Mission email week ¿? - Calarcá, Colombia

 Hi everyone! I realized that this is realy week _____ 1/2 Because i started MTC on a  thursday and my first few emails on wednesday but now pdays are on monday so that changed a bit but also we left for colombia on a tuesday and i didn't write for almost two weeks so ill haved to count. When i send this if the subject and the begining don't have numbers then i forgot to actualy check what week this actualy is. Im sure you can figure it out, I started July 29. Probably. Yep.

Ok so this week was good, we had an intercambio where my companion switched with another elder from a different companion in our district. I only got lost once on the way to the appointments so i'll call that a sucsess lol. Sorry for the infrequent use of this thingy ' it is in a different place on spanish keyboards and is a huge pain to actualy type. We are teaching a couple of families right now and a couple of people with families that aren't interested in the church. Everyone is shorter than me, like a lot shorter. I realized i havent fully goten used to the short doors when i slamed my head into one recently. A lot of canceled apointments this week but we got a good amount of new people too from calling people as well so it was a good week overall. Wow these are random emails lol. It looks a little like a brain dump of five seconds of me thinking. Ok thats it : )

I forgot to take pictures until today so here are a few, hopefuly more next week if i remember.

Byeeee

Elder Crenshaw 

(no pictures attached :-D)

Mission Email Week 7 - Calarcá, Colombia

I think this is week seven at least, I didn't actualy check lol, this week was good, I am gettting used to the crazy driving and the short doors, and I am learning spanish pretty fast too. The branch Im in is small but it's hard for me to remember all the names because they are spanish and im not used to that yet.

IDK if I said this in the last email or not but the food here is realy good. they have hot chocolate like every day but it is not always sweet. even when it doesn't have sugar it is still realy good. the other drink that you have if it is not chocolate is panela (i think that is how it is spelled)

We almost had a baptism this week but she decided she wasn't ready for baptism yet which is sad but it is ok. she still wants to have lessons and still believes in the gosple so hopefuly she will change her mind about baptism in the future. :)

the people here are realy nice, they almost always say hello when you walk by in the street and they almost always give you food if you talk to them for any longer than like three minutes. They can get mad if you close the car door to hard tho, in the US I just kindof slam it closed but here if you do anything harder than a soft tap that barely closes the door they will probably get mad at you.

this is a little late so I am gonna end it here but here are some pictures because my mom said that I need to send pictures, more next week, this is just what I could find and what I took after she told me to when I talked to her today :D

Mission Email Week 6 First week in Colombia! - Calarcá, Colombia

Hi everyone! IT's difficult to type on this phone because  it keeps auto correcting to a spanish word or a different word in english so if there are a lot of typos thats why😂 A lot happened this week, it's my first week in Colombia! Meeting all the Elders from my MTC district was great. On the flight to Miami I sat bext to a missionary from another church, it was cool to talk to him about the church. At the end of the flight i offered him a book of mormon but he wouldn't take it, ah well, at least he knows a bit more about the church :D. I was a little worried when we got to Colombia because i forgot to print all of my papers, the coustoms people must have not cared tho because they just asked for my passport and then just let me through when they asked for my other papers and i said i didn't have them with me. After the airport we met the mission president and he took us all to Dominos for pizza. Then we droped off our bags at the mission home and went to sleep at a bunch of different missionary's appartments. Then in the mornning we went back to the mission home and ate breakfast and had our welcome to the mission thingy. We met or saw a video of our companion and found out were our first area was. My companion is Elder Camacho in Carlarca.  Inteeviews with the mission president took all day because there are so many of us. That night we went to another missionary's appartment. I was at that appartment all of the next day with Elder Meeks while the zone leaders were at zone conference. The day after that we were on the bus all day going to our areas with our zone leaders. Im really tall in Colombia so everyone i meet talks a lot about it😀 one cool thing that happened this week was durring lunch. Lunch in Colombia is very big and breakfastand dinner is small. I had trouble eating everything so that lunch i said a prayer asking for help finnishing the food. It felt like my stomach emptied😀 i need to go so i will stop here but God loves all of us and always listens to our prayers.

Love you all, byeee

Testimony in Spanish (talk in sacrament meeting) - Woodstock, IL

 

Mission Email Weeks 4-5 - Home MTC, Woodstock IL

 Hi everyone! sorry I didn't write last week, I'll summarize both weeks in this one :)

We finally got our travel plans! I'm going to Medellin, Colombia on the 7th. The whole district is flying from where they live to Miami Florida and then we are all going on the same flight to Medellin. I'm glad that I can see the rest of the district before we go to different areas in the mission. My Spanish is improving a lot but I don't know how much I'll actually be able to understand once I get there. Last week we started doing some group classes/workshops with the Latino missionaries and they talk really fast. I can get the general Idea of what they say but I'm not fast enough to catch all the details. It's ok though.

In class we do a lot of practicing teaching the lessons and a lot of spanish grammar practice. I made Quizlets for all the words in the lessons in our Spanish Intermediate Core book. It took a while to type them all into a spreadsheet because there's a lot of words. all together I've made over 2000 flashcards and typed over 7000 words :O All the elders in my district have been using them a lot and It helped me to learn all the words better so I think it was worth it.

I have been going to the temple every week on P-day and that's been really cool. Today we were going to do Initiatories, Endowments, and Sealings but they needed help with the baptisms and confirmations suddenly so I got to do those as well so I did all the ordinances today.

All of the days we are in class are very similar which makes it hard to describe them well but I liked what my companion wrote to summarize our classes so I'm going to steal it from him.

Epistle of Elder Leatham

And it came to pass that Elder Leatham the Misionero looked upon the screen all the day long. And he did look upon the screen for 6 days and he said to himself in his mind. "This is good." He labored with all his might to learn the language, and it slowly came. 

This is the end of the Epistle of Elder Leatham

My Aunt Teresa is putting all these emails and pictures on a blog thingy so people can see everything at once so check that out! 

https://elderchriscrenshaw.blogspot.com/

I don't know when my P-day will be when I get to Colombia so It might be almost 2 weeks before I can write again, we will see.

here are some random pictures from MTC

there's a google folder as well, I think you can find it in the last email or on the blog thing :D

BYEEEE