#5 MTC

Madre y Familia,

Hey! I’m glad to hear that all is well, and that you are all having fun. Hopefully you get better soon from your stomach flu. That’s no bueno. Lo Siento. Anyways I was really really excited to hear about Sam's mission call. That is very very exciting. When we were at BYU, Derek's sister was serving in that mission, so I heard a lot about it. That is really exciting. He said that his sister had spent to that date, all of her mission in El Salvador. Anyways, I am really excited to hear about that. Tell him congrats from me. We will definitely have to go back after we are all done. The Guatemala CCM is a really cool place. We just had some Elders in our district head down there, and they say that it is really great. Apparently the food there is really good, and they have a ping pong table. Lucky! That is also really cool that we get to be so close to each other. It is awesome that he is learning Spanish too. It seems like 60% of everyone in the MTC is going Spanish speaking. I’m really excited about his mission call, and I'm also really excited to hear where Katie goes.

Well this week has been pretty uneventful. We do the same old stuff every day. Oh something funny is that I joined the MTC choir. It’s pretty cool. I’m really horrible at singing and stuff, but there are a lot of people who are worse. We sung a pretty cool song, and sometimes the camera pans over us in the choir. Sadly I didn’t see myself this devotional, but whatever. I probably would have started laughing or something.

Last night we had a wrestling match in our room. It was pretty fun, and we had a lot of people in the room. It was more like a brawl/free for all. Anyways it was really fun. Owen would love it here. There are a lot of missionaries here who are really good wrestlers who wrestled for colleges. What made the wrestling match more extreme was the fact that we turned off the lights, so it was pitch black. It was really fun, but also scary. Last week I got a knee to the nose, which hurt. It was alright. I kicked Elder T. in the jaw (on accident of course). So we are even. Also the banana-ing has come to an end. It was getting pretty out of control, and Elder T threw a banana down the hall was one night and made a big mess. It was funny, but we decided that it would be best to stop.

So I bought some scripture covers like 3 weeks ago, and they are pretty cool. There are a lot of cool looking ones here at the bookstore. Oh and thanks for the package. It arrived here yesterday, and the cookies were really good. They are all fresh and soft. I really enjoyed them, and I still have a lot left so that is good. Oh in our zone there is a guy who played basketball with Riley at the Moses Lake college. He is cool.

Well Spanish is coming along really well. Each week we have a District goal for how many contacts we have to do. A contact = figuring out their name, where they're from, and where they're going, and bearing your testimony. We were doing contacts, and I was bearing my testimony to some guys in a lunch line. They had been here for a week or something, and they were impressed with my Spanish. I was like "oh that’s cool". Anyways, I think that I’m getting better. I can actually read the scriptures in Spanish and understand what is going on. The scriptures are really confusing by the way.

Well I don’t really know what else to say. It’s all pretty fun here and I’m having a good time. We teach investigators pretty much every day or twice a day. We also teach at this place called the TRC (Teaching Resource Center), and we teach real people. This week we taught an old Guatemalan guy. It went well, but he spoke really quick, so it was hard to understand. I kept having to ask him what he just said. And he kept correcting our grammar and sentence structure. It was interesting. I’m excited to get to the point where I can hear native speakers, and understand what they say. I was looking at the calendar and I've been here for a month. Only one more month until we get out into the field. That will be exciting.

Well this is about all for this week. I need to go take my laundry out of the washer in a second. I love you all and miss you.

Con Amor,

Elder Stark