Updates from Hermana Goudie: Week 2 at the CCM!

HOLA mi familia and anyone else that reads this! How are you? I am doing great here :) Having lots of fun :) So last week was my birthday as you know and it was just grand. It started off with the three hermanas in mi cuarto (my room) singing Happy Birthday to me to wake me up. It was lovely. My companera gave me a cute note with a coupon for an ice cream sammy from the tienda. I love those! The elders in my district gave me a cute note with some sour candies from the tienda and also a weird long skinny packgae that was wrapped in normal like printing paper but it was yellow and they didnt have any tape so they used string and sewed it shut. Oh elders. Anyways after the many minutes I tried to open it I finally decided to get out my finger nail clippers and cut the string. Long story not so short it was a cute pink pen from the store that had the CCM name on it. It was so nice of them! Another hermana in mi casa gave me a note with $10 in it! So nice of her :) At dinner the hermanas at my table started singing happy birthday to me in espanol of course and pretty soon everyone in the comedor was singing. It was a bit embarassing. But all is well :) I also played PING PONG again (I usually do everyday. Its like the highlight of the day for me) and I won both games that I played and I even played against Elder Medling who is really good at ping pong and I beat him!!!!!!!! It wasnt until after the game that he told me he played with his left hand for a few minutes... oh well. At least he was being nice to me on my birthday and letting me win although I think it wouldve been a better present if he hadnt have told me that ;)

So teaching here is still really scary for me. A lot of times I dont even know what I want to say in Enligsh let alone Spanish. My companion is awesome at spanish though and almost always can find a way to say what she wants to and have it make sense. Im slightly jealous. Im not to that point yet... but its coming. Slowly but surely. I am understanding more spanish and can write more but speaking is hard for me. Anyways we had our last lesson with Chris (our investigator who is actually our night teacher now) and we committed him to baptism and he said YES!!!!!!!!!! Cool huh? Even though it wasnt real it was awesome to hear and I cant wait to have that feeling with real people who will actually be baptized. It is kinda weird he is my teacher now but oh well. Hes pretty awesome actually. His name is Hermano Smith. When he teaches its awesome. He helps a lot with spanish and grammar and such. Hermana Coleman is more the teacher for spiritual things and Hermano Smith is more for the language in my opinion. But he is fun and messes around with us a lot. My district is crazy! I love them! But we have a hard time staying focused sometimes because we just have too much fun together.

So the other morning at 5:30 in the morning it sounded like WWIII outside. It was a warzone. We sleep with our windows open and you know how I mentioned that bombs (really they are just fireworks but the sound like bombs and for the sake of it it just sounds funnier to say in my opinion) go off a lot here. Its just part of there culture for if someone dies or if there is a wedding or pretty much whatever. It doesnt really make sense to me but thats because I live in Utah not Mexico where people are crazy ;) But they were going off like nothing else this past week and it was so hard to sleep through them because whoever was setting them off was super close to the CCM and it was SOOOOOOOOOOOOO loud! Come to find out they are having this festival thing and the first mass starts at 5:30 in the morning. Who would be crazy enough to go to a mass that early I dont know but they set off like 20 bombs at once and keep setting them off until like 6:30. The best part about it is that the festival lasted a WEEK. It was miserable. But by the end of the week I think I started sleeping through them and we shut our windows so that mightve helped a little bit.

So at gym my companera is muy loco! She loves to exercise. We usually go running but sometimes we do other stuff. But you know how I said that I ran a mile last time in like 12 or 13 minutes? Which is pretty pathetic I realize because my companion laps me like twice every day but I got my mile down to 11 minutes the other day. So 10 minutes is my next goal. And I also play ping pong almost every day. Its great. Oh and we played soccer the other day with some hermanas and lots of elders. I went up to get the ball because it was coming to me (usually thats what you do in soccer incase you didnt know) and another hermana started running towards it and I got to it first and started dribbling it and all of a sudden she like body slams me and I fall to the ground in front of everyone. It was pretty great. and embarassing. But oh well :)

The other day there was a CRAZY thunderstorm! It was lightninging and thudnering (yes I realize those arent words) a lot! And pouring rain. Hermana Murri and I didnt have our umbrellas so we had to run to our casas to get them and we got drenched! I played piano in sacrament meeting on Sunday. That was fun. Each Sunday we dont know who is speaking until right before so we all have to prepare a talk before hand. It can be on anything. But my companion had to speak. Which was weird because there were like 4 hermanas that were there for there last Sunday and they never had to speak... anyways. I hope I dont have to speak this Sunday because my district is doing a musical number. My companion is playing violin, I am playing piano, and the 6 Elders are singing. We are doing Did you Think to Pray. It sounds good. However there might possibly be one or two Elders that are tone deaf... but besides that it sounds good!

Sundays are great here. I dont know if I told you last week but we get to watch movies every Sunday night. No. Not normal movies but church movies. Its not the same as going to a movie theater or anything but when you are living the mission life it is pretty great. Last week we watched something like "how great a treasure" and this week we watched the "legacy." One thing thats tough for me here is that it is REALLY hard to wake up in the morning. I am always the last one up... But I always make it on time. And another thing thats hard is staying awake during lectures and devotionals and stuff. I have never fallen asleep yet because I usually end up writing a bunch of stuff down to keep me awake or braid my hair or do something but I have gotten pretty close a few times.

We had the weirdest meeting this week. We all thought it was going to be on like modesty or something like that. But no. It was on hair. And makeup. She basically told us that we dont look good enough and need to spend more time in the morning making ourselves look presentable. Sad huh? Its kinda been the joke between all the hermanas this week though. Although I do understand where she is coming from like we need to look professional because it also shows how we feel about the message we are sharing I just didnt really feel like it was necessary because usually almost all the hermanas I have seen always look super cute.

We got a new investigator this week. Her name is Roberta. And yes. It is hermana Coleman. Weird right? But we had our first lesson with her on Monday and it went really well. The Elders that went before us didnt even get in the door and we were able to get in within the first 3 minutes and taught the whole 1st lesson on the Restauracion. I didnt talk much because my companion usually talks a lot and is able to say what she wants to in Spanish. But I did talk about the parts I had prepared because I had most of it written down... haha ;) Some day I hopefully will get to the point where I dont have to read stuff and can just speak it.

Laundry is going good. My companion is very patient with helping me. I also ironed today. Weird huh?

My water bottle was super stinky this week. I decided to wash it. It was definately a process. I didnt have any soap so I had to use a hand bar of soap and it didnt fit so I had to like fill my hand up with soapy water and put it in. And then I squirted foam in it and rinsed it out. It smells a lot better now.

Today I did laundry, organized, cleaned my room, and yeah. It was a pretty relaxed day. We also practiced the musical number with the Elders and then we might have had a little jamming out session afterwards. It was super fun! Well I love you all and hope that life is still going good en Los Estados Unidos! LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Love, Hermana Goudie