I cant believe it, but I've been here for two weeks now!! Crazy! I should be fluent any day now right?? =]
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE LETTERS!!! AND SUZI SCHEIDEGGER!!! Thanks for your letter and the pics! It was my first mail in the CTM and I LOVE it. =]
Life is soooo good!! I got a new companion last week and she is fantastic!! Sister Sessions. ASH, she was in your ward at BYU!! Heather Sessions. She remembers you! Anyways, she is super nice and just so great. And it is wonderful to actually have a companion now!!
Actually, today we are getting another companion, so we will be a trio. Crazy! And sadly, we have to move bedrooms..... after my first week, I got a new companion and had to move bedrooms and now it is happening again! Ah. I wonder what will happen next week....
Portuguese is coming. Slowly. haha. BUT it is good. All the elders in my district joke around that I'm fluent and that I'm actually brazilian and just pretending to be an american.... ha. NOT TRUE!! But I'm getting better at it!! Sister Sessions and I got two brazilian roommates last week and they are wonderful!! Sister Texeira is from Brazil and Sister Almeida is actually from Portugal. So she's taught me a couple phrases that i probably wont hear around here.... They are the sweetest!! The other day they left Sister Sessions and I little notes under our pillows! So sweet. I'm sad that we have to leave them when we move rooms today.
Our district is awesome! I love them all. Last weekend in one of our evening classes we had an impromptu testimony meeting and it was so great. These elders amaze me with their testimonies and their desire to serve. Sometimes Sister Sessions and I get frustrated when the elders are being immature, but moments like this make me so happy!!
They have a violin here at the CTM, and I got to check it out for this past week!! Wooo! Sister Steadman who leads the choir asked me to play with them at the devotional on sunday night. It was so fun!! Dont get any grand ideas though... this CTM is TINY compared with the Provo MTC.... For example, there were only 14 sisters my first week here, last week we had 19.... So choir is mandatory for EVERYONE and we arent very good.... hahaha. But it was still so good to get to play. Since then I've been playing a little bit for my district everyday. I started out just playing some hymns for them, but then Elder Myer asked me to play a celtic fiddle tune and they all basically died... hahah. Maybe they enjoyed it so much because they dont get to hear music very often.....
Teaching is going alright. It is so fun to teach! but so hard too. We have mostly been teaching our teachers in fake situations, but on Saturday Sister Sessions and I did our first TRC. There was a youth group that came in to be our investigators, and we got three teenage girls. OH MY GOSH. They talk so FAST!!!! AHHHHHHH. We nearly died. And while one of them was talking and repeating what she said about 400 times for us, the other two would be snickering in the background. cool. OH and they video all of it. Turns out all the other people that came with the youth group were watching us in the waiting room..... GREAT.
But yeah. We're gonna get better at it!!
Last week our teacher Irma Korth challenged us to memorize this verb sheet that they gave us... the entire thing. It was 6 tenses of 3 regular verbs and 19 irregular verbs!!! AH. And we have to memorize 4 conjugations for every tense!! (there are 6 conjugations, but we don't really use two of them...). Anyways. It's way hard. And I kept trying, but everyday I would forget what I had memorized the day before. Yesterday though, I finally was able to remember some!! I've memorized all the tenses for 6 of the verbs on the sheet now!! WAHOOOO! Wish me luck in learning the rest.
Today we got to go to the Sao Paulo Temple. SO GORGEOUS. The inside has all this dark wood (cherry?? mahogany??) and it is beautiful. And there is a ton of stained glass. soo cool. The foyer has a stained glass depiction of the Savior coming to the Americas, which is really cool when you think about where we are!! Crazy!
Everyday is so busy, and sometimes hard, but I'm so happy anyways! I love it. Missions are so great. I am sooo sooo soo glad that things worked out so that I can be here now. It is amazing to me. I was reading in Alma (chapter 8 or 9 ish??) where Amulek is talking and he says that he had been called many times but would not hear. I'm so glad that our Heavenly Father calls us over and over again until we hear Him!! And I am so grateful to be here in Brazil!! It is seriously amazing and I love it soooo much.
Eu amo voces!!! SO MUCH.
Sister Ward
A note from Ashley: Amanda sent these pics last week, but I was lazy and forgot to post them.... Sorry!
I'm assuming these two are Elder Gaines and Elder Elliott, her old "escort".
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