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| Me and Hermana Madsen |
My first week in the Missionary training center down here in Mexico has been so awesome! I have made friends, felt the spirit, and eaten some tacos.
My companion is awesome! Her name is Hermana Madsen and she's from Layton, Utah and was a lifeguard. She´s super funny and sassy, it makes for some awesome night time conversations. Every night our room, which is made up of us two and one other companionship (one of them being my friend from college named Haley Judd!), stays up laughing and talking. Well, stays up until 10:30 when we all crash from exhaustion (we have to wake up at 6:30 every day).
My district is funny. Everyone is going to Mexico, split between Chihuahua, Guadalajara East, and Ciudad Juarez (my mission). Me and Hermana Madsen are the only two girls in the group of 12, and 8 out of the 10 guys came straight out of high school, so we have a lot of goofy 18 year old boys. They struggle a bit to focus but they are all good guys.
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| My district |
The food here is good. We eat a lot of Mexican food but they also have a lot of foods that are almost American. They are almost like foods from home, pancakes, burgers, pasta, and pizza, but its all somehow a little off. I don't quite know how to describe it, but its always just a little different than you anticipate. Its all still good though.
One of the hard parts about being here is that girls and guys can´t play contact sports together, so I´ve definitely been missing soccer and basketball, but we´ve played plenty of volley ball. We actually did get a game of ultimate frisbee going with some of the other Hermanas so that was pretty fun. I only got taken out once (by Hermana Madsen haha) but it was a ton of fun!
Oh yeah, also our bathroom flooded. The shower stopped draining while one of the hermanas was showering so we had to quickly try to mop that up. Didn´t get far enough to get into our room luckily. So nothing too bad.
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| Hermana Thomson, a girl going to my same mission! |
My Spanish is sort of coming along. It´s a bit of a struggle trying to talk to all the Latinos who are here (though we do try) but I´m to the point where I can understand the majority of what the gringos are saying in Spanish, if they´re talking slow. I generally can pick up the overall meaning, even if the actual words aren´t fully understood. I definitely say ¨lo siento¨and ¨repitan por favor¨ many, many times each day. But it´s getting better.
Because I took four years of Spanish in high school I started with a bit of an advantage over the other missionaries in my district, and apparently I did well enough during our first practice lesson that one of my teachers decided that I was her translator whenever she didn´t know how to say something. I tried my best and would guess based on what was going on, but I usually had no idea what she was trying to say to me. Both of my teachers are native Spanish speakers and struggle a bit with English, so that's been an adventure, but has definitely helped me learn faster.
Oh and we got to go to the temple today!! It was so awesome, I felt the Spirit so strongly, it was fantastic.
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| Mexico City temple |
Lesson of the week: God is awesome. No matter who we are, no matter what our strengths and weaknesses are, if we turn to Him, He will help us become the people we want to be. If He can help turn a full blown, Minnesota-raised, shy gringa like me into a confident (well, trying to learn to be confident) missionary who can talk to random people she´s never met, in Spanish, He can help you become whoever you hope to be. Turn to Him. He Loves you and wants to help. Let Him heal you.
I love and miss you all like crazy!
Hermana Naatjes
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