Elder Chad Bergquist: 9/4/14 First Preparation Day!

I knew Chad, or Elder Bergquist, had arrived but I had NO idea when his Pday would be. I looked every day, okay honestly, I looked several times a day to see if he had written... finally, on Thursday his email arrived!!! Okay, Thursday is now my new favorite day!!! Here is what he had to tell us!

Yes, I took the Typhoid pills, they said I didn´t need any more. Elder Larsen, my companion is from Idaho. We have 4 to a room in the casas. We have bunk beds, I am on the bottom bunk. We have10 elderes y 2 hermanas in our district. Elder Humphreys who is in my room is our district leader. We taught an investigator (pretend/practice), Josue Angulo, who will now be our teacher, Hermano Gomez. Hermana Garcia who was our teacher will be our next investigator. I love my district. They´re awesome. We had an awesome spiritual unofficial testimony meeting as a district in a circle on Sunday night after everyone in the CCM went to the auditorium and watched the John Tanner story and a video of the Crucifixion and atonement. We have been praying in Spanish and trying to speak in Spanish but it´s funny because there´s always a lot we don´t know how to say so it´s a lot of Spanglish. We took some pictures today...

But yeah I love my district. Elder Bushman who is also in our room and is ridiculously good at yo-yoing and apparently vaulted 15 feet in Pole Vault. It was really weird when we first came from the airport, it is an extremely packed city with really constant traffic and building stacked unorderly. Then you come to this huge wall with barbed wire around the whole thing and inside there is all this grass area and these suburban style little houses on I think they said 90 acres. And there are always people working on the lawns and stuff. We try to speak to them a little bit in Spanish and they´re all really friendly. Oh our Branch president served his mission in Riverside. He said he was going to talk to me about it but we´ve not gotten to yet. for each Sunday (except this coming week being fast and testimony) we all have to prepare a talk in Spanish and we get called to the stand right after sacrament. I was surprised when learning how to pray that we address Padre Celestial in the tu form which is informal and everyone else we address in usted. it was a shock. Last Thursday when our teacher gave us a tour of the campus in pure Spanish. We do a lot of our studying without the teacher just as a district. I suppose to get us used to studying on our own. When getting on our bus to come here a girl told us to tell you about this website www.missionarypackagemx.com I guess to send us select things to the MTC not that I really need anything but knowing you you´d probably want to know about it. Sometimes I forget we´re actually in Mexico (despite the Spanish) until I look at all those buildings on the hill and it looks really cool. as you can tell my p-days are Thursday. All the elders were really excited last night saying its our first p-day eve. The food is pretty good. plus they have cereal as an option at most meals. Elder Clouse in our district eats like 5 bowls per meal that they have it. It´s kind of awesome having like 13-15 minimum prayers per day. And having a lot of personal study time is great since there´s so much to study. I´m only about 14 pages into Jesus the Christ because even when not studying Spanish there is so much scripture to cover. I really enjoyed Acts I think it was chapter 5 or 6 where the saints were rejoicing that they were worthy of being persecuted in the name of Christ. And continued to preach of him regardless of how much the council in Jerusalem put them in prison and told them they could not. Also for some reason I never realized the saints just after Christ ascended, lived the law of consecration. Why isn´t that talked about more? Hermana Garcia was pretty impressed with a few of the others in our district and myself when we were getting ahead by studying the preterit together.

Adios, Elder Bergquist