Ecuadorable: First Week at the CCM

HOLA!!!!! Happy Thanksgiving!!!! I love you guys so much!!! This week has been so hard without you guys!!! Oh my goodness I don't know where to start! So the first day was crazy and really was the longest day of my life. We had a ton of power points talking about all of the rules. That's pretty much all that the CCM (MTC) is a bunch of rules. We cant even give the Elders high fives or sit by them at lunch! Oh AND I was sick so that defiantly didn't help. Hermana Conder is my companion and I love her! We get a long so well and she is really good about helping me with Spanish! Ugh I am so frustrated with this freaking language. I guess I just thought that it would come really easy cause of Argentina but its not haha I just need to work harder I guess! Tomorrow we are going to try to talk only in Spanish so that will be interesting! So after being in the CCM for one day, ONE DAY we had to teach a lesson to an investigator in all Spanish. haha that was pretty painful.

So a typical day is... we wake up at 6:30 and get ready then go to breakfast then we have an hour of personal study where we read preach my gospel or the scriptures, then we have about two hours of language study and another hour to prepare our lesson for that night. We teach a lesson in Spanish every night! The style of teaching is pretty crazy. They pretty much don't tell us anything about what we should teach or how to speak Spanish and just throw us into everything! BUT I can say a prayer and say my testimony in Spanish so that's pretty exciting! Then we have lunch and then MORE studying. We pretty much stay locked up in a room studying all day every day and only three of the hours are with a teacher so its hard to be productive, but I am working really hard! Then we have gym which means Hermana Smith runs around the track and Hermana Obendorf, Hermana Conder, and I stretch and do handstands and stuff haha. Oh Hermana Obendorf and Smith are the other girls in our room and I absolutely love the heck out of them! I will try to send pictures so you can see us all! Then we have another hour of language study which again is really hard without direction. Then we have dinner and get to teach our investigator! Our investigators name is Carlos and he is super cool! We got him to commit to baptism yesterday!!! But it is so freaking hard to teach a lesson in a language that you don't know and when no one is telling you what to teach!

I love you guys so much! Today is our Pday so we got to go to the temple which was super cool! I loved it! We got to wear headphones so it was in English but next time we go we have to do it in Spanish! And we just had our thanksgiving dinner (lunch is the big meal of the day so it was really lunch) I am going to try to send pictures now! I love you so much! Keep the emails coming! I love you guys and miss you more than you could possibly imagine!

Love, Hermana Chamberlain