I'm not just going on a mission; I'm becoming a missionary

July 29,2013

Hola familia!!!!!!! And everyone who will eventually read this!

First of all, DISCLAIMER: I know that some of you who read this won't be members of the LDS Church! So unfortunately you might not understand a lot of the Church terms I use in my emails. I unfortunately won't have time to explain them all! So I have to write like everyone who reads this is a member of the Church and if you ever have any questions, feel free to ask my parents and sisters who would love to explain anything for you!

 So, I think I was born to be a missionary. ME ENCANTA EL CCM (MTC in Spanish)!! This place is the happiest place ever!!! the Spirit is incredibly strong and everyone is helpful and there is such a power here that is hard to explain! I no longer even care that I didn't get my visa in time to go straight to Spain, and my comp and I actually have started hoping that we get to stay here the whole 6 weeks! Anyway, I have SOOO many things to tell you and it would be so hard to do it chronologically so I have decided to have different categories!

MTC In General: Like I said, this is the best place ever and I was right to be upset that my report date was so far away because I must have subconciously known what I was missing! I LOVE being so productive for literally every waking moment of the day! My life has never before had so much purpose to it! I'm already scared about feeling completely lost with what to do with my time after coming home from the mission because there is always something to do here, and the best part is, it's all focused on others which is amazing. Everything we do is to prepare ourselves to invite others to Christ. I also have realized that I know more people here than I thought! I keep running into new people I didn't know were here, but also some I did know were here. I've seen Elder Welch (who is from my stake and said "that's so weird!" when I mentioned that i had seen and talked to his father just 2 days previously), Elder Schindler from BYU, Hermana Withers from BYU freshman ward, Kelly's roommate Catie, a girl from my La Jolla ward, and a guy who was in my social dance class last semester and probably some others I can't think of. I also know a few workers in the cafeteria. Oh, and Kelly and Aaron, while doing service a guy totally recognized me from our humanities class! Haha he said he hated that class so much and thought the TA was crazy. I said we had similar feelings :p

Companion: Mi companera is Hermana Jarman. She is 19 and from Arizona and went to a year of college at ASU before coming on the mission. She is the 10th of 12 children (WOW) and is the first girl from her family to serve a mission although she has 6 older brothers who have as well. She has never lived away from home before so I'm her first roommate :) She is AMAZING and I feel like I've known her forever!! She is sooo motivated and is always wanting to teach and is so excited when our lessons go well and she doesn't like to waste time (which is good; neither do I!) and she loves speaking Spanish (she took some in high school) and has such a strong testimony! She likes to plan a lot and so our lessons are always very thought out. I can't explain it, we just get along really well and from many conversations, i can tell we are very similar-minded and think the same about a lot of different things. Neither of us are very quiet so we both speak up quite a bit in class (much more than the elders! ha!). So my companion is not a problem for me, but it has taken a while to actually get used to having a companion. I have never in my life been with someone 24/7 and it's WEIRD. I like to be a convenient person, so it's really hard that I can't just be like, "okay you run and grab your bag upstairs while I use the bathroom and then we'll meet up here." Nope, we have to take the time for both of us to do both. So in that aspect it's a little annoying, but I know it's Heavenly Father's rule so it's for the best.

My District: Hermana J and I are the only sisters in our district. The rest are elders, so it's weird being around so many guys ALL the time but the guys are the best so it's totally fun! The weird thing is that not everyone in our district is going to the same mission (Spanish districts are like that quite a bit). In fact, everyone except for me and Elder Datwyler are going to different missions! Elder Neddo and Elder Olsen are the elders we usually end up hanging out with the most. They are both from Utah and are both going to Mexico (I don't remember all the different Mexico missions, there are so many that it is hard to keep track of who is going where). They are hilarious and they are really great companions and they could have been best friends forever except they only met a few days ago! My companion is going to Barcelona, Spain, obviously, I'm going to Malaga obviously. Then Elder Harvey and Elder Conklin are both going to Mexico There is something about Elder Harvey that I just find adorable! He's also one of my favorite people to talk to! He's also a beast at volleyball, probably because he's so tall and he played in high school haha. Elder Conklin is much more quiet but he's one of those quiet people that when they do say something, it's hilarious. Like the other day we had a debate about whether it's "Books of Mormon" or "Book of Mormons" and he said "I think its Ofs. Book ofs Mormon." I was extremely amused! Then there's a trio of elders. Elder Datwyler is going to Malaga with me but he's pretty quiet too so I'll have to get to know him better so we can be friends in the field too. Elder Ridd is our district leader going to Madrid Spain (literally just found out from Neddo and Olsen that Ridd just got news like an hour ago that he got his visa! He leaves for Spain in 2 hours!! What the heck??? Now Hermana and I are scared, we could leave at anytime! Wow! They only gave him a couple hours to leave, I guess they don't waste any time!) and then Elder Cavazotti (Italian pronunciation) is the only stateside elder in our district going to St George Utah, Spanish speaking (weird because he lived in Utah since he was 6! He was born in Brazil and speaks fluent Portuguese so his call was defnitely surprising to him!) His Spanish is sometimes difficult to understand because it's so Portuguese-ish hahaha. Oh, and I'm the oldest person in the district! Hermana is 19 and all the elders just graduated high school! So crazy!

