Week 5: July 9, 2010

Dear family,


A lot has happened this week. We had our first lesson in Spanish and
it was actually our best lesson yet. We still have to work on the Spanish,
but the important thing is that we taught with the Spirit. An elder in my
district told me a story about his brother on his mission. He was teaching
the Word of Wisdom to another woman and they taught the whole thing wrong
because they mixed up a ton of words, but when they asked the woman to tell
what she learned, she said everything perfectly. I guess it just goes to
show how the Spirit can teach people.

We're at the point now where pretty much anything we say can be applied to a Spanish principle we've learned and so we made up a game to motivate us to speak more Spanish. There's a "native" in the district that has to speak Spanish all day, and so the point of the game is to also speak Spanish so that people will think that you're the native. If you're not the native, but still get people to vote for you, you'll get more points than if people voted for the actual native. It's a lot of fun.


When my companion goes to the tutor, I'll just learn some vocabulary words
or if it's during class with a teacher, I'll just follow along with what the
teacher had planned without my companion. But I think I might start going to
the tutor with my companion again because I'm sure there's something new I
could learn from him, and the tutor is a really cool and outgoing guy.

The weather was 105? This sure has been a crazy weather year for Maryland
when I'm not in it. You had 2 blizzards that Maryland has never seen before
and now it's almost as hot as where I'm going. I don't think I ever
experienced 105 weather in Maryland. There might've been times when it was
105 at Philmont, but I was always in the commissary with the freezers at -20
degrees, so I could never tell.

I should've got my roommate from BYU to help you out with your Hawaiian
dinner you're making since he would always make his creations with rice and spam at BYU.

We had fireworks on Saturday night last week after a movie that
showed how the Reformers paved the way for the Restoration. It was really
similar to what our Youth Conference was about 3 or 4 years ago. Anyway, the
fireworks went pretty late and so we were in bed by 11 instead of 10:30.

The Escort might be getting to its final years. I was telling Colin before I
left how much it'd been through with Kara all the way down to Julia and how
many times we had been fixing it. If you're getting to the point where
you're always having to fix it, you may as well buy another missionary car
again. haha

The Provo Temple is doing some cleaning for four weeks, so we haven't been
to the temple for a few weeks. We'll probably be able to go in two weeks or
so. Well, I think that's it.

Elder Meiners