CCM #4

haha ya sorry for all the emails. I think tony got me ´too´good of a camera! The pictures are so high def that the email doesn’t know how to deal with it! jaja(as the latinos say)

TREVs a beast!!! Way to be on all the high honors! He’s going to be awesome in japan:) but ya...get on those applications!  I’m definitely going to miss a home grown garden.

Oh, so i forgot to tell you that i barely missed elder bednar!! he was at the ccm literally 2 days before i got there and shook everyones hands!

I love the way the latinos translate some stuff into spanish. On our schedule it says, ´red the book of mormon´ for read. The other day one of our teachers was trying to explain a word and said you know, ´teeth sticks´ we later found out he meant tooth picks haha.

So you know the thing that craig used to do with his hand when he was excited? like the snappy clap thing? Its only with one finger here--your pointer finger hitting your middle finger and thumb. trev can do it i think, but anyways all of the latinos can do it and do it when somethings awesome like encouragement kind of. I’ve finally gotten a sound out of it, but I’ll be pro when i get home.

haha so i think I’ve figured out why people get so close to their districts in the mtc and why they have so much fun all the time. Its cuz we´re all soooo dead tired so it starts to get to the point where EVERYTHING is hilarious! And how the smallest things are SUPER entertaining. Like if i saw some of the things that gave me enjoyment now i would probably be ashamed. haha. Like there’s this huge house on the side of the hill next to the ccm and we can see it over our wall. Anyways the other night the alarm was going off on it, and literally we all stood outside and watched it for like 10 minutes. It was exciting. The other day one of the elders discovered something super exciting, spinning around for 30 seconds and then putting your feet together. You fall flat. Hilarious. We learned a little foot clappy thing. one of the sisters stole my toothbrush while i was in the restroom and put in on the window sill ledge and sat there cutely smiling while slowly pushing it off making the emporers new grove noise saying, uh huh?´kinda. I though it was the most hilarious thing. I died. Same girl pulled me around in the hallway on our comforter. McDonalds has never tasted better in my entire life! I think it’s my new fav restaurant and i didn’t like it before the mish. The few of us that are staying in peru on our mishes had to go and get our peruvian licenses today and so we got it. Best hamburger and fries of my life. The sprite tasted kinda diff though.

ya, so while were waiting for forever at the license place today. I saw this man with a daughter that was crying. I went over and went over and tried to give her a pamphlet to look at the pictures but she didn’t want it so i pulled out a piece of paper and a pen and she stopped crying and started drawing, I started talking to the guy and he spoke english!!! The tender mercies of the Lord. Not only that but he was from..get this.. INDIA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I said one of my hindi phrases to him that i learned from my tapes!!!! He totally understood me and could understand my accent!!! wuzzup!!!!! He was in peru for work, we were just talking about life it was great. His daughter ended up crying again and I made one of those cootie catchers and she loved it! She giggled so much and took it. He asked me if i had a facebook or email address and i gave it to him and took down his info for the missionaries to come! It was great!! 

While we were waiting there were people just sitting all around me. I luckily had brought like ten pamphlets about the plan of salvation etc and handed them out to the people around me that looked bored saying, ´quiere leer?´ they all took them and some of them looked really grateful and said thank you. There was this boy that was in high school that looked like he had a rough life and i handed him one and he kinda started reading it, then i went and sat by him and asked him about soccer and messi in my broken spanish. We talked about usa and what i liked about it. He asked about the church and it was super cool cuz i told him that we are Gods children and he could be like God one day. It was super cool cuz we went back to talking about other stuff(he was definitely very patient with my spanish) and were just like chill friends. I realized that that’s how the gospel needs to be taught, not as like someone trying to force their beliefs on someone else, but as friends sharing and really caring about others and helping them to find more and become more for themselves. (I’m not going to lie, there was a lot of times i would just nod and laugh if it looked like he was saying something funny..most the time i could barely understand him..it worked though i think! lool)

We went prosylyting on saturday. It was a really awesome experience. I felt like a real missionary. And kind of lame cuz i really don’t know the language. With God it doesn’t matter though cuz the spirit has its own language and i definitely felt it a lot. The cool thing about the ccm is that the spirit is everywhere. it’s so real.

