Hurrah for Israel!

Can you believe it's been over a week?! It's true what they say, the days are long but the weeks fly by! So lets start with the most important thing, the food.  Its a hit or a miss.  Usually a miss.  One time they fed us fish heads that were just fried, eyeballs and all.  I dry heaved a little.  Rice and potatoes are going to get me through.  Lunch and dinner are always rice, potatoes, and meat.  Breakfast is some weird egg thing that isn't eggs and uncooked sausage.  Thank goodness for breakfast bread.  They did give us the best breakfast one morning though, cereal with yogurt instead of milk.  It's amazing! You should all try it. 

The Spanish is coming, slowly though.  Sometimes I feel like if i sat in a room for forty years and only studied Spanish then maybe I would be fluent and then other times I open my mouth and it just comes out and I'm convoked I'm already fluent.  It's an emotional roller coaster.   

Sundays are my favorite days.  Except for sacrament meetings because they give everyone a topic to prepare a talk on the night before and then call you up in sacrament hunger games style.  Talk about stressful.  But the rest of the day is in English! I love English so much. I know I'm here to learn Spanish and I´m learning to love it, but I'm so grateful I know English. It's the language of the restoration and I can read the actual words Joseph Smith translated.  I can also hear the prophet's actual voices and know what they sound like. Don't worry, I'm focused on Spanish, but that's just something I've come to be grateful for.  Also, on Sundays, President Dyer teaches us for like three hours.  It's amazing.  I feel like I'm sitting at the feet of an apostle.  He's so smart and both he and Hermana Dyer are just good, solid people.  I love them so much!  

We went to the temple this week and it was so awesome! The night before we had a meeting about the temple.  Something President Dyer said stuck with me "Whenever a temple goes up it is literally a beacon of light going up for all the world to see".  Well, the Bogota temple is just like a beacon of light.  I could have stayed there forever.  I did the session with one headphone of English and the other listening to Spanish.  They just dub the voices over.    

I love love love all the Hermanas here.  I fit in perfectly with the Latinas and we just laugh and laugh all day.  We have amazing spiritual experiences. Every night as a room the six of us pray together.  The first night we did it we were all having a pretty tough time.  By the end of the prayer we were all in tears.  The spirit was so strong.  We all hugged and now it´s a nightly ritual.  Last night we all sang As Sisters in Zion together, the new missionary verses (so glad I brought those), in our room together. Hermana Adams and I taught them the words in English.  I'm tearing up right now just thinking about it.  Words cannot convey how much I love them.  Even though communication is sometimes hard, we understand each other because we all have testimonies and are here to share the gospel!  

Sorry this email was so short, but I want to share one more experience. The first couple days were really frustrating because I was super concentrated on learning the language and I kinda neglected the gospel aspect a little.   But when I slowed down and realized I wasn't going to learn the language in a day and started focusing more on the gospel, I realized something.   As long as I follow the spirit and teach the way the Lord would have me do, the spirit will do the rest and it won't matter how bad my Spanish is.  I can testify the gift of tongues is real and tomorrow I am gonna need it because we're going proselyting! Wish me luck!  

I love the gospel and missions.  Hurrah for Israel!   

Hermana Willes