Nov 25, 2009

Hi there peeps!~

Tiff~
I got your email of when you forwarded your dearelder.com letter to me. :) Usually they just print it off the day that you write it and put it in your mailbox, so I don't know why I didn't get it yet. It could have been because I'm not in the philippines yet, and you specified that I was there, OR because they're trying to uhh... filter some stuff. Just so you knoooow. It's funny that you told me to tell everyone about you, because just this morning I mentioned to my companion about my friend back home. ;)

Eva~
I love you so much!! I want to hear everything about your doctor's appointment. I love the updates on Elizabeth too, because she's going to be so much bigger when I get home. Its nice to see how she's growing. :)

Mom~
Thanks for sending me the stuff that I need. I'm so happy that you are going to get to go see Michael. And I'm so happy he's going to get married. He's so much fun and so nice that he deserves to be happy!! Of course I wish I could be there for the wedding, but I'm sure Michael will forgive me, seeing as I'm a bit... uh busy. ;)

A lot of stuff has happened this week. My companion Sister Dustin has moved on to the Philippines this week, so I'm going to miss her. But we're going to be in the same mission, so it's quite likely that I'll see her again, or even be her companion! Right now the 6 beds in our room are half empty. Sister Purdy and Palmer both left this week as well to New York. They only had to stay 3 weeks because they're English speaking missionaries. We took a bunch of pictures. I'm so glad I have my camera.~ Right now I'm in a trio companionship with the other two sisters still in my room. They're Sister Lew and Sister Kim. They're going to the Hong Kong mission and they're learning Cantonese. :O I'll probably be with them until Sister Lew leaves, or the new Cebuano district comes in. There are no new missionaries coming in this week because it's Thanksgiving. So last week we had 700 new missionaries come in.

The last Cebuano district was huge. They had about 20 people in it. They all left on Monday/Tuesday though. So technically... for the time being I am the ONLY Cebuano sister in the WHOLE MTC. :) I am pretty sure that the next district coming in is going to have a Sister missionary or two.

Elder Aso that I wrote about last week is going to be sent home for medical issues. He has a problem with a heart valve that they discovered when he was in surgery for his digestive system. So he's not going to be in our district anymore. :( Our district now consists of 3 Elders and I. So basically we all have to go around everywhere together (when I'm not with my Sister companionship) because we can't be alone, and a Sister and an Elder pairing off is a no-no.

I have a field day on saturday, so we're going to be trying to make it seem like we're in the mission field as much as possible. We're going to make appointments with people to teach them and our schedule is a little more flexible for dinner and stuff. It seems like our branch is the only one that's really done field days in the MTC, but I'm not sure.

We had a devotional last night and Elder Dallin H. Oaks came and spoke to us! Try not to be too jealous. :) It was a really cool devotional. We got to hear Elder Oaks with his directness, but the subject matter was missionary work. There were a couple of things that really stood out to me as counsel that I needed to listen to.

On thursday, (THANKSGIVING) we're having a lot of speakers, and rumor has it that one of the speakers is going to be Jeffrey R. Holland. We'll see though, because rumors are everywhere. haha.

There's no temple session for us this week because they're closing the temple just before our session would have started. Thanksgiving and all...

The language is coming along I believe. I feel like I can actually carry on something of a conversation now instead of just asking what's your name and where are you from. Our teaching appointments are usually on thursday, but because of thanksgiving we're going to teach Sister Lillywhite on Friday as our teaching appointment.

My teachers are Sister Lillywhite and Brother Morrey. They both have very different styles of teaching and both of them served in the Cebu mission. The only missions that Cebuano speakers go to is either Cebu or Tacloban. I heard that about 1/3rd of the population in Tacloban speak Cebuano and the other 2/3rds speak Warai Warai. Apparently the sentence structure is the same though. That's good to know because that's really the hardest part of learning a language. :)

I gotta go now, my timer is running low.
I LOVE YOU ALL. Send me dearelders.com if you can. ;) HEARTS AND LOVE!!