Fourth Week

Hey guys I hope you guys are having a good time and doing good in school (Chace and Herman). So ya we get to go to the market tomorrow
and we dont get our cameras as of right now. but I am going to buy soccer jerseys, and basketball shorts. I will buy a scripture case for
Mom and Chace but I need to know what kind of scripture case you want Mom. Once I get into the field I will send a package and I just heard
that the first week I get into the field I might not have the opportunity to email that day. So I will try to make next weeks email
really long. Going back to tomorrow we are also going to Wendy's and here in guatemala they have waiters at Wendy's! Isn't that legit! I have
never heard of having a waiter for a fast food restaurant!   

So this week has been like the usual but now the next group leaves tomorrow and that means I only have two weeks left in the CCM! I cant believe
its already been a month! also next week is general conference and I wont be able to sleep during general conference now... haha and fast
Sunday was actually yesterday instead of the week after general conference, and dont ask me why they do it like that, I have no clue.
Also everytime a group leaves into the mission field we have everyone(only elders actually) and we all sqeeze into one bedroom so
we will have about 100 people in one room and then we will sing two songs. The first one is called to serve, which is a no brainer, and
then til we meet again, but we sing both in spanish and at the top of our lungs! It's crazy how loud it is. After we are done everyone is
drenched with sweat because the room feels like a sauna. and our rooms have no fans and the beds in the room are wet with sweat after, haha!

Also this week we learned a huge lesson on having the spirit with us at all times and knowing what we need to do to become better
missionaries and be respectful to everyone. And also our attitudes, we need to have the best attitudes about everything we do here in the CCM
so we can have the spirit and be able to ask inspired questions with our investigators. So how does it feel that me and colton have been
gone for a month? I will try to send letters every two or three weeks. It's kind of harder to write them here with so much stuff going on and
everyone talking before bed. and I like letters way better than emails, because I can always read over a letter. but the dear elder
letters take about 3 weeks and I dont know why they take so long but no one here gets their dear elder letters fast. 

So now some of the funny things that have happened this week. the first was kind of funny but also like are you serious? question. elder mcvey who is a stud and one of my best friends here, he was asking about Colton and he asked, "how old is your twin?" and everyone was looking at him like he
was stupid! haha it was funny and also there are three people here that swim and they aren't bad at swim but they aren't super good. One of
the elders is hickerson and he could go a 5 flat 500 free so he's not too bad. Also another funny story this week was every latino has no
sense of personal space and every latino touches elder dawsons belly and says he is fat and they dont think its offensive! haha its so
funny. Well I gtg so love you guys!                 

Elder Flygare

Week Three

 sorry i tried hitting the tab button and it sent the email. these key boards a different then the american ones. sometimes it is hard to type because you dont know where any thing is.

     but this week has just been awesome. we learned futuro tense for verbs and for regular verbs they are so easy. i have one of the best districts too because when one person need help with a word, we can ask at any time and someone will know how to say it. (mostly elder dawson is the one to answer. go figure. hes a genius) but we have just been a super cool district and we have all become such good friends.

     hopefully i will be able to take pictures when im at the market! ill take pics of my distict too. im sorry if i am not answering some of your guy's questions, its so hard to say everything you want to say in your emails. 

     somethings i learned this week is that we need to have faith in the lord. ask in faith and listen to the still small voice of the spirit. act on every prompting. next is about prayer. prayer is our one way to communicate with the lord. always pray even when you dont want to or dont feel like you need to. and as missionaries the lord has called us to succeed not fail. we will grow and the lord will never abandon us. he has called me to serve a mission. in case something happens and my mission changes then we are suppose to remember that the lord has called us to serve a mission. we are assigned to that mission but assignments can change. but he needs us to serve a mission no matter where he calls us to serve. the last thing i would like to talk about is what my teacher told us last week. we asked hermano ruiz about familys after this life, specifically kids younger than 8 and he said, joseph smith taught, "that when young children die. when we get to the ressurection the lord will look to the mom of the child and will let her raise the spirit children in heaven until the have grown to the full stature that it needs to be." and it really hit me hard because you(mom) will have the opportunituy to raise micah, micayla, and mason in the next life. 

     i would like to end with my testimony, yo se que la iglesia de jesucristo es el verdadera iglesia de dios. yo se que jesucristo es nuestro salvador y que el murio por nuesrto pecados. 

sorry its short but i have to go...

Week Two

Its great to hear where Reagan, Ike and Nate are going. its going to be awesome for them! the MTC is starting to go faster which is a good thing and a bad. its good because classes were so long before and it took forever for the day to go by. its bad because i need to learn a lot more Spanish before i go. its crazy how much my Spanish has grown. i was asked to give a prayer in one of our devotionals on Sunday in front of all the guy missionaries here. which we only had about 100 missionaries. but still it was still a little scary. i thought i was going to mess up or forget some words but i did just fine. it wasn't super long but it wasn't a short little prayer. it is awesome watching devotionals every Sunday and seeing these old devotionals from like 2008 at the Provo MTC but they still are super powerful and the apostles are amazing speakers. i will be in here for the next general conference and i cant wait to see how much more i will get out of this general conference then what i usually get out of them. i just know the longer i am on my mission the hotter my wife will be! haha 

     like i told dad, our roommates just left but we will get new ones tomorrow. and i know i am emailing on Tuesday today and no i'm not sneaking on the computer to email you today but today is our p-day this week. and that means it will feel like forever until our next email because we go back to Wednesday p-days.

