Hola minha familia e meus amigos!
I’m into week 2 at the missionary training center in Provo, Utah! It’s still fantastic of course. And new missionaries arrived a few days ago so I’m not one of the new ones anymore! Yippee skippe! I only ahve 30 minutes of email time and it goes so quickly. Ahhhhh!
Things here are so good. The spirit is so so strong as there are 3000 missionaries here all giving up 1.5-2 years of their life to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. Everyone is always studying or always teaching. We have like 30 minutes for each meal, 30 minutes to exercise, 30 minutes to get ready, and an hour in our room in the evenings before bed. Then time to sleep for 8 hours. I’m always busy busy busy. Glad I enjoyed all of the sweet free time this summer. :)
It’s nice that the non class time is self governed though. there’s no one telling us specific things to study or specific ways to use our time. I love study time. Good thing there’s so much of it. But I’m never in my room, which I miss because I love my room and my tie dye sheets and my pictures on the wall. But we never spend time in our room, always out and about.
The MTC here is pretty much as big as BYUHawaii. It’s bizarro. I love it here though. And all of the missionaries are so wonderful. Especially those in my district!
Portuguese is progressing slightly. I pray about 500,000 bajillion times a day in Portuguese. “Querido Pai Celestial, adgradecemos-te por… por favor nos ajude a… nos te-pedimos que abencoas… em nome de Jesus Cristo amem.” And then I throw in plenty of English words, since my Portuguese vocab is rather limited. I loooove learning Portuguese though and am so excited to learn more.
Sunday was excellent. Everyone is in branches of whatever language they’ll be speaking. There are about 60ish missionarios in my branch, 8 of those are sisters. The branch president is excellent and I love his wife too. Goooood people around this place. We have sacrament meeting from 8 to 9, watch Music and the Spoken Word watch Music and the Spoken Word from 9:30 to 10, then all of the sisters at the mtc meet together for Relief Society. There’s extra meetings too, such as fireside and district stuff. Sunday was beautiful here. My companion and I sat out on the grass and studied scriptures and Preach My Gospel and Jesus the Christ. Then we met up with our ten elders and walked to the temple and took pictures. I can’t really email pictures, but I’ll try to mail some soon.
Tuesday we had a devotional with Richard C. Edgley. We get lots of General Authorities around this place. :) Sister Lund (minha companheira) and I sang Lead, Kindly Light in the choir for devotional which means we get good seats too. :)
OBRIGADA for the wonderful mail you peeps have sent me! I got two packages (and like 5 from amazon that I ordered before I left :)) and cards and dearelder letters. YAY! Mail makes me soooo happy so keep sending it. Dearelder.com is the way to do it while I’m at the mtc, especailly since it’s free and I get it that day! Yay mail! Hopefully I’ll get some things sent out to some of you today, but I’ve got only about and hour of free(ish) time left to write lots of things.
We went to the Provo temple this morning with our district. It was so wonderful being there and the temple is b.e.a.utiful! Especially with Sister Lund and our 10 favorite elders here at the mtc.
And more good news… I got to see my aunt Connie yesterday! Oh it was so fantastic. We got to visit for like 45 minutes while she was here. It was the BEST! And she gave me the best hugs I’ve had since I left home! Oh it was so grand. Family is the greatest!
I’m so excited to go to Brazil and share with the people that families can be together forever! I’m so excited for Brazil! But I’ll be here, along with tonnnns of other missionaries, until I get a visa. Peeps aren’t really getting them too much. And if I finish my mtc time here in 8 weeks and still don’t have a visa, I’ll be assigned to a temporary mission stateside, most likely not Portuguese speaking. But whatever happens works for me! The Lord knows what he’s doing. I’ll be where I need to be.
I love you all muchos muchos and think of you all often! Hope and pray that each of you are doing well!
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