One thing i learned this week from Elder Holland is that whatever you want your investigators to do you need to do first yourself. Like if you want your investigators to pray harder and repent more or dig deeper into the scriptures then you need to do it yourself! You are Gods investigator. He wants you to come closer to him. I’m working on making my prayers more meaningful and digging deeper into the scriptures and i challenge yall to do the same! i love you all soo soo much!!!!!!!! Good luck on graduation coming up t-rev!!!!!!!

te amo mucho!

herm black.

ps, i think im heading out on the tuesday around june 4th. 2 more weeks!!!!!! :O

CCM #2

TREVOR THE ASIAN!!!!!!!!!! WOWO!!!!! DID ANYONE SEE THAT ONE COMING?!?!?!?! CRAZY!!!!! CRAZY!!!!!!!! CRAZY HARD LANGUAGE!!!!!! dude, trev. you´re going to ROCK man!!!! spanish is hard..but its nothing compared to japanese!!! haha. all that studying for ib will pay off i think!! youre soooo cool!!!!! you're going to be able to speak japanese!!!!!!!! thats super good that steve gave you that rosetta stone though. i heard those things are the best. im soo sooo pumped for you. i was sitting here reading my emails with a room of missionaries and i yelled, ´WHAT?!?!´ and then ¨my brother got called to JAPAN!!!!!!!!!!!´ sooo stoked for you man!!! you are seriously going to rock it.

i am sooo sooo soooo stoked for michaela to come!!!!!!!!!! ive been telling everyone, ´my cousins coming in two days!!!!!´one of the elders was like, ´does she play soccer too?´ haha i said shes a really good piano player. :) its nuts cuz theres only like 20 people at the ccm right now! 2 of the 4 american districts left on sunday, and all of the latinos(they only stay for two weeks so ill go through 3 groups of them)! i was muy triste. the latinos woke me up at 4 in the morning and we sang ´God be with you til we meet again´in espanol, and i prayed for them in spanish. theyre the best. theyll all find me on ´face´(thats what they call facebook haha) cuz i wrote them all notes in their journals(more like drew them with my colorful pens and wrote in broken spanish) ha. ya so its a party being so empty here. according to hermana cardon(presidents wife) theres about 75 latinos coming, 4 latinas, 7 american hermanas y 9 american elders. should be fun! cant wait for another hermana black!!!

i didnt realize how hard it would be to work hard as a missionary. theres not people there all the time telling me what i need to do all the time. its a lot of self discipline to study for multiple hours a day on your own. im trying to learn how to get rid of my will and accept Gods. the district also makes it hard too, because they become some of your really good friends because your with them all day every day! so if one person comes off focus, then everyone does. on sunday we were all particularly roudy and finally one of the elders stood up and said, ´i have a spiritual thought´and he read a quote from preach my gospel and a scripture about working hard and how God will bless you with power. i have definitely re-commited to putting my best effort out there and stop letting myself lag because other people are. whats cool(trevor) is that we all have so much more respect for that guy now. hes always worked so hard and his spanish has improved a ton(he´ll bring flashcards to meals even). we all want to be the best missionaries, so when youre an example even if it seems intimidating people will thank you for being so so obedient all the time. i know i have definitely thanked that elder.  

cool thought in the temple today was that scripture ´the last shall be first and the first last etc´. i sat on the back row so that i would be the last one into the celestial room, because im trying to be better at serving others and being selfless(last time i was first in there). anyways, the way it worked out, they were taking the people on the back row first this time, so i ended up being first again! it made me realize that when you do what your supposed to and always put God first, things will actually work out better for you. siempre. always. it may not seem like when we get rid of our will and put God first that its better for us. but he´s way smarter than us. he´ll pay us back 500%. at least. the scriptures are dang powerful. i watched a talk from elder holland on sunday and he said that when you open the book of mormon its like the spirit oozes of the pages. (i dont think he used that exact wording, but that the imagery i got:)) ha anyways. its so true. the book of mormons powerful. i just get to tell people to read it! its the proof that everythings true!!

much love,

hermana black.

Pictures (CCM #3)

We pieced together a BUNCH of emails for the following (2 days after Mom’s day)…

Mostly info from the pics she sent.

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This is my district all on the same flight to peru from georgia. There are two other girls that flew alone, so they’re not here, and we also have two more people in our district from the mtc in provo that got their visas. i wonder if i have pictures of them?