With brings me to...Spanish. El idioma celestial. I love Spanish SO much. Learning it is fantastic! And I have been soooo prepared because of Mrs. Martin in high school and BYU which has amazing language classes. Those together make me easily the best at Spanish in the class. I'm really really not bragging when I say this. In fact, I wish I wasn't the best because it's annoying to go over easy stuff when i want to practice teaching in Spanish, but at least it's an intermediate class! The rest of the districts in our zone started as beginners so all of us are already better than them too. But we've already taught our "investigator" in Spanish twice and it went SO well and I am more confident about Spanish than ever before. Even though I'm no where close to being fluent, I can always somehow say what I want to if I think about it hard enough. I gave a prayer in Sacrament Meeting yesterday and my zone was blown away...and my branch president said I speak just like a native. It was quite funny! My favorite moment ever in Spanish though was when Hermana and i were pretending to be investigators for Neddo and Olsen and they were getting to know us and Hermana instead of saying "Mi mama es enfermera en Africa" (My mom is a nurse in Africa) she said "Mi mama es enferma en Africa" (My mom is a terminally ill person in Africa). It was funny, but i laughed so hard that I started to think we're literally going crazy in here. We sit in class allllllllll day pretty much, so I think things are funnier than they usually would be. I should send a picture of my schedule sometime, but basically it's class class class. In fact, my schedule is literally the same for the next 5 weeks so this might be the only interesting email you get from me since everything else will be the same until i get to Spain :p

Spiritual: Wow. If you thought EFY was like being sprayed in the face with a spiritual firehose, then the MTC is like standing under a spiritual Niagra Falls. Like, it's amazing, don't get me wrong, but sometimes you actually can become really spriitually drained and so 10:30pm-6:30am sleep schedule is basically the best thing that ever happened to me. I wish I could take all day and explain about all the wonderful things I've learned but I can't. So I'll pick something that stood out to me more! I think what stood out to me most was the very first night we were here we went to these "Teaching Experiences" where we had 3 different scenarios with actors that were playing investigators really convincingly and we all got to raise our hands if we had something to say in the discussion but sometimes the narrator would take a moment to interrupt and talk about it. Basically, I expected to get a lot of teaching skills or something, but the VERY first thing they wanted us to consider was "What does Jesus Christ think when He looks at this investigator?" This was before we even talked with him at all. We knew nothing about him. And I learned zero teaching skills that night, but what I did learn was that it's about PEOPLE. I learned to observe and consider their needs and try to learn as much about them as I could even if without asking a lot of questions. And so I did learn teaching skills, because those skills make you a good teacher. This gospel is just incredible.

Food: It's really weird being on the receiving end of the cafeteria! But I still like the food and I make sure to make my tray really easy for the employees to clean up haha. In fact, I like the food better now because I get whatever I want, not just the random leftovers they sometimes fed employees!

Well, i only have a couple more minutes. I wish I could tell about our lessons and how I memorized the First Vision paragraph in Spanish just to share it in the lesson and it was REALLY powerful and I also want to share about the devotional we watched from Elder Bednar on Christmas Day a couple years ago because it BLEW MY MIND and seriously makes me want to be a less selfish person and get rid of that natural man. But yeah, time's up so I'll talk to you guys next week! And I just got a letter from home that my DL just delivered to me so I'll read that right now!

I LOVE YOU! The mission is the best! Everyone should go on one!

Hermana Andrew