First P-Day in Colombia!

Elder Tenney is coming to you live from Bogotá, Colombia!!!!

OK first of all lemme tell you that I love it here!!!  The CCM here (spanish for MTC) is waaaay rad!!!  So ya as I told you, the first night we got into the MTC at like 10 and got in bed but didnt sleep till 2 haha because soon after about 40 missionaries from Venezuela came in and we stayed up trying as hard as we could to talk to them with tons of hand signals and all haha!  So it is constant fun here trying to communicate with the latinos, and jokes seem to be way funnier across language barriers so we are constantly enjoying good laughs with the latinos and have become great friends!  There are only 6 of us gringos here right now, and one of them is on his last block, meaning he has class with the latinos.  A block here is two weeks, so the latinos all come for a block and the gringos come for three, the first two learning spanish with each other and then we spend our last block with a latino companion and going to all their classes comletely in spanish with them... 

K Bogotá is quite a city!  Its sort of like Log Angeles but with more and taller building all over the place.  The buildings are all pretty run down, but they are way more colorful than any city in the states which makes it cool.  And my favorite part of course is that there are sweeeeet mountaints surrounding the whole place!  There are sweet big mountains not too far from the CCM here, and they are like the hills north of LA (in that they are really shifty if that makes sense) but about the size of the utah mountains, maybe a bit smaller, and they are really green!  Super neat!  The city is loud and crazy but really exciting!  There are literally car alarms going off half the time, I cant imagine how its possible that they are always going off so often, and the drivers are indeed pretty crazy so there are constant honkings of car horns as well, but i like it because you learn to just block out the sounds when you need to focus but you also can always sit back and kind of enjoy the comotion when you want haha!  They took our cameras so i couldnt take any pictures of the city when we went to the temple on wednesday or when we went to register our visas at an immigration building, but they did give us our cameras today for p'day hours, so ive got some coming of my friends and i and of the city view from the CCM here.  Oh also there are these funny trucks that drive around all the time with big loud speakers that are like announcing all sorts of random stuff that the natives say they cant even usually understand, but just another fun loud thing about this city.

My teachers are awesome!!  They dont speak much english, but just enough that if we cant ever understand their spanish they can eek by whatever we are missing in english.  But they are all natives here of colombia and super fun guys!  We have most of our classes with our district, which consists of us five gringos and two brazilians who are learning spanish too.  The gringo group is me, Elder Jones (my good friend from BYU), Elder Windchester (from Florida who is awesome and going to Cali with me), Elder Downing (also knew him at BYU but not very well, its been super fun becoming friends with him here, his family are Dave and Lauras old neighbors with the pool in their back yard), and Elder Jorgansen who is a ton of fun too and from North Ogden Utah.

So it really is pretty sweet here, the only things i dont love are the werid p'day schedule (had to go a week and a half with out one till today, but then i get another one this coming tuesday), and the food haha.  The food is decent, better than I thought it would be, but its also probably a good middle ground working down towards the kinda food im gonna get in cali.  part of the problem though is that ive just been spoiled with moms good food.  They always have good bread and soup, and super neat fruit drinks.  The meat however comes in all shapes and sizes, with fun obstacles to cut around haha.  The other day we were talking about how fun it is to look at the clouds and guess what shape they are in, and we all agreed that it is eve more fun to play that game with the meat here haha, but its not actually as bad as i probably just made it sound.

My favorite thing hands down so far has been this killer meeting we had with, guess who, ELDER CLAYTON from the 70!!!!!  He came and put on a three hour fireside that did not at all feel like three hours though, i coud have sat in that same seet for easily another three to listen to him!!  His wife talked a lot too and contributed lots, and she sang a song for us that was my favorite one from that CD Mom gave me of spanish music when i got my call!!  It was awesome!!  Our little chapel here was packed with elders from both Bogota missions too so it was really cool to see the big time real dea elders, especially the gringos and their awesome spanish!  Another thing i loved is that us gringos hre in the CCM got headsets for translation, and i could put the headset just at the right volume so that i could hear most of what Clayton was saying and practice understanding his spanish (most of which i did in fact understand) and any word i didnt catch i could just listen to the translation a few words behind on the headset, really helped me understand practicing spanish!!!  What was the highlight of my time so far though turned out to be pretty disappointing when they made all of us MTC students stay seated while the Claytons and older missionaries left, so we didnt get to talk to any of them, and i really wanted to, but oh well.

So i can honestly say my spanish is getting pretty good!  My companions and I (i dont think i explained this yet, i am in a three some with Elder Jones and Elder Windchester, its a blast!!!) have already taught three lessons to a (fake) investigator Luis, entirely in spanish!!!  The first one was quite tough but we have since gotten pretty good, and we plan to invite him to get baptized next lesson tonight!  So it is super neat how much we are already practicing preparing lessons and teaching them entirely in spanish, and the gift of tongues is definitely with me!

Every sunday afternoon President Dyer (from san Diego, he knows Grandpa well and i found out we are related to him through Willard Richards!!!) meets with us gringos to have suuuper deep and neat gospel discussions!  I have learned so much from him! 

Well I dont get too much time today so I gotta rap it up, but hopefully I will have more time Tuesday to write even more!!!  good to hear from everyone!  And of course I will close with my testimony real quick, in Spanish!! 

Yo se que esta iglesia es la iglesia verdadera aqui in la tierra, la misma con la iglesia de Jesucristo cuado El vivio aqui en la tierra.  Yo se que Dios nos ama, y que El nos da Su Hijo, Jesucristo, quien nos dio su vida, para que podemos volver a vivir con ellos y nustras familia otra vez.  Yo se que tenemos un profeta hoy, quien recibe revelaciones actuales para nosotros.  yo se que dios me ama porque puedo sentir su amor y el espiritu santo cuando leo las escrituras.  Tambien he tomado pruebas en mi vida, como cada persona aqui en la tierra, y he sentido el mano de Dios durante de mis pruebas, y despues de mis pruebas, siempre puedo sentir mas cerca de Dios, y digo estas cosas en el nombre de Jesucristo, amen.

          Translation by Will:

I know that this church is the most true church here on the earth. the same as the church of Jesus Christ when he lived here. I know that God loves us and  his son, who gave his life for us so that we can return to live with them and out families again. I know that we have a prophet today, who receives actual revelation on our behalf. I know that God lives me because I can feel his love and the spirit when i read the scriptures. I also have had challenges is my life, like everyone here on this earth, and i have felt the hand of God during my challenges, and after them i always feel closer to God. I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ amen!

Les amo

Nos Vemos

Elder Tenney