Greetings to all! I am no longer a denzin of the United States, for as I as write this, I am here at the Peru MTC ready to absorb the gospel like a sponge of righteousness! The flights themselves went nicely, on the first one I sat next to this old Dentist who served in the war who was going to Alabama, and on the second I sat in the midst of a group of girls who were going to Peru for a service expidition. Pretty neat. The very first moment of getting out the plane was the weirdest: seeing a wall of ads in a different language. ¡Loco! The airport went by smoothly and we were able to be escorted to our MTC mobile, or a spanish version of Charter buses we have in the US. The air in Peru is very cool, a little thick and always slightly foggy, and it´s 100% overcast 24/7, and I hear when the sun manifests itself it is ´a rare delight´. The city was also a brand new sight for me. Every other block was either fancy or completely run down poor, with random walls of graffiti and large movie posters with exquisite pavilions. It was just like the apartments you see in movies where it looks like old rooms slapped together and held together by glue and paper. They had a few American resturaunts, and alot of KFC´s. On the bus I was thinking how odd it was that we hadn´t seen a McDonald´s yet and as I turned around I beheld a 3 story hotel looking McDonald´s mansion. Later, I got to the CCM (spanish for MTC) at about 2 am, which should be 1am in Utah time, and entered my dorm. There´s 6 people to a room, and this MTC is way newer than the one in Provo, but significantly smaller. The whole thing is only 3 buildings with a courtyard, basketball court, and an utterly spectacular, netted, astro-turf soccer field with stadium lights. I CANNOT WAIT to play on it, although all the native missionaries are probably going to destroy me with thier exceedingly great skills.
And Mom (and Dan) is going to love this, but my companion is a member of the Ecuadorian indian tribe where they speak (I don´t know how to spell it but here´s how it sounds) ´keechua´´ and he has the whole long hair bit and everything! I´m excited to get to know him, because right now it´s really tough to do anything because my spanish is as lame as a moldy tortilla. But by this rate, I´ll learn it in no time! (I´m already speaking it about 40% of the time here, and there¨s alot more Americanos than I was anticipating) But everyone in my room is Latino, and I feel lost pretty much the whole time. I can put together senteces pretty easily, but for some reason I have a really tough time just trying to understand what someone said. My comprehension skills are not balanced to my creative thought processes. And the food isn¨t hard to adapt to either. In fact, it was really good. And I learned that whatever food you put on your tray, you need to eat, because I heard the chef will yell at you and make you go back and eat the whole thing. Good life skills.
And I¨ll say, last night and this morning I had never felt so homesick. The concept of literally being in an entirely different continent (sort-of) really hit me, but I think I´m doing better now. I miss you guys SO MUCH. Today´s schedule is really laid-back thankfully, at the Provo MTC I think I was in my classroom with in 15 minutes of arriving. But here, everything is way more laid back. Then again, that´s probably because there´s only about 150 missionaries here. In Provo they have about 2600.
And another really cool thing about this CCM is that every Saturday we get to go out in the city and practice proslyting to people. It is pretty much the real deal. I´m excited to do it just because my Spanish is so poor, and it will be a very interesting and rather fun opportunity. Then, by the time I can really speak the language, I hope to bear my testimony to all that I can say it to.
All in all, I don´t have my journal so I don´t any specific doctrine to share in the letter this time, but I´ll bear my testimony that the Lord cares for us. As foriegn as this place truly is to me, I know that I´ll be both building myself and others that I interact with, whether it be church investigators or whoever reads these letters. Once again, you guys are fabulous, both Family, Friends, and Fans (if any Youtubers got my message!). My new P-days are on Wednesday, so I´ll write e-mails to you then. (and it´s pretty much hopeless to send packages, so don´t worry about it, I´ll try to send those letters/pictures I wrote on the plane as soon as I can get some stamps, plus, I´ll try to send some digital pictures next week)
¡Nos Vemos a todos personas! ¡Ciao!
-Elder Sanders
