She's Alive!

Brittany sent her first email from the MTC today!! For those who don't know, Brittany is only allowed to e-mail her family one time a week, so we will post her emails on this blog for everyone to read how she is doing! She is allowed to receive and send snail mail for anyone not in her immediate family, so please send letters! :) Here is the first email for everyone to read:

Hola!

I'M ALIVE! And doing well. They let us have our first pday (preparation day) today (Saturday), and then from now on we will have them on Thursdays. So, I guess I'll just go ahead and tell you about my life for these last few days.

So on Wednesday you dropped me off, tear tear, and then I had a little "host sister" that showed me around. She took me to my room and got me situated, then took me to my class, where I met my companera and my district. Mi companera se llama Hermana Lamb. She is from Panama City, Panama! And I'm already finding myself using way too much Spanglish, if you can't already tell. So her parents are American, but she was born and raised in Panama, then came here for school. So she speaks both English and Spanish perfectly. We work really well together. The more we get to know eachother, the better I feel about our companionship. She's really hardworking and obedient, and she always has good ideas that she shares. I think it's good for me to have a native companion, I learn more about how the culture works, and I get to live with someone who speaks way too fast. She's really good, like I said, as each day goes by, we get better and better at working together. I think it'll be great. Also, she's serving in the Mesa visitor's center as well, so we'll be seeing a lot of eachother during these next 18 months.

The rest of my district is really great. We actually have more sisters than elders! Theres me and Hermana Lamb, then another companionship. In that companionship, one is from the DR, learning English, and the other one is from Georgia, learned Espanol in college like me, and they're both going to NYC North Spanish Speaking! They're both really sweet. Then we have a trio of elders. One is from Orlando and going to LA spanish speaking! The other is from New Mexico and is going to Quito. And the last is from Maryland and is going to Tijuana. They're all at least partially Latino, and have one or both parents who speak Spanish. They're really fun, we already get along great. I like my district already, and I know the closer we get, it'll get even better.

I've only met one of my teachers, his name is Hermano Arnold. I thought Ashley's husband, Stephen, was going to be my teacher, but they split up the district at the last minute, and I got the other teacher. Hermano Arnold is really good, and we'll have a sister teacher as well starting next week.

Que mas...Well one great thing is that I've seen LOTS of people here that I know! That always makes it great. I've seen Natalie Stevenson, Michael Slawson, Trisha Zemp, Caitlin Jolley, Andrew Bentz, Rebecca Carper, Jeralee Johnson, and others. That makes it really fun.

My Spanish has already improved a lot. I'm getting a lot faster at reading it, and my speaking is improving too. I'm still hoping to improve my understanding of native speakers more. But I figured that after 4 weeks, I'll hopefully have improved a lot more. I'm sooo lucky that I am serving in a language that I already know a bit. It would be so incredibly hard if I were here learning Russian or Korean. I got it pretty good.

So...let's talk about what I'm learning. Can you tell I'm a little scatterbrained? And I only have 13 minutes and 52 seconds more to write to you! AHHH! So the first night here was great. They had three older men come in who acted as investigators, and they would do a little role-play discussion, and then they would ask questions that us new missionaries would field. So these actors acted out parts of a diplomat from Haiti, a Japanese Buddhist living in Ogden, and a Catholic Italian who lost his wife. And they had the legit accents, so it made it very believable :) But it was so cool, as the night went on, you could just tell that the love that all of us missionaries had for them just grew and grew. Seriously, the last investigator was the Italian who lost his wife, and me and my companion were both just like "WE LOVE YOU SO MUCH!!!!" and different missionaries from the audience were testifying about how they had come to know that our families are eternal. It was really cool.

So, other than that, we mostly just do a lot of class and a lot of personal study. We have around 2-4 hours of personal study each day. Then we have 1 hour of companionship study that is during classtime. Then we have class for about 5-6 hours a day. During this time we're doing a lot of reading, a lot more of roleplaying. The roleplaying and practicing contacting/teaching is my favorite part, which makes me think that I will love my mission even more when I get out there. During my personal study, I read the missionary manual, and then I've been studying the first lesson, charity, and some other subjects. By orders of my branch president, I've also been memorizing 3 Nephi 15:3, the first vision, D&C 4, and our purpose. Todos en ingles y espanol tambien! We also all need to have a 5 minute talk prepared on a certain subject (tambien en espanol) for our branch meeting on sunday, and then 2 of us are picked to give our talk. This week's topic is the Atonement (no big deal, right?), so I've been studying that as well. Basically everyone I've talked to says that it gets "soooo much better" after the first Sunday, so I'm curious to see how tomorrow is :)

I'm working on being more bold. Example: Today Hermana Lamb and I taught our teacher a bit of the first lesson. And for various reasons, I like basically threw out the idea of baptism, on the first lesson, which is something I never would have done before hahahaha. My teacher was kind of like "Wellll I don't want to take it too fast" haha but it turned out fine. It was funny. I don't know what else to say...I know you always love to hear what I think about the food, and let me just tell you that it is NOT the same as the Cannon Center! The Cannon was way better :) Hahaha but the food is still totally good. Que mas...I'm finding myself whistling hymns a lot. Seriously...I've gotten to that point. Hahaha, WHAT IS BECOMING OF ME!?!?! Just kidding.

I think that's about all. I'm doing really well. Thank you for all of your prayers! Write me so I can hear how you're doing! Hope you're all doing great, thanks for everything. I'm really quite surprised at how perfectly content I've been here...maybe that means I just need to stretch myself more. But I think I'm making good progress, I'm learning lots and lots about missionary work, which I love. Thanks for everything! Te quiero!

Love,
Hermana Fors