Sister Hamilton has been called to serve for a period of 18 months in the California Arcadia Mission. She will be serving in Spanish.

Monday, September 8, 2014

Hola Familia y Amigos!

Hola! Buenos Dias!

This week has totally flown by. We are constantly super busy with our language study and classes. This week we started teaching two new investigators, Edgar and Mauricio (who are really our teachers, Hermano Melara and Hermano Galicia). It´s amazing how much more I can say in Spanish now in comparison to what I could say during our lessons last week. My grammar is still a disaster and my verb tenses are all over the map, but I feel like I can express myself better. I´ve also been translating the messages that the Spanish Speakers from the Yorktown ward wrote in my journal, which has been a lot of fun and super cool. I´m excited to hopefully be able to hold actually conversations with them completely in Spanish when I get back. It´s a lofty goal, but I think it´s a good one.

On Sunday I was able to give a five minute talk completely in Spanish all about the blessings of the Temple. I think it was actually a really great learning tool. I had  Elder Neser ( one of our Zone Leaders and pretty much the best Spanish speaker in the zone) proof read my talk and he didn´t even make that many changes which made me feel pretty good about how much I´ve learned. 

On Sunday we also watched a really great devotional that Elder Scott gave last year where he said "remember the Lord has called you to succeed not to fail". I just thought it was a really great message because we´ve all been feeling frustrated with learning the language and a bit overwhelmed by how much we are asked to do, but this is the Lord´s work and with his help we will be able to speak the language and help the people. 

Sometimes we have district devotionals and every night we have a prayer and spiritual thought as a zone. I love those meetings because they feel so sincere and just for us. There are no teachers, no manuals, no expectations, just a bunch of ragtag young people sharing how they feel and what they believe. It´s a cool experience.I also really love singing all of the hymns in Spanish. At the end of every zone meeting, all of the Hermanas hug each other goodnight and say "Buenos Noches". It´s one of my favorite parts of the day especially since Hermana Johnson, of one of the other districts, gives super tight hugs like Torie and it just makes me so happy.

This week we started practicing contacting and we had to do it with the latino missionaries that are here. I thought it was fun to try and talk with them. It was hard because they talk so fast and I know so little, but we were able to communicate and ever crack jokes. Some of them asked for a picture with use (probably so they has a picture with some gringas) so now there is a photo some where out there of Hermana Hansen and I and a bunch of Latino missionaries. 

I´m running out of email time, but I´m so excited for this up coming week. They´ve already started decorating for Mexican Independence day and I just think holidays are awesome. It´ll probably suck a little bit though, because Mexico City is already so loud and it´s only going to get louder. I doubt we´ll be able to get any sleep. I´ll try to write more next week. (an hour email time is NOT enough time at all!)

I hope everyone had a great week! Love you and miss you loads.

Hermana Hamilton







This is the sign I made for the classroom. 
We needed some district Spirit


























My companion and I by a budding palm tree. We think they´re awesome. She always says "look there´s a pineapple popping out of the ground!"






























We labeled our dorm so we could learn house hold words. We labeled the little cabinet with the ironing table as a cabinet because we didn´t know how to say it, but the cleaning workers wrote it out for us while we were gone. I thought it was super funny





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