Making Headway with Tagalog

Kumusta Family!!

I want you all to know that I love you lots and I miss you soooo much!

Thanks for all the letters I love reading them :)

MOM and Rachel! That is so awesome that you signed up for the Turkey Trot!! I am so proud of you girls I know you can do it:) I will pray for your success! Tell me all about it k?

Also mother, I have not found my camera. I know very sad. I guess I will have to buy a new one but untill then sister Palmers mom is supposed to be sending you pics. Has she done that yet?

Anyway this week has been great! I think it is my best week yet here at the mtc! I am finally getting comfortable with the language. It is far from perfect but my Kasamas and I can converse now about things other than "Where are you from?" and "Do you have a family?" haha! We are also able to teach lessons now with hardly any planning which is pretty exciting. I mean of course we plan a topic to teach about but we don't have to plan out each phrase and practice it for two days to be able to teach it. Last night we taught two elders in our district with about ten minutes to prepare and we taught an awesome lesson about obedience in tagalog! Being able to speak and understand the language better makes it easier for us to foeel the spirit and teach by the spirit during our lessons. We have been working on that a lot lately, being guided by the spirit as we are teaching. It is amazing how much the spirit can bring to my mind and how much I can feel the spirit when I rely on him. The gifts of the spirit are so amazing but we cannot be led by them if we don't ask! so make sure all of you pray for the guidence of the Holy Ghost Lahat Araw, Araw Araw (all day every day!) !

So anyway lets see district 16C is officially gone :( they are awesome missionaries and we will miss them so much! Especially sister Tauti! She left yesterday and that was so sad but happpy because she is going the be an amazing missionary in the field. We all saw them off and took a lot of pics with them yesterday. In a couple of weeks that will be me leaving!! I can't wait.Sooooooo missionaries leaving means a lot of changes around here! New zone leaders are Elders Perkins and Adams who are in my disrtict. And we are getting 37 new missionaries tomorrow!!! That's a lot of missionaries! 6 of them are sisters. Oh man 31 new elders. haha. that is going to be a handful, but I'm super excited.

Since there are so many newbies coming in all the teachers are getting moved around. Our favorite teacher Bro. Ah Mu is not going to be our teacher anymore. Very sad. He is soooooo highlarious and such a great teacher! we are going to miss him a lot. At least we still have our other teacher Sister Lewis. She is so sweet and amazing at Tagalog. She also has the cutest dresses in the World!

So this might be a short email today because not a ton has happened this week so sorry but something that did happen this week is Elder Neil L Andersen came to speak to us! It was so amazing to have an apostle of the Lord here at the MTC! He started of by saying that it was Thomas S. Monsons Birthday and that he wished he could have been there. So we all sang Happy Birthday to President Thomas S. Monson! it was so fun :) He went on to talk about 9 very important things that Thomas S. Monson would have said if he were speaking at the MTC. These two are my favorite. #7 Never ignore a prompting of the spirit and #9 Witness the Power of the Savior. The other points are also very important but these two are just so important. Like I said before, the Holy Ghost is so important in missionary work. We must always be heeding to it's promptings and asking for his prescence if we are to find people and teach them to their needs. Once we do teach we must testify of Christ. Jesus Christ is the reason why we do missionary work. If we are to testify of Christ we should be converted unto Christ ourselves too!! Anyways I don't have time to wright all about this but I am hoping to have time to write you all a hand written letter today too.

I love you and I am sorry this was so short and not really funny or anything! Thank you for writing funny things in your letters I love you read them and they make me happy!

I love getting letters tell everyone to send more!!!

I am glad you started baseball up again mother I know you love that. Tell all the children I say hello and that I love them all to pieces!

Ahhhh!! There is like no Tagalog in this letter!! ummmmmmm Itinuturo sa ating ng Word of wisdom na iwasan nating and tsa, kape, tobacco, at alak. haha. random sentence that I said in a lesson the other day.

Love you! I promise hand written letters this week!!!