Week 3

Alright so today I'm emailing way late because all of the Nortes (Americans) that had already been here for 3 weeks and all of the Latinos left either on Monday or throughout the night, and it was just us 20 Nortes in the CCM all day. We had the really unique experience of going to Monserrate for the majority of the day. It was beautiful!!! AGHHHHH!!!! I have pictures but the internet is apparently just not going to be strong enough to send them here. Hopefully my first email in the field will finally have some pictures. We also went to this really good burger place and then we went to a jersey store and I got myself a Colombian and Uruguayan jersey. They were pretty cheap.

Recently during P-day soccer I was on an absolute dream team. Elder James, Elder Peterson, Elder Alencastri, and Elder Cherres. We won 9 games in a row. I personally had somewhere in the teens of blocked shots on the goal, we were feeling real good. In fact we have a time limit set and that is why we got kicked off; I technically had a perfect goalie day.

At one point during a grammar lesson on prepositions our entire class just caved and completely lost our sanity because they were not translating directly the way they would in English, like their definitions described in our language books. I personally went 2/15 on the preposition practice test and I took 4 years of Spanish. I was laughing so hard because I never imagined I could hate a group of words so much, but they were so bad. I've gotten a little better since then, but still, why?!!?!

One of my favorite funny things from this week, we were all telling stories from when we were about 14 or so. Can't remember why, but we were. Elder Houseman was telling us about his 14-year-old lady slaying skills and at one point Elder Torgerson just interrupts us all and says, "You know, when Joseph Smith was 14, he saw God." The best part was that he said it super matter of fact and we were all just dying for about the next 15 minutes.

One of the things we do almost every day is someone will lead a discussion about their favorite chapter of the Book of Mormon, and Elder Peterson chose Ether 6. He talked a lot about symbolism and application in our lives, and I would like to point out that I got a lot of spiritual upliftment from this chapter, but inwardly I was just dying because someone finally found a way to tell me that the boats that were "tight like unto a dish" actually had spiritual significance. He basically just compared the water to evil and our spirits like the boats. Sometimes we get submerged(surrounded) by water(evil) but if our boats(spirits) are tight like unto a dish, then we'll be ok.

Final thing. Yesterday we had to say goodbye to all of the Latinos and the Nortes Viejos (Americans that have been there the longest), we all sang "God Be With You Til We Meet Again" and it was just super sad and happy at the same time. I'm going to miss all of those guys so much. Elder Gutierrez wrote me a note in English, very broken English, but it is very understandable talking about how we'll meet up again and tell mission stories in the next life; Elder Chevez gave me a Peruvian flag and colored the Uruguayan flag in my D&C Section 4. All of the Nortes that were more experienced than us are gone too, and each one of them has become a good friend to me in just the three weeks that I knew them, but now I am a Norte Viejo, and I need to make sure I am the best example I can be, because even though in reality I haven't been out much longer than the new missionaries coming in, they're going to look up to me like I did to the other Nortes. I might as well give them something good to look at. 

-Élder Martin