Oh my goodness, where do I begin?! When our district started emailing just now it was like a race because we all have SO much we want to tell in just an hour! I absolutely LOVE Colombia and am so glad I get to be at the CCM here. So there are 73 missionaries here at the CCM so it's very cozy and so nice because everyone gets to know each other and it's like one big familia! There are 26 Nortes and the rest are Latinos! Me and Hermana Parker's roommates are all Latinos but one of them, Hermana Goosman who's from Bolivia, speaks English and it is SO nice since we obviously aren't fluent in Spanish yet, haha.
So our schedule goes like this: We wake up before 6:30, get ready, do personal study in our districts from 7:00 to 8:00, go to breakfast until 9, study grammar for an hour, study to teach an investigator for an hour, do more language study for an hour, go to lunch, study some more, teach our investigators, go to gym where we can either workout, play volleyball, soccer or pingpong *I usually just run with another Hermana or do ping pong because soccer here is intense....like people have gone to the hopsital for injuries plus the court is on concrete so...* then we shower and get ready again, go to dinner til 6:30, then usually have a lesson and then we do TALL, which is a Spanish program of the church and we get to repeat words and conjugated verbs over and over and overrrr, so fun!
The next best thing other than the people here is definitely....THE FOOD! Holy moly, meal time is like my favorite thing here. Since I can't share every meal I've had here, I'll just list some favorites. For breakfast there's almost always this delicious hot chocolate, and it's so much better than in America because it actually tastes like real chocolate, if that makes sense...? And there's always these delicious rolls and fruit for breakfast too. Then my favorite lunch would probably be the delicous assortment of rice (duh), this soft tortilla biscuit thing, ground meat, DELICIOUS plantain cooked to perfection, and the biggest slash best piece of avocado ever. Then for dinner there was this steak with a boiled egg cooked in the middle with potatoes and rice. And to finish the delicious food segment, the best dessert ever was this macaroon looking thing, it was these two shortbread cookies with this orange caramel stuff in the middle rolled in coconut. Need I say more? Oh, and me and Hermana Parker discovered a fun new fruit, I don't know how to spell it but its granadia? Hermana Goosman said they call it Moco Moco in Bolivia because the stuff you eat inside looks like...MOCO. Look it up...
Almost everyone in our district is from Utah, or as the Latins call it, The Mormon Factory. The first few days we were here we learned how to bear our testimnonies and pray in Spanish, and guess who got called on to say the prayer our third day here right before a meeting with everyone at the CCM...me! Thankfully I did alright!! Our teacher we have everyday for language and other lessons is Hermano Arangos and he is so hilarious! He comes in almost everyday singing "Buen dias, BUEN DIAS!" and awlays says "Can I get an amen?!" when he wants us to be more passionate about what were learning or saying. We've been teaching two investigators, aka a teacher at the CCM and the CCM President's wife haha. TEACHING IN SPANISH IS HARD. Our lessons are basically just a page of notes in Spanish and when they ask a question, we just string together words and verbs so they'll get the idea.
Meetings and Sunday classes here are so great! When we meet in the chapel for church or devotionals or other speakers, the nortes get headphones and one of the teachers translates everything into English for us. It's funny though because whenever the speaker says something funny the Nortes' laughs are delayed since we don't know what they said until later. Oh, and I love singing hymns here! The Latins just sing with their whole heart and there's no pressure to sing the perfect pitch and harmonize, even though that's great too…haha.
A member of the Quorum of the Seventy came and spoke to us yesterday morning and it was such a cool experience. It was Elder Camargo and he spoke about what we need to do to be successful missionaries and one of my favorite things he said was that the gospel is a daily effort and diligence is an active thing! Before the meeting started we all lined up and got to shake his and his wife's hand and introduce ourselves to them.
This morning we went to the temple and it is so gorgoeus!! We got so many pictures afterward so don't worry...Driving there in the bus was an adventure, traffic here is crazy. You can literally reach your hand out the window and shake hands, high five, whatever you prefer with the car next to you since you're so close. Oh, and our next P Day is on Tuesday because it alternates between Tuesdays and Thursdays here. Thank you so much for all the sweet emails and pictures!!LOVE ALL OF YOU! Ciao!!
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