The First Week

Sam's first week in the MTC is coming to a close, and we received his first real email today! Following are some excerpts:

"This week was pretty insane, a lot more stressful than I thought it was going to be. We had to teach I think 5 lessons already to an "investigator."  All of these lessons are in spanish so on Friday when my companion and I had to teach our first lesson we were pretty dang nervous! I was thinking how am I going to teach a lesson in pure Spanish after being here for 2 days, I was freaking out! I don't know why I was scared if it was just a fake investigator. So we made a script up of what we would say and it wasn't too bad other than the fact that we were reading a script (we looked so stupid). We haven't gotten to the point where we can now teach an investigator with no script just an english outline for about 20 minutes in pretty broken spanish. Not too bad though!"

"Yesterday we had our first "major investigator'' where were supposed to teach for 45 minutes. We had a lesson together about how God loves each of his children, and when we got in there he was asking us all of these hard questions like "if Joseph Smith was on 14 years old how did he translate a book?" or "tell me one place in the Bible that says families can be together forever." My companion and I were just looking at each other and were like uhhh crap! So we scratched our whole lesson and just went off of the spirit. It ended up being 55 minutes of pretty good spanglish. He looked at me and was like "show me a scripture that says that we will have a life after this" and I was like okay... um so I had him read Moses 1:39. He read it after being all heated he was like ok very interesting.  It felt pretty good haha! Anyways that is basically how our lessons go!"

"...so the spanish is coming along very slowly but surely. Yes for those of you who asked I can say my testimony and pray in spanish and I can have a somewhat decent gospel conversation. It's crazy how much spanish I have learned in one week, way more than high school. The thing I am just working on now is trying to memorize vocab and get better at conjugations. It is pretty tough though. I am hoping and praying every day that I can learn this language and it is insane how much the spirit has helped me out with the language."

"My schedule each day basically goes like this: wake up at 6:20 (which is a killer), go to class for an hour and study, go to breakfast (which always sucks), go play b-ball for an hour then sit in class for the next 12 hours of the day and learn spanish. It is really a lot of working for only 8 hours of sleep every night. Hopefully at some point I get used to it!"

"Oh yeah I forgot to tell you my companion and I were made "Zone leaders" which is kind of lame in the MTC. Our zone is only one district and so it is not that big of a deal which is pretty nice! I get to carry an awesome flip phone haha! Our district is pretty cool and we have a lot of fun!"

"That is about it from this week, hopefully it goes by quick, because I just want to go to Argentina already even though I know I am not ready!"