     i cant believe its already been two weeks though! its crazy how fast time flies. i cant wait to be in the mission field and just be able to speak Spanish and really see the difference i can make in peoples lives. the Latinos that just left had names for some of the white people here and the names they called some of the people in my district was, elder buzz lightyear, elder woody, elder john cena, elder dawson was estruden which i guess is the catepillar off of bugs life and then i was called elder dumbo. haha its funny to see how that the Latino elders have no sense of their words being mean. it just comes to them and they say it like its no big deal.

     also, this week we have two new investigators; which is Mario Lopez and Ana. they are fake of course but its cool trying to use every Spanish word i know to testify and share a lesson with them. 

and i don't know if i told you guys last week but we had an elder get sent home for punching his companion in the face. ya.. just punched him in the face because he was annoyed of him and because i guess he got him mad about him needing to try harder to learn the Spanish.

     i am sending  two letters tomorrow morning and i hope it doesn't take forever for them to get to you guys and i guess when we are in the MTC we cant send items home. which sucks because i have this wallet for Chace that i wanted to send home which is pretty sick because it looks like a 100 quetzal bill, but i will send that when i get out into the mission. 

     its awesome that Blake is taking off so much time! just tell him to keep working hard and work on technique and he will drop even more time in his events. hows the Gerken family doing?

     And i forgot to respond to the question about goals last week. so my goals are to be able to speak and give a talk in sacrament meeting here before i leave with out reading it straight from my paper and also to learn 10 new Spanish words a day which is going pretty good. and i would like you guys to learn Spanish so when i call you guys for Christmas we can speak a little Spanish. the best way to learn Spanish is using flash cards. i learned 25 new words in 20 minutes using flashcards. just make sure to review them like 5 times the first day and it will just stick in your head. 

     Tell grandpa how much i love him and to keep trying hard to lose the weight so he can get put back on the priority heart transplant list. 

      it rains almost a total of 16 hours here a day and it almost always rains when we are outside playing basketball or volleyball. one second it could not be raining then the next you are drenched. but on the bright side, my shoe drier works! it dries my shoes in like 3 hours and my shoes are soaking wet.

well i got to go! love you guys and i want to let you know that you are in my prayers every day. and ask Chace why he didn't email me this week! i want to know if my bed is comfortable! haha well bye and talk to you next week! love you guys!!! only 102 more weeks!

First Week

Hey guys! when I arrived to LAX I met up with 24 other missionaries. When we got here we were able to take a nap and then went straight into the Spanish lessons.  Oh and right when we got off the plane and got out of the airport, we first see this super small Guatemalan dude with no legs and he used a skateboard to get around and he just pushed himself every where. Then another Guatemalan dude came up and asked if I wanted my shoes shined. and i was trying to practice to say no but he kept asking over and over again so I finally asked how much would it cost and he said it would cost 1 dollar. and so i thought and I ended up giving him the dollar to shine my shoes, but I just realized after that, that he does that for a living and he just goes around asking to shine peoples shoes for a dollar. To us a dollar is nothing, but to him that was the only way he could get money to buy food.  It has been such a hard time here. Learning Spanish is so difficult, especially when you can't speak to your teachers and they want every question you have in Spanish. The second day we had to give our first lesson and I would like to say that Elder Dawson killed it! haha. He gave most of the lesson and I read stuff from the scriptures and from the preach my gospel, but he just is so fluent in Spanish! By the first day we had to learn how to say a prayer in Spanish and by the second day we learned how to bear our testimonies in Spanish. It's crazy how fast you learn Spanish. The gift of tongues is real.

Also we went to the Guatemalan City Temple today and the room is only big enough for like 30 of us and we were squished. It wasn't chairs either, but it was benches and since I am talking about the temple I would like to say that I am in the best room of the MTC (CCM). I get to look out my window every night and see the temple. I get to see where I am striving to get myself after a mission. The only night that I couldn't see it was last night though, because there was so much fog that we couldn't see the temple and the temple is one building away from us. There's a gas station in between us and the temple and then a small street. It's crazy how close we are to it! and I love the Guatemala City Temple's baptismal font. It's so small which is perfect for the Guatemalans but it just is so cool how they have it set up.

I know it might be surprising but the food here is still good! haha. To be honest we haven't had much beans or rice, which is really weird because some of the Guatemalan elders say that they always have beans and rice, but the beans don't go right through me, It's the juice. The juice is so strong that if you drink more than one glass a day and you aren't use to it, then you will have the runs the next day. It's not good at all. 

To end my first letter, I would like to say how much I love you guys and that I couldn't ask for a better family. and even though the days may seem long, the weeks seem like they are fast. I cant wait to write to you guys again! I love you guys so much and cant wait to be out in the mission field.

Love you,
Elder Flygare

Headed to Guatemala!

With 9 out of the 25 missionaries I met up with at LAX on our way down.  

First Letter!

We will be going to the market in two weeks and i will buy flip flops there. the mtc bathrooms and showers arent disgusting.

also we made it here safely and the food is actually good here. i guess if you have too much of the juice then it will go right through you and you will get really sick. Spanish is so hard. i dont understand anything that she is saying. she says she wont speak english at any time and i guess that is good because it will force me and help me learn it. my companion is elder dawson! its really such a blessing that i know someone here and he tells me what she is saying in spanish because i am clueless. my bedroom window faces right at the temple! i will send pictures of it in 6 weeks because they take your cameras, imunization card, and passports. i love it here though!

when we got here we got to take a nap for like 3 hours but it was so hot in my room that i couldnt really sleep. and tell sherri and debbie that i did sleep on the plane even though i said i wouldnt but i didnt need a head rest because i can sleep straight up now! haha i love you guys so much and i cant wait to see you guys in two!

 

Elder Flygare