Living Among Llamas : September 10, 2014

The CCM is in a very ghetto area, but we have no exposure other than the noise because of the huge walls. We are totally secluded from the entire city, it is beyond safe.

I slept ok the last 2 nights. Usually it's because my earplugs fall out and then i wake up to gunshots or sirens or one of the companions snoring. Last night he was making WAY weird noises at like 5 am. Like all out ET noises no joke. I was afraid of aliens.

Here's my basic schedule:

6:30 wake up. Lie in bed for 10 minutes while companions take showers and i contemplate the decisions ive made in my life

7:00 Breakfast, usually they have enchiladas or something freakin' retarded for breakfast so i just eat yogurt or nutella or something

7:30 personal study time, or as i call it, write nancy a really long letter time. I try to read scriptures for at least 30 minutes during this time.

8:30 Teacher arrives, begins teaching

12:00 We get out of class after 3:30 hours. My teacher's name is hermano hernandez. My spanish is probably better than his english. He speaks in spanish the whole time, very few exeptions. He is the best teacher ive ever had anywhere. He teaches us how to teach and how to be missionaries so well i can't even explain. He is so amazing, that's pretty much it. We enjoy the whole class and leave feeling excited for life. We go to lunch after. Sometimes we teach an investigator for like 20 minutes during it. This last time the investigator was very mean and when we asked him if he was interested in baptism he said h no.

For lunch I usually just take some meat and tortillas and then they have like a salad bar thing with beans and rice. Then i pour a freakin' crapload of this hotsauce on called valentina sauce. I think nancy use to eat it all the time. Anyways i literally used the beans, rice, meat and salsa to make tacos for lunch and dinner every day last week. EVERY SINGLE DAY I ATE TACOS. I was overeating by waaaaay too much so i started really trying to eat less. I weighed myself and it said 77 kg, which is like 170 pounds. I decided that either i was constipated or i needed to eat less and exercise more (actually it's totally both. At least i have a ton of anti diarreal medication lolol) Then I got the package, which thanks for it. Ill prolly share it with my district because im already getting fat.

12:45 We do more personal study time or something. I usually study spanish or preach my gospel or the scriptures or something. I read all of first nephi in like the last 3 days like srsly wtf. The first few chapters i read in spanish and then i gave up because it gets tiring of trying to focus.

1:45 we leave and go change. We havelike 50 minutes to play sports or exercise. Usually me and elder warnick just go running. I will run like a mile or 5 laps or something and then go sit in the shade. I put on a ton of sunscreen today because i got a little bit toasty yesterday.

3:30 we go back to shower at like 3 and then we go to the TALL lab to work on spanish. TALL stands for technologically assisted language learning. It's basically a program made by byu to learn languages. We have assignments usually and they are so dumb. We do like conjugating ar verbs for present tense. Some days there are serisously like 5 guys sleeping becuase it is so boring. I use it a lot, usually i can get through the whole hour being way focused and i want to stay another 30 minutes so i can try to learn more. I usually do subjunctive vs indicative noun clauses or something that i don't actually know.

5:00 We go back to class. We have a different teacher. She use to be an investigator then she all of a sudden walked in and was like JK IM YOUR NIGHT TEACHER ROFL and i was like oh good. I had taught her the law of chastity the night before and i got to tell her all about what sexual relations not to have before marriage and it could have been better. Then she was our teacher the next day so that happened.

9:30 Go back to the house. Lights out by 10:30.

That's the general way things work. Sundays are different because we have sacrament meeting or whatever. Fast sunday was very very good, very spiritual. I was the fourth one to get up and i talked for a few minutes. all in spanish of course. My district were the first 11 out of 13 to get up. were obviously better than everyone else.

Really though my district is 11 guys and we know more spanish than any other non native speaker in the mtc, even the ones who have been here for almost 6 weeks.

Tuesdays we have a devotional at night. Last nights was a recording from elder holland from last year. It was VERY good, very spiritual, lots of good things. I really enjoyed it. Afterwards we went back to our classroom as a district and everyone talked about what happened and what we've been feeling. Everyone spoke in english but me, i spoke for a good 5 minutes all in spanish no problem. I just talked about what's been going on and what i've been doing to get closer to Christ and to keep the spirit with me all the time. It was really good, i felt good after.

I LOVE TEACHING. Teaching is seriously the best thing. Whenever we teach investigators it goes so well, i can understand everything they say in native mexican and i can answer their questions and tell them what they need to know. All in spanish. I leave teaching appointments feeling so hyped and just on such a spiritual high it's the best thing ever. Seriously it's basically drugs. I don't think i can ever teach enough. I will probably need stamps when im in peru but i dont know. I really have no idea, i just ask everyone and they ask me why i would ever need to send a letter when i have email. Sorry family, but ive sent like 20 pages worth of letters to nancy in the last week lololol, when i asked the lady for 10 international stamps she was like wat. p.s., sorry i dont know where quotation marks are.

Anyways im out of time and i need to send pictures. Just know that I'm getting through it and there are definitely some times that are great and there are some times when i consider just jumping off something really high. I won't tho bc nancy is v cute <3

also, public shout out to my mom for blessing me with being bipolar out of my freakin' mind. My whole life is a roller coaster of emotional conflict.

Love you guys,

Elder Mitchell

The guys in my district cut up a bunch of flash cards and wrote card numbers and stuff on them. So they made a deck of cards and spent some time this morning playing cards. I studied spanish and wrote to nancy instead. <3