Monday, March 11, 2013

Week Six!

Hola!

Finally got to my P-Day! That was a while, but it didn't seem like that long really. This week has gone by pretty fast looking back. And even the days are fast. It seems like we just get out and then we're coming back to sleep. But anyways first things first:

Flights were good. We were only in Atlanta for like 45 minutes so didn't get to see much of that. I slept awkwardly basically the whole flight to Florida which was like 45 minutes? yeah it was cool stuff. We got off the plane and went to the terminal where Pres. and Sis. Summerhays were waiting. That was pretty cool. They're basically awesome! So nice and loving. Then we did what I told you where we went to the mission home and ate and did some paperwork stuff and had a lesson. Then me and my two comps went and slept at the assistants to the pres. apartment that night. They're pretty cool. Oh and it wasn't even hot that day so no huge rush of humidity. People were saying it was a "cold" day because it was 60 degrees. Today it's like 80. Normal. But then the next day we went and did some orientation at the church and got our companions! Mine is............ELDER CASEY! He's way chill and awesome. He's from Draper too! He's been out for about 9 months so he's still pretty young. But he knows spanish well. He speaks to me whenever we're planning or prepping or out seeing people he mostly speaks in spanish. So I'm getting so much better at understanding almost all of it......most of the time. Old people are hard.


A day in the life:


6:15 wake up and work out.
8:00 Personal study
9 comp study
10 language study
11 lunch
12 First twelve weeks (a new training program)
1 start our day!
Appointments (hopefully)
9-9:30 Come back and Plan
10:30 sleep

yep it's pretty much a ton of studying! And on Wednesdays we have weekly planning which takes three hours where we go in depth and use PME to focus on each one of our investigators. We don't start the day until 3 pm those days. We usually have appointments set up, or we just plan to visit people, but it's important here to have our backup plans legit because a ton of people flake out and just aren't home when we show up.

It's way funny how many of our lessons have actually been in Spanish....I'd say like.....2-3? Ha ha but I'm still learning! Because I still have to understand and communicate and teach those people that only speak spanish and basically everyone in the branch yesterday only spoke to me in spanish. And most of the kids we teach it's just polite to speak to their parents in spanish. Crazy thing is I just talked back to them! Most of the time...I understand everything they say, I just can't really respond that well. But understanding is huge and I'm improving so much. But yeah we mostly have our age ish investigators, or  kids and they were raised speaking both but they go to english schools obviously. So it's so much different here. The lessons we teach and how we teach them is completely different then I could've ever thought. They're so much more chill. Like the kids our age we just talk to normally about whatever, and then we just slip in a simple, but powerful still lesson. It's hard to describe. But it's nothing like go into a home, sit down, how's life, here's a deep deep lesson. It's so much more just laid back. Like it might be different everywhere else, but that's just the way the it is here and it's the best way to do it to really make them care about what we teach. Elder Casey focuses a lot on developing that relationship with investigators, and I agree completely. It's important stuff. Oh and we've gotten 6 baptism commitments this last week.


Yeah it's true! 6! pretty crazy awesome! But yeah. cool stuff happening. Those are happening within the next couple of weeks. 24th, 31st, and 6th I think. OH DUH. I'm in Bradenton. It's south of Tampa a ways. We are the only spanish missionaries in our zone, so we cover Bradenton, some of Palmetto (north) and a little bit of Sarasota (south). This week we had the car so it was way nice to just drive everywhere. This next week we're on bikes (we trade off with the english missionaries in our district every other week). So bikes...no bueno. We had to ride them one day on like thursday. My bike....turns out it's pretty tiny. Not like impossible to ride tiny, but I'm working with it. Just have to try to adjust a lot of stuff. But let's see what else..............haven't seen any freaky wildlife yet because I don't think much is around this area. Our apartment is in the Watermark complex. It's right next Manatee River I think is the name. We drive over that river like everyday. Cool. We have like bugs and stuff in our apartment, but that's apparently just florida. I've had to kill a few cockroaches which is the nastiest moment of my life. But other than that life is great! I'm still constantly overly unhealthily tired, but that's not gonna go away for about two years. Elder Casey's gonna be my trainer for 12 weeks. And I'm gonna be in Bradenton until three transfers, so like until July ish. But he might want to extend his time here because we're starting to baptize all these people he's known and worked with for a while and he wants to see entire families get together and such. Presidente Gonzalez is our branch pres. It's spring break here so lots of baseball games and peeps here. I guess there's the Spring training field here where a ton of MLB teams come and play? We drive past in basically on the daily. Well don't know much else to say.....! I'm totes in Florida.

Live Hard,

Love Hard,
Laugh Hard,

Elder Bryson Davies








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