Maddi made it to the Centro de Capacitacion Misional Mexico

Hola!

    I cant believe only a week has gone by. So the campus here is so beautiful. Its so green and huge and we are surrounded by millions of tiny colorful houses all over the mountainside. I took some pictures today so you get to see. Hermana Paulsen (my companion) and I live in casa 7 and its purple. The houses are colored like a rainbow all up and down the streets its pretty cool. Everyone here is super nice and they say ¨´Hola´ everytime you walk by. At first this kind of caught me off guard and I'd end up saying some sort of mix of hello and hola back like hella or holla so that was nice. But Im used to it now haha.  The elders are pretty much forced to be really polite to us here so I feel like I don't have to do anything- they open doors for us, set up our desks, let us cut them in line in the cafeteria,- so ive learned being an hermana is a good thing. The food is so good here by the way. Its kind of a bad thing. And they have mangoes and a Nutella station at almost every meal so I cant really ask for anything else.

Our second day here we had to teach an investigator a 20 minute lesson in Spanish. We were kind of freaking out. We spent all day planning out our lesson. It was hard because we were pretty much writing a one sided script where we had no idea what the other person was going to say and we were talking in a language we definitely didn't know. It was probably the most nerve wracking thing Ive ever done. We taught our lesson at like 8 at night and the investigators name was Jorge. It was a really rough start because we couldnt stop laughing because we couldn't even remember how to say our names in Spanish. Then we sat down and the only thing I remembered how to say was do you have a dog. Yup. so  that's how our conversation started haha. Eventually we got ourselves together and taught him a lesson on how we can pray to our heavenly father to receive personal revelation. We taught him how to pray and got him to say the closing prayer. It was so cool! We've had 3 lessons with him since then and luckily they keep getting better. Every time we teach though all I can think about is how much I just want to speak from my heart and tell him everything I know but Im limited to this teeny tiny vocabulary of Spanish I know and whats written down on the paper in front of me. Our first night here Hermana Paulsen and I thought it would be cool if we picked 5 random words from the dictionary each day to learn in Spanish. But then I calculated how long it would take us to learn all of them and it would be like at least 25 years so we abandoned that plan. They told us that we need 600 hours of studying to be functional in the Spanish language. We only have 100 total hours scheduled for us to study spanish and its up to us to find the rest of the 500. Pray to help me learn fast because its all I want to do.

I feel like everything I think about here is how can we help Jorge *the investigator* or what can we teach Jorge today. Its really cool because learning Spanish is really just a side effect of teaching him the lessons we prepare each day. Yesterday we had a lesson with him and we ended up teaching for 30 minutes. We didn't want to stop because we had so much we wanted to say! I messed up a little though when I was talking about the atonement and said That Christ suffered for all of our pescados, instead of saying pecados. So I said Christ suffered for all or our fish instead of sins haha.

There is so much I want to say but they only let us on the computer for so much time. Its only been a week and I feel like a new person. The spirit here is so strong and I feel it every day. Its amazing how much you learn and feel when you are willing to sacrifice. This is the hardest but best thing Ive ever done.. I can tell already. I love and miss you so much and wish I could say so much more but just know that I love it here and la iglesia es verdad!!

Con Amor
Hermana Baugh