched the testament the other night, every time there was a joke or flirting or people kissing the place went nuts! everybody would be yelling "page 33!!!" white handbook, also know as the white bible, talks about opposite sex relationships and is definitely the most referenced page here in the MTC. We always yell at people about page 33. 

That's about all that's really happened here in the MTC. It should get a lot more interesting here in the next week though!! I love all of you!!! Hopefuly you aren't missing me too much haha!  Love you all!!!

Elder Hamblin