First Letters

10 April 2013

First of all you should know that I'm using a crazy keyboard with no hard returns and other quirks. That coupled with only 30 minutes of internet will make for interesting reading I'm sure. My flight out went okay. There weren't any missionaries on my flight from Philly. At LAX I switched airlines. Because of how the airport works there, I had to leave security and take a shuttle to another terminal. Then I had to go through security again. It was hard figuring out how to do it. I had to ask several people for directions. But I made it. From LAX to Guatemala there were oodles of missionaries. All of the Nortes. In the MTC we have two groups of people, Nortes and Latinos. The Latinos come and go every two weeks and the Nortes are here for the six. Also, you should know that if you send a letter or anything it should say Hermana Emily Davis. Apparently Hermana or Elder makes stuff go through customs better because they recognize it's to a Mormon missionary. But for my time here in the MTC just send stuff Dear Elder, and please send stuff Dear Elder, if only so that I can have hard copies of your emails to read outside of my allotted 30 minutes. There are 12 of us in our district, 6 elders and 6 Hermanas. All of them except three of us Hermanas are going to El Salvador. The other three of us are all going to Honduras together. There are three other Hermanas going to my mission in another district. I don't know of any Elders and the Latinos and Latinas won't arrive for a few more weeks. My Spanish is coming back. During the general meetings, they give the new Nortes headsets so they can hear a translation in English. I dispensed with the headset after about 5 minutes because I could get almost everything. Unless you're fluent enough to go with the Latinos, all the Nortes get lumped together. That means there isn't an intermediate language track, at least not to my knowledge. For now I'm bored out of my mind during language instruction, but the gospel instruction is good. Now that we've got some language basics started, we're starting to do more with Preach My Gospel, so I'm liking class better each day. Guess what? We're teaching a real investigator. I wasn't expecting that, so that adds more pressure than teaching a return missionary who is posing as an investigator, because we really don't want to mess up. Our investigator is super receptive, however, (I'm sure he was hand-picked) so teaching is going okay. We do a mix of English and Spanish. I'd want to go entirely Spanish, but my companion doesn't understand what's going on when I do, so for now we're mixing in some English. (Our investigator speaks English quite well.) I love you all sooooooo much. My foot has been doing pretty well. For the first few days, the walking program went by the wayside, but I'm back on it again, now that I have things figured out a little better here. I think, however, that I won't be able to squeeze in more than 45 minutes during gym time, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. I got to watch conference, in English. I know that conference in Spanish would have been good language practice, but I loved that I could hear the real voices. (They put the Nortes in a separate room to watch the broadcast in English.) Well, I'm just about out of time.

Hermana Davis

5 April 2013

Hi Family! I made it to Guatemala albeit exhausted! But a couple of nights of sleep later, things are going well. I have never eaten so much meat. Probably ever. I´ve taken to skipping the hot food line for breakfast and just go for the fruit because I cannot eat meat first thing in the morning. Spanish is going well enough, but I haven´t figured out the teaching bit. We taught our first lesson last night to a REAL investigator. I thought we would teach members posing as investigators, but no. So we´re trying to not do anything really stupid. My P-day is Wednesday, and that´ll be the only time I can write or email. My contacts list in here isn´t really working. Please forward this to the rest of the family. I have to go now. I love you all so much.

Hermana Davis