oh wow! What to say? well lets start with this week has definitely been longer then my first week in the MTC. OH guess what? i placed 4 BOMS on my way here. so awesome. anywho, we got here and the president took us to the temple, then we had a whole day of training and talking... most of it in spanish, then we met our new companions. My comp is from Peru and she knows exactly no english! Her name is Hermana Ureta and she is pretty great. The language barrier is a little difficult but its getting better... sort of. So we thought we were going to Machala but really we were going to Cuenca (yes the city) so we had to go get all of Hermana Ureta's things from Machala (4 hours by bus) spend the night in Machala and then take a bus at 6 in the morning to get to Cuanca (3 hours by bus) when we got here, the elders weren't at the bus station yet so we had to wait for about an hour. When they showed up they took us straight to our casa, which is awesome! Its the best house in the whole zone and everyone is a little jealous. Its new and has 2 floors, 2 separate bedrooms for the 2 companionships and 3 bathrooms, also, separate rooms for studying and a kitchen! So great. Anywho, missonary life is so different then MTC life, i dont know if this is how it always is or its just the way my comp works or what but i feel like we take forever to do things and we never make it to appointments we set up with people on the street. No se. anyways, we do a lot of contacting and spending time with people in the ward. The people here are so nice and open. A lot of them don't really care about what we have to say, but they will listen and are willing to talk to us again. so that's awesome.
So the language barrier... yeah. I'm getting to the point that if i listen super carefully i can understand the jist of what is going on but usually im lost. ive heard that the first transfer is for learning to understand and that the second is for learning how to speak so im giving myself 3 months before i get too frustrated. This morning, my comp said i had to memorize all these points in PMG(Preach My Gospel) and so i made a deal with her that if i memorized them in spanish she had to memorize them in english and i think it helped her understand how hard it is to learn a new language. She gets a little frustrated with me when i speak in english to Hermana Clark, who is one of the Hermanas we live with, i was actually in the MTC with her so she is going through the same things right now! i love her mucho :)
Que mas? oh my bishop is totally american so thats really nice and one of our mamitas is american too and she speaks no spanish so i am actually the one that has to translate for her... sometimes its a confidence booster and sometimes its not. So the mamitas here are just the people that feed us so we have like 7 mamitas...
I cant really think of anything else. Ecuador is awesome, i hope i learn this language soon.
I love you all!
Hermana Whitmore
This is the picture the mission office sent, along with a letter, to let Krista's family know that she had arrived safely in Ecuador!
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