This is us at the airport in peru! The girl to the left of me is my companion. haha so this picture was supposed to have everyone that was there with us, but the lady that took the picture musta zoomed in a lot. haha

Here’s the picture i drew you mom! Sorry its dark i just barely took it. :)

 2. = freedom. that’s what across the street looks like when we get to leave on pdays. It’s pretty awesome because every single pday we get to go to the temple and then after we get to go out on the streets and go shopping for a couple more hours. We always bring extra book of mormons and pamphlets and hand them out on the crazy busses and in stores. i love it. Except it is a little nerve racking to speak to someone in spanish, because i can’t understand hardly anything they say. i bought some smiley face stickers and I’ve been handing them out to little kids on the street. I think it’s good for people to see how nice the people with name tags are.

 3. My district in front of the ccm. i love them.  jk, 3 = most of my district in front of the temple.

 Ok, this picture is great. i found out after that i wasn’t supposed to take pictures in the cafeteria, but im glad i got it! These are some of my latina girls, and you can see in the background that there’s a lot of latinos. I havent been as friendly with this last group of latinos, this time, but i was tight with all them.

 5. What the soccer field looks like from my floor. it’s nice. We got some new latinos this time around and one of the elders said that he’s never seen a girl play soccer before! They dont in peru i guess!

 6. Me in front of the ccm on a pday.

 7. Is my whole district in front of the ccm. They’re crazy. we see them all the time. we tried to do an all spanish day, because surprisingly we get spoken to in english a ton. And for like devotionals they give us translators. ya that day only lasted til lunch. it hurts my head to speak in two languages.

 8. The cute girls in my district. 3 go to byu idaho, one goes to byu. my comp goes to uvu. we took this picture while we were waiting for the bus. Ok jk it doesn’t wanna upload. So here’s another of my district on our first pday!

 10. K there’s this crazy fruit called the granadilla or something, and i love it! It has a hard shell that you can break open with your fingers and is about the shape and size of a lemon. Inside though are these crazy slimy covered seeds that taste delicious when you slurp them up! Some of the elders said they look like frog eggs so most of my district won’t eat them anymore. ha. i still do and love it!!!

 13. ok this guy in our district is awesome. elder estrada. the one that kept us in line the other day. He’s hilarious and crazy super hill billy(like lives with his family in a swamp town) haha hes going to cusco too. Anyways we were talking about the crazy food that we might have to eat and someone said we might have to have monkey brains. Now every time someone says anything about monkeys he does a creepy monkey sound and wiggles his arms. i drew a picture of a monkey holding a baby with a tentacle on the whiteboard because one night he said, ´what would you do if you just had a baby and the doctor brings it out and it has a tentacle for an arm?´ haha ya thats estrada.

On my way to peru. The sky was absolutely gorgeous. I’m lucky the plane wasn’t too full so we got to choose where we got to sit! Yes, they gave us like 3 meals on the plane. i loved every minute of it.

I gave a talk on sunday! So they have us all prepare a talk in spanish and call on us randomly to give it. the topic was on charity and they called ´hermana black´haha probably gave Michaela a heart attack, I’m surprised the other herm black didn’t give it because she leaves next week. But my talk went well! All in spanish baby!

Elder chino is one of the new latinos and he’s from bolivia! He brought me a letter from Elisa!!!! so cool. he’s a super funny kid, and he told me that Elisa’s spanish is super good! there’s actually 3 sister blacks at the ccm now that Michaela’s here, so i think it was kind of confusing for him to find me :) yes, i see Michaela all the time she lives across the hall from me. She was famous when she got here. I told everyone she was coming. :)

Ah thanks so much for the update! I’m glad you found the pin mom:) well, i don’t really wanna look for the second trigaurd, cuz all my suitcases are up on top of the closet, but I’m sure I’ll be fine. there’s been some viruses breaking out among the north americans, so my oils are being well spent. And the wonderful cough drops. muchas gracias. :)

 I’m glad everything’s going well in provo! haha i laughed out loud about that tooth fairy tali story. sooo cute. i miss that chica. Tell me what you want me to take more pictures of!!

i love you all so much! The church is so true! Today was pretty cool because they didn’t have translators for us in the temple, I love how i know exactly what’s going on, even though I don’t know all the words. The spirit is siempre the same. i feel bad for Michaela though cuz its her first time! I love that imp starting to be able to feel the spirit more and more in spanish. keep it real familia!

much love,

hermana mal black