So to explain how Dear Elder works, basically i can get the mail in the cafeteria in either the morning or at night, so twice a day, but it normally takes 12 hours to process it. So if you want to Dear Elder me, do it before Tuesday so i can get it and reply before Wednesday morning when i reply to everyone.
Health is getting better. Head cold finally died out about two days ago, and ear infections went away yesterday, so two weeks into the MTC my health is back to normal.
Last p-day we saw the new video at the temple. It was still really good, but honestly i didn't like the acting very much, the characters were a bit sketchy. Satan was bald, and ya i understand that when we are resurrected not a single hair on our head will be lost, but if you going to outer darkness do you seriously gotta take it all the way and make Satan bald? Meh, actually not really, but he was just an angry actor. And i thought Eve was smiling when she was suppose to be crying, so i think i like the first one better. Still haven't seen the video where Heavenly Father is sitting down, i've heard that one is pretty glorious.
Great to hear from the siblets again, i love their one sentence comments, its useful for some entertainment while i'm here on MTC campus. Its mostly boring here since its the same old schedule of class time every day, and we don't get enough time to practice teaching investigators. We teach once about every two days, which feel like the highlights of the day, but that should change as soon as we start teaching at the TRC building next Monday.
Spanish is still coming along pretty well. I can just about fluently speak my mind now, but there are still a lot of words i should memorize for regular concepts and objects. My companion is actually pretty decent at Spanish, but only when we talk slow. Whenever we talk with a mock investigator i'm always the person to answer the questions, because he never knows whats going on, and we get docked if we try to talk in English to our companions to explain stuff. And by docked i mean our investigators will stock keeping commitments or be harder to work with if we talk in English. Its kinda like forcing those uncomfortable with Spanish to use it as much as they can, but it doesn't bother me.
I can talk Spanish, and read mostly, but flipping to a random scripture in the bible and trying to interpret it, ya that's where my skill of Spanish stops, because i have no idea whats happening. My spanish is fine, but my grammer is most likely way of so reading scriptures is hard.
I am finding a couple things though to keep me entertained beyond the usual during my free time. I'm starting to tab up my scriptures with these little 1/4" x 1/2" sticky notes at the end of pages and highlight in different colors depending upon what the scriptures are talking about. I remember a couple years ago CJ tried telling me to highlight based on concepts, but i never really listened to that. Adam showed me his scriptures which had the tabs on his and it looked like a cool concept, but i forgot about it when i got here. One of my teachers had it in his Bible and it looked way convenient, so i tried it and it works fantastic.
I also found out during our study time we can listen to the music on the computers that's available on LDS.org. I use to wonder how i would ever be able to listen to motab or other super calm music all day, but after going an entire week without any music, anything will do. I've also been following the bible video series the church has. I know that they had clippits of sections of Jesus's life or other biblical videos, but i didn't know they had recorded basically his whole life into little 2 minute video bits from birth to death and they are super cool to watch.
MTC is fine, but i just want to actually get out to Costa Rica and start doing the real deal. Practice is nice and super effective, but this place is starting to get pretty old.
Until next time,
-Elder Campbell
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Hola Familia
So weird to hear that the house has changed. I was trying to picture how it looks now, but i just can't imagine what the den and my room look like being clean and actually serving a purpose besides sleep and stalling on the computer. I'm starting to miss animals quite a bit actually. Occasionally i see some old peeps driving down the road holding their pug while it sticks it head out of the window, but that's about all the animal exposure i get here.
It's nice to hear how much the gospel is trying to spread back home with the family history challenge and the ward inactive invitations. I never really understood how fast paced missionary work was with its investigators, but now that i'm here it feels like missionary work is like a bullet train. Glad i had all the brothers to help me lower my expectations and prepare me to work with whatever the lord give's me.
Turns out MTC west is the lower quality campus compared to the main thing, which helps with a lot of the bad rumors about the MTC. This cafeteria doesn't have enough food and junk food to make me fat, and everyone speaks the same language since its MTC west, so communicating is easy.
Can't think of much else to say, I guess i miss Parkour more then anything else right now, but i still find my chances to sneak side flips in every once and while. Yupp, thats about it on my mind.
Hasta Luego
Elder Campbell
