FIRST LETTER: Saturday, June 5th, 2010

Querido familia,


My first week here has been really long, but really satisfying. My companion's name is Elder May. He's from Washington State, and he's going to the Georgia Atlanta North mission, also Spanish speaking. He's a really nice guy and loves learning. The rate at which we are learning Spanish almost seems unreal. We've already learned how to testify, recite "the purpose". introduce ourselves, and today we learned how to pray. We now have to try and pray in Spanish every time. The food reminds me a lot of BYU, but at least it's not always the same thing. I always feel bad because I use all of the lunch time to eat, and Elder May eats for 5 minutes and then watches me eat for the rest of the time. Getting up at 6:30 in the morning has actually seemed a little bit easier since Dad always made us get up at that time earlier this week, before the MTC, but after I got set apart. When we saw James last weekend, James teased me because whenever Dad asked what we wanted to do, James would always suggest going to the movies, going on a date, or go swimming.

Our P-Day is usually on Friday, but this week it's on Saturday, and it's a half P-Day. For our gym time, we usually go to the gym, but today me and my companion went to the missionary field and played some sand-volleyball. I've seen some people I met from BYU here at the MTC, I saw my home-teachee (Jono Duncan), 3 guys from marching band (2 tubas, 1 trombone (Lyman McBride, who was in the BYU Philharmonic)). The classes have been pretty long, but they're also profound. We're learning more about our roles as not just teachers, but trying to get to know the investigators before we teach them. Yesterday, we did a little role-playing where me and another Elder were each going to be a missionary and investigator. When he was the investigator, he had an atheist point of view regarding God and so it was pretty hard and some of the questions seemed unaswerable. He apologized after because he knew that the investigator he was playing was very condescending and hard-hearted. We've been pretty busy these last few days, but I actually seem to be learning more as we have more of our day planned out and not a whole lot of time to just do whatever. We seem to be learning a lot and I'm excited to see what else I'll learn this week. Don't worry about me.



Elder Meiners