Spanglish

I thought our Spanish speaking friends and family might be interested to see Colin's linguistic progress.  Here is a total Spanglish sentence from the letter he wrote me this week:

"pues, cosas son buenas aqui, este semana pasada, yo estudie mucho sobre cosas como, sanctificacion, y como nosotros become it, y es muy interesante y muy intense!!"

(quasi translation: So, things are good here, this last week, I studied a lot about things like, sanctification, and how we become it, and it's really interesting and really intense!!)

Love that boy!
-Linds

Everything is Coming Together

Colin sent us a beautiful letter about his experiences teaching TRC's which are opportunities for "outside people" to come into the MTC and help the Elders and Sisters practice the things they have been working on in class. This particular letter discusses how Colin and his companion Elder Denninghoff had been teaching a woman and her 7 year old daughter about the need for the restoration of the gospel and the need for this woman to be baptised by someone who had the proper authority. They were speaking Spanish and Colin felt that he understood about 95% of what the woman was saying! The past week Colin has been working on understanding the needs and concerns of the investigator and addressing these issues. He wrote:

"I told them that Heavenly Father loves his children so much that He restored His church again upon the earth. Then we connected that to her baptism question, then from that we went into the atonement, and from the atonement we talked about God's plan for us... bringing us back to the feeling that she felt...and that that feeling was the love of God. At the end we talked about how the Gospel blesses families and this is when just everything we talked about came together. I was getting choked up, the lady was getting choked up, the daughter stopped writing in her notebook and squeezed in close to her mom and they were holding hands so tightly that they were turning white... I closed it by saying that I know that this gospel is true, it had blessed my family, and has brought us so much joy and peace and happiness and that this message isn't meant for one person, that it was meant for everybody and that was why I am here, to share it with other people... and that the gospel brings happiness and unity into a family. It was just awesome how everything went together. I could never have done anything like that on my own. It was just so apparent that the spirit was there you could almost touch it. The church is true."

"p.s.

Evan, you better go on a mission or I will give you a round-house-kick to the face!"

New Photos!!!

The El Salvador San Salvador East District

Enjoying a photo opportunity after visiting the Provo Temple.

Colin and his companion, Elder Denninghoff.

"Oh, yeah!"

"Man, it is great here! I am learning so much, and I am reading the scriptures, and just leanrning a ton of stuff. It is great!"

The Interview

My companion and I are continuing to improve, but we still have a ton to learn. Spanish is still going well...but last Sunday my companion and I had our interview with a member of our Branch Presidency and he was actually a Mission President in Argentina and is from Central America. So in this interview we started talking and he said, "Your teachers tell me that you two can speak pretty good Spanish." We just answered saying that we spoke a little, but not very much. Then he said, "Oh, good! Teach me the first lesson in Spanish." We stared at him, mouths down to the floor, then looked at each other, opened with a prayer and started talking. We jumped around between principles and skipped a few, but what would you expect, it was barely our second week there! We asked him if he would keep some commitments and then closed. We were really surprised at how much we knew. He told us that we did a really good job and that we just needed to work on our eye contact, but he understood everything we said. So now we are practicing more in Spanish!