Semana Siete

Hola Familia!

 

  Well this week has been pretty good so far! I enjoyed Sunday again and I was surprised that in Church nobody in our district got called on to give a talk. The district above us left this morning, including my roommates at like 5am! So I was woken up while they were finishing packing a couple things and told them goodbye. One person from their district and someone from the district under us got called to give talks though. So I'm sure we will get called on next. It's weird being the oldest district in the Zone now because I don't feel like we have been here that long, however it seems like a really long time when I think about that first week I got here. As I had mentioned before the people who get called on to give talks are called randomly that day in sacrament, so you are supposed to have a little talk prepared in Spanish beforehand on whatever the weekly subject is. Maybe I'll get lucky and not get called on however, if I do a lot of the Elders just talk a little bit about the subject in, share a few scriptures, and then bear their testimony about it.

 

  There are a few things different things going on this week! Which is great because anytime there is something different here it is exciting :).. The building that our zone moves in is going to begin getting renovated this week so we are going to get moved into a new building on Thursday. I haven't mentioned it very much but there has been a lot of construction going on at the MTC the entire time I have been here. It seems like kind of a funny time to do it, but the buildings definitely needed some updates so that is good! The bummer is that we are going to probably be stuck into a room with 4 other Elders, so there will be 6 Elders to a room possibly! And I don't know if we will stay with our District, and if we do, it's even more unlikely that we will stay with our Zone. So that kind of isn't fun because I don't want to have to pack twice, but I'm just going to leave one of my suitcases packed this time. It might be nice to have some new roommates too as long as they are nice and not super messy (specially with 6 of us!!).. Now that it is finally getting colder here too they told us on Sunday we have to always wear our Suit jackets around the MTC now. You can take them off in class, but everywhere else we are pretty much wearing them now. It was pretty weird because there was one day where it all of the sudden dropped like 20 degrees and was raining quite a bit. Ever since then the weather has been a little colder, but today is a really nice day outside. I like the rain too! It only rained in the morning and a little bit in the afternoon for about 2 days... The best thing happening this week though is I'm supposed to be getting my travel plans!! We usually get them on Thursdays so I'm really excited for that to happen! I should be leaving in less than 2 weeks now, crazy! I'm getting ancy to leave but still learning a lot.

 

 We have finished our grammar activity book in Spanish now, so I know most of the common spanish verb forms now (including present and past subjunctive, for those who know any spanish). The hard thing is remember how to conjucate each individual verb because there are so many irregular verbs, and then remembering to speak it is another task too. I feel like I'm getting better at it each day. Our district each week resets the goal to speak Spanish from 8am- 9pm, and we aren't always sucessful but we have been doing a better job about it. Yesterday we spoke Spanish pretty much all day except for gym time. Besides that things are about the same. Our roleplay investigators are doing pretty well. We were talking to Luis about baptism however and he said that his Esposa (which means wife in Spanish, but she is his girlfriend) who he has a little daughter with want to get married to eachother, but she is having a hard time getting the divorice papers processed from her previous husband. I guess in a lot of other countries getting legally divoriced can take years sometimes too. So we haven't figured out exactly what to do about that, but we encouraged them to pray and fast. We have been encouraging him however we can and teaching him more about the Gospel. Eva is doing well too and we have taught her a lot more of the lessons about the Gospel. She reads her scriptures and prays with her family every night so that is great. Her husband might be interested in learning from us also.... We're doing some more practice teaching in our classes now too, because we aren't going over the grammar book as much in Spanish. Each day we still learn something new in Spanish, but a lot more time is being spent just practicing. I hope that my Spanish is good enough for people to understand what I'm trying to say when I need to by the time I get to Mexico! I'm sure it will come a lot faster once I'm living there too.

 

Look forward to writing everyone again, hopefully with my travel plans here when I do too! Thanks again for all your letters, support, prayers, and love. Hasta lluego!

 

Love,

Elder David Carlson