30 January 2013

Hola mi familia y mis amigos!
Well the week has flown by and I hardly
know what to write. Sorry if I repeat any of my last email...I cant
remember. The weather here is great! nice and warm! But at times it
gets quite hot when we are exercising outside at 3 pm. But I will not
complain because it is so much nicer that Provo. The people here are
wonderful! They are so incredibly nice and patient is helping us learn
spanish. Speaking with the natives here is the only thing that has
gotten me through the week.
 There are many changes here from Provo
that are hard to swallow but the best change is that we get so much
experience listening and speaking with natives. I am just blown away
by the incredible latino sisters here. Most of the ones that I have
talked with do not come from full member families and some have
families that are not at all happy that they are serving a mission.
Sometimes I forget how very fortunate I am! But through it all they
are still here and smiling. It is a constant battle to understand
because they talk fast and quietly. I feel like the words that I say
most every day are mas despacio. ha! On our third day here we got to
go to the temple grounds to contact. It was nerve racking to walk up
to strangers and share a spiritual thought with them and then ask for
contacts. But it went better than I expected. One of my teachers in
provo told us that a mission is all about getting comfortable with the
uncomfortable. That is SO true! Hopefully it gets easier. Today we got
to do a session in the temple here. It is TINY! The session room was
about as big as my bedroom at home with three pews and an alter in it.
Luckily there were enough of us Nortes there that the session was in
english. Only two people could be going through the veil at the same
time because they didnt have any more workers. Hence it took us almost
40 minutes to get through the veil. My poor companion needed to go to
the bathroom the whole time! On p days vendors come here to sell
stuff. It would be easy to spend all my money but I am trying to
exercise some restrant :) Luckily I found out that when I go to my
mission home I will be taking a bus not a plane so I wont have to
battle the weight of my luggage any more. Santa Ana is only about 4
hours from here. That is crazy to think about! The food here is pretty
good. Mel, you wont like anything though. I look at every meal and
find a least something that you wouldnt handle well :) Most of the
time I feel well but the other day I ran into my first set of
digestive problems....not fun! Hopefully it wont happen often. Well I
better go. Sorry that my punctuation and paragraphs are next to
nonexistent. The keyboard here is really weird and I figure out how to
do an apostrophy and there is no enter button. Weird! I hope all is
well with you all. oh and I hope you got my last email. did you put
it on the blog? my email is weird here too and lost some of my
contacts so sorry if you dont receive this email directly from me.
hasta luego!