The Most Unprepared Helping Others Activity
The trend of the events of Tuesday naming the emails is officially broken. This time I named my email off of the events of Wednesday. Sorry Tuesday, talking with the MTC President is not enough to get onto the subject line.
Fun fact, I'm writing the email on the way home from the temple today, meaning I have two temple trips to share with you!
Friday
Temple trip! We did Endowments today in the temple. We were worried that the endowment would be in Spanish…and we were correct. Luckily for us though, they had English subtitles for us to follow with, so we weren’t too lost. The speaking parts were a little worrisome as well but we were given a piece of paper with the transcript so we could read our parts. That was a great thing because many of the people had a heavy accent that is hard to understand.
I’m starting to get more excited to meet the people in Honduras every day, especially when I think about all the cool people I will be able to meet.
Saturday
THE BIGGEST RAINSTORM I HAVE EVER SEEN HAPPENED TODAY. The amount of rain that fell today was about the same amount of rain that fell in Utah in the past two decades. I’m a little jealous that Utah doesn’t get this rain because Utah really needs it, but it was fun to experience a big rainstorm like that.
Costco Hot Dogs today! Yay!
Substitute teacher today. I liked her, but most of my district did not. Their loss, I’ll stay positive and happy as best I can.
Sunday
I taught the Sunday Priesthood lesson for church today. A week of work lead up to this moment, and worse, President Hymas (the MTC President, more about him later in the email) was at the sacrament meeting today! Luckily for me, he decided to go to the other priesthood session in my branch, so my companion and I were in the clear (kinda, the President called out my companion during sacrament meeting for crossing his fingers when the sacrament meeting talks were announced).
Our lesson was about goals. We started with a wordle to help people guess what our lesson was about. And the district leader guessed the word on the FIRST try. That part of the lesson was supposed to be a time waster, but it ended way too quickly. Luckily, we had planned more than enough for our lesson and we had to cut our meeting short to keep up with our time constraints. I think the lesson went well, and now I’ve inspired myself to make a bunch of goals to help improve myself.
Monday
Now that we are among the oldest of the Elders in the CCM we have been asked to only speak in Spanish (not possible). We all took up the challenge, and promptly failed a few minutes later, but the special part of this challenge is not that we are perfect, but trying harder than before.
Speaking of trying harder than before, I am now enacting goals to try harder as a disciple of Jesus Christ. I'm pretty terrible at making and enacting goals, but so far it is working out very well.
I tried some meditation today. MUCH RECOMMENDED. You feel so calm and peaceful after meditating and it's nice to forget stressors for a short while.
Tuesday
Today was a good day for sports. I played Nine Square, Spike Ball, and Ultimate Frisbee. It was very fun to play and try my hardest, had some pretty cool moments dashing for the disk and catching it, or jumping for the ball and hitting it. I also found a jump rope and briefly relived my elementary school days.
I decided to sit next to President Hymas and his wife. They are the MTC Presidents and from Provo, Utah. They are both very fluent in Spanish and have been running the CCM for the past 7 months. It was cool talking with them, and I found out they love Cubby's, which is where I worked for a year.
New batch of missionaries came in today, and because we have so many missionaries already, we were put into a separate building to watch the devotional online. It's not as cool as being in the auditorium but this will likely be the only time our district won't be in the auditorium because they cycle between which districts have to sit out.
Wednesday
Now is the time to explain what the "Helping Others" activity is. To practice teaching to people in a more realistic environment the MTCs around the world get volunteers to roleplay with missionaries. Most volunteers are members, and occasionally a nonmember will volunteer too. Last week my companion and I did one of those activities with a member of a bishopric in Mexico City and it was pretty good. We were told to expect to do one every week, but we couldn’t find our district on this week’s schedule.
Because we weren’t on the schedule we thought that we were in the clear on needing to do a Helping Others activity. Our teacher said that we would need to do one of the activities before finding out that we weren’t on the list, so he was like, “I guess you guys are fine this week so let’s continue the lesson”. We peacefully kept learning and working until out of nowhere my teacher (Hermano Salado) stood up from his desk and said, “Let’s go to Helping Others”.
We had exactly 1 minute to prepare a scripture before we were sent to rooms with computers so we could meet the volunteers on zoom. We were told to spend about 15-20 minutes chatting and sharing a spiritual thought before ending the lesson, but my companion and I were praying to even teach for 10 minutes.
To cut a long story short. 40 minutes later and a couple texts to find where the rest of the district went, we found out we spent the most time talking to our volunteer. We met Maria Patricia, a charming woman with 2 children and 4 grandchildren, who has been a member for many years and loves to talk about food. We easily spent over half the time we had talking about food, about the weather, about Mexico vs. the United States. It was hard talking only in Spanish, especially when the internet cut out briefly, but we ended up chatting until they forcibly kicked us off. We shared with her a short message about faith and she shared her testimony with us and it was just amazing to be able to connect with someone I’ve never met before.
This was easily the most stressful and most fun experience of the week.
Thursday
One month down on the mission, and 700 days left. I hope you guys can wait that long. We had a substitute teacher during our morning class today because Hermano Salado’s sister has a birthday today. Our substitute was very nice, but we spent the class period practicing teaching SO MANY LESSONS. It was very tiring, but also great practice for the mission field where we may be teaching many different lessons on the fly.
Our two dear zone leaders: Elder Amosa and Elder Nelson are now gone from the CCM. They are now at their appropriate missions and we have their replacements in my very own district. Elder Snyder and Elder Evanson are the two new zone leaders, and so far they are doing great. In two weeks it will be me and my district that will be leaving.
Finally, I forgot to mention that I met an Elder Davis from the Harvest Hills 6th ward yesterday. He lived pretty close to where my piano teacher lived, and was good friends with the Gross family that lives down the street from my home. I’m so surprised that someone who lived so close to me passed by me every day for weeks, and I never even knew until now!
Friday
We had an early morning temple trip today. Because of that my email is late today, but I have more to say about today!
We went to the temple today. Because it was early in the morning I had to wake up 30 minutes early today, but luckily I was blessed with the ability to jump out of bed full of energy today.
We did Endowments and Sealings today. Endowments were the same as last week’s temple trip. But I was able to do proxy sealings for the first time EVER. And in Spanish nonetheless. I’m so grateful that these ordinances are so easy to perform, otherwise it would’ve been nearly impossible to perform them in a foreign language.
After doing sealings we had some time to visit the visitors center next to the temple. The sights were beautiful and it was cool seeing the service missionaries there. I am surprised by how many temples are already in Mexico, and they are building more as you read this!
We had one of our most American meals today for lunch: Burgers and Chicken Tenders. It is so nice to have a burger again because they are my favorite food.
Fun news today! I got my flight information this week. I will be flying to San Pedro Sula, Honduras from Mexico City at 8:35am August 17th. It’s felt like I’ve been in the CCM for so long but I’m finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel…er, for the next two weeks.
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