Week Three-He's a District Leader!

¡Hola a todos!

Week three at the CCM is about halfway over. My Spanish continues to improve every day as I learn and teach in Spanish. The days really fly by now that we're settled into our routine.

I don't have any pictures right now, but I will try to send some later today. My companion, Elder Youngblood, took a bunch, but he hasn't sent them yet. I will send them as soon as I get them.

The other district in our branch has now left the CCM, so they assigned new leaders for us. Elder Bullough (previously the district leader) is now the Zone Leader over the whole branch, along with his companion, Elder Jorgensen. I am now the district leader, so I have some responsibility now. I have to look out for the needs of those in my district, so I have to pay more attention to individual people now.

Almost everything we do now is in Spanish. We pray in Spanish, teach in Spanish, attend church in Spanish. It's not always easy, but it has really helped us learn. My companion and I were even told by one of the staff members that we don't have gringo accents! I see improvement in myself and all the members of my district every day. Yesterday, we started a game called "the Latino". One of us in the district is the Latino, who can't speak any English at all. The rest of us try to speak only in Spanish in order to protect the Latino from our teacher, who is trying to figure out who the Latino is. It's pretty fun, and it's been a good motivator for speaking only in Spanish.

Last week, we went to the Mexico City Temple, and we're going again today. It's very beautiful, and it's inspired by native Mexican architecture. Unlike a lot of temples in the US, it's very square and blocky, which makes it very unique. We took some pictures, but, like I said before, I don't have them yet. I will send them when I can.

I found out this week about a website at www.missionarypackagemx.com where you can send e-mails so I can read them throughout the week. I don't know exactly how it works, but if you want to send me something to read during the week, they print it out and send it like a letter to the MTC. Then I can read it whenever it arrives, not just on Friday. It's also possible to send packages or anything through it as well.

We also got a new district in our branch, since the old one is gone. They're all brand new, so even though our Spanish isn't perfect, we know way more than they do. We don't know much about them yet, but they seem nice, and we hope to be able to do a lot with them.

I didn't have a whole lot of time last week, so I neglected to talk about some things here at the CCM. First: it used to be a high school. Each building has classrooms and whiteboards, and it's set up like a school. It only became an MTC about three years ago. Second: the food. We eat at a place called the Comedor. There's a lot of real Mexican food, but they also serve other things sometimes, like hamburgers and pizza. All the names of things are in Spanish, though, so we don't always know exactly what we're eating. It's usually pretty good, though.

Not every missionary here is learning Spanish. A lot of them are from Mexico, and are only here for three weeks to learn about teaching and things like that. Some of them know some English, but most of them speak only Spanish. It's much harder talking to them than it is talking to teachers, because teachers know how to word things in ways we understand, and they know the common mistakes we make when talking to them.
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I have no idea why that message just sent. I definitely did not click the "send" button. I guess you guys are getting three e-mails this week. Sorry!

The keyboards are all in Spanish. The letters are all the same, but the symbols are swapped around. The semicolon is now ñ, and the hyphen is below that. The hyphen's normal place instead has a ¿. It makes it easier to type in Spanish, but I get confused sometimes when I'm trying to type in English!

Elder Youngblood and I still struggle somewhat when we teach our "investigators." We know all the messages, but it's hard to speak with them in English. We're kind of nervous because tomorrow, Saturday, we're doing something called TRC. It stands for "Teaching Resource Center". Basically, people volunteer to be taught by missionaries at the MTC. These are real people who actually don't speak English! We're not too worried, but we hope we can communicate well enough to teach them!

Our scripture study is usually in both Spanish and  English, so we can read in Spanish, but still know what we're reading about. It's really helpful for us to be able to read out loud. We've also started memorizing verses in Spanish. So far I only have a few. Some of them were really short, and some were longer. The shortest one is John 14:15 "Si me amáis, guardad mis mandamientos." (If ye love me, keep my commandments). All of the names are translated, too, so it's actually Juan 14:15. Most of the translations make sense (Joseph = José, Mark = Marcos), but for some reason, James is translated as "Santiago". I have no idea how James = Santiago. Maybe it has something to do with the meaning of it, but it looks nothing like it. Whatever, I wasn't in charge of the translation.

Also, I forgot to talk about the birds! There are some birds that we see all the time, but there are also flocks of bright green parakeets! In Spanish, they're called "loritos", or little parrots. I think they look really cool because we never see any birds that color in the US. It's hard to get a good picture of them, but I've been trying!

Yesterday, to practice the verb "gustar" (basically "to like"), we had to write questions to ask to 10 Latino missionaries outside. We asked questions like "¿Qué le gusta hacer?" (What do you like to do?" and "¿Qué himno le gusta?" (What hymn do you like?). It was pretty interesting to see what they said. Several of them said their favorite food was pizza. One of them was from the Dominican Republic, where they speak Spanish so quickly that sometimes even native Spanish speakers have a hard time understanding them. It's interesting to see the different accents that people have from different countries.

Sorry again for the multiple e-mails, but I hope you all enjoyed reading this e-mail. Feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions or comments on how I can improve these weekly e-mails. This one's kind of disorganized, partly because it's two e-mails, and partly just because I didn't really plan it out beforehand, but I hope you all enjoyed reading it anyway!

¡Hasta luego!

Elder Rowe