Snail Mail 10/28/2008

Excerpts from two letters sent 10/28:

Half an hour is so short to write everything about my life (in an email).

Every Sunday (except for fast Sunday) I get to sing in a choir. It's just practice and then on Tuesday we have one more practice and then sing in the devotional that night. Then we do it again the next week. :) My companion isn't the best singer, but he wants to be better.

We just got to listen to L. Tom Perry speak in our devotional. It was really cool. I love all the amazing talks we get to listen to. Oh, and by the way, there are 500 people that sing in the choir, but when everyone is singing in all the bleachers and gym it is so cool!

So I think I misspelled the mission my comp is going to. It's actually the Chile, Rancagua mission -- not that you care, just in case. I've heard that Anaheim has one of the highest retention rates. One of the members of my branch presidency said his son went there and came back knowing Spanish better than his other missionary children since there are people from like all the Spanish-speaking countries there! He could tell where everyone was from just by how they spoke! He wouldn't say how many baptisms he got, I think he just said it could be a whole ward. :) I've also heard tons of people say they knew some awesome people who are there/were there. It's pretty exciting.

The people in my district are: Elder Freeman, Ortiz, Winters, Peterson, Land, Hadfield, Johns, Skyles, and Sister Demers. Oh, and the frosted flakes here are real. The guys in my district eat so much! Mostly Elder Land and Elder Peterson. I eat more now that I only eat 3x a day, but their diets are ridiculous and Elder Peterson has a smaller waist size than me! He's pretty athletic and very good at soccer. He likes to lift weights, break dance, play soccer, do the stock market, etc. When we first moved in he found out his spray deodorant had sprayed all over the plastic sack it was in. Our room smelled like it for like 3 days. Then his parents sent him his favorite salsa through air-mail in a cubby in a lunch box with an ice thing. The air pressure change made the vinegar in it go out and soak everything else in the package. That smelled even worse. Actually the cologne didn't smell bad at all, but when he dried the vinegar on the papers on our vent, our room smelled bad. :)

Did I tell you about the elders who moved into our room? They came up from the beginning class, but then one went back and the other moved next door, so it's just us again. Maybe some more will come and move in tomorrow since new arrivals come every Wednesday.

Guess what? We found some secret compartments in our room with hidden stuff inside. We found a little Styrofoam airplane and a flag and a paper frog. Isn't that cool?

We get to watch a movie every Sunday, and the movies change that you can watch (4 options every Sunday). So that will be cool. There are 2 classes every day (except Sunday and P-day) and one session where we study with our companion, by ourselves, and study the language. Then we have a zone meeting every Friday and after the meeting we go teach people lessons who aren't missionaries but come and pretend to be investigators. We so far only did part of it in Spanish. On Wednesdays we go to the Referral Center (RC) which is a place that you call real people on the phone to see if they want to talk to the missionaries. It's kind of scary. Most of them already got a pass-along card and got something for free from the church so we just see if they got it and see if they're interested. On Sunday we get to go take pictures at the temple and walk around the outside. On Tuesdays we can go inside.

I get to sleep on a bunk bed. I have to sleep on the bottom so I can use my machine. I never knew it was so hard to make a bunk bed and I bet it's just as hard to make the top bunk. I lost one of my black socks today while doing laundry so I'm kind of sad. :( Every Thursday morning I get to clean. They have missionaries clean so they don't have to pay people -- plus then missionaries keep it more clean. They only have to hire a few people and the rest is cleaned when we do our service time.

Make sure that Dad puts on my blog that I don't have hardly any addresses so people have to write me so I can write them!

It is so weird to not call people by their first names. When I hear what their first name is I think it sounds so weird. I guess I have to give up the name Shane for a while. :)

Love,
Elder Curtis