MTC Week 4

Hello people of the outside world!

This week has been pretty busy, and I have gotten discouraged a lot with the language and just with teaching in general. En las palabras de Bilbo Baggins: Me siento como mantequillera, extendada sobre mucho pan. (In the words of Biblo Baggins, i feel like butter, scraped across too much bread.) That was as close as I could get in Spanish to the English quote. On Monday we were working in Spanish and did a review of the five tenses we have learned so far, and I wasn't understanding anything. I was trying and praying and trying and praying and it was just not coming at all. I got so frustrated and bitter that I just sat there and didn't say a word the rest of the review, which my teacher noticed because my mouth is constantly going. But that is just me, I shut down when I am angry. I know it was just a phase and that I will understand it sooner or later, but at that exact moment i willfully shut of my brain in silent protest of the Spanish language, and nothing was going to get me to try. You will be happy to know that Spanish and I have reconciled and we are on better terms now.

So this week I feel like I actually had a missionary experience, not just an MTC simulated one. Every Friday we go to the RC and answer the phone calls that come in. I always wondered where the calls from all those commercials went. Well we don't get a lot of calls on Friday's at 11 because everyone is working, but I finally got one for the first time from Carolyn from Ohio. Her son married a member but the family is putting a lot of pressure on him to join the church, and Carolyn wants to find out more about the church because she wants to be able to talk about it with her son. She had a lot of questions that I answered for her, and I sent the missionaries in her area to her with a copy of the Restoration DVD. We talked for about 30 minutes and I told her I would call her back next Friday to see how it went. She seemed comforted knowing she would be talking to the same person when she talked to the Church again. So Friday should be interesting.

So every week our Branch President gives out two topics for talks in Sacrament meeting and every elder is supposed to write a 5 minute talk in Spanish. Well, our district's topic was the Atonement. So I wrote the talk like everyone else, and then nobody knows who will be speaking until the meeting starts and President Busath announces the program. So he gets up after sacrament and says, "And now we will be pleased to hear a talk on the Atonement by Elder Gilmore." and he sits down...COMO!!!! haha it really wasn't that bad. I had written enough to speak for about 4 1/2 minutes. Only one of the branch presidency members speaks Spanish, and afterwards he said he was pleased with my progress in the language. So I gave my first Spanish Sacrament meeting talk. Count it!

Also for dinner on Sunday, they had authentic BYU Cannon Center Chicken Cordon Bleu. I was very excited to say the least. Also my video card will be sent home today so pictures are on the way finally.

So Elder Stokes and I started appointments with a "progressive investigator" yesterday, which is when you sign up with a teacher and the teacher acts like a real investigator while you are teaching. No feedback is given. He is in character the entire time. We have 4 scheduled meetings with him. So we go in and he goes through his little orientation thing. He told us he had picked an investigator from his mission and was going to do everything like that person would do. EVERYTHING! It was difficult. Bro. Valladares turned into Pedro...and Pedro is a piece of work. He was apathetic towards every single thing we tried to teach him. At first I didn't mind because we always learn to try and teach according to the needs of the investigator. So we learn he has two kids. So we taught about eternal families. We asked, "How devastating would it be if you lost one of your kids?" he said, "Well I already lost my wife so it probably wouldn't kill me." which was a weird answer but we went with it. so "how would you feel if you could see you wife again?" "that's alright i guess" WHAT!!! i signed up to teach human beings with real feelings!

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