Another Great Week! September 13, 2019

Fri, Sep 13, 1:56 PM

Family and Friends!

It's been another great week! There's been a lot since my last email so I'll try to get it all in. 

I was able to go to the temple last week and it was awesome! It's so beautiful! I think we are going to try to go again on our last pday (Preparation day is the only day missionaries have "off".  That is when they check and send emails, do laundry, shopping and sight seeing.  All other days are devoted to The Lord)  l'm here in the CCM. I've had a lot of good opportunities to increase my Spanish speaking. My first Sunday I was there, my companion and I got to bless the sacrament in Spanish! The following Sunday I gave a talk in Spanish. Mexico's independence day is coming up this weekend and they do a lot of celebrating so it's going to be pretty loud haha. And this Sunday, my companion and I are giving a lesson so we've been preparing for that. As for my Spanish speaking, I'm not even close to fluent but I've definitely learned more than I thought I would have by now! I'm able to have a small conversation with people and get to know them. But it's still not all that easy haha. Most of what we do here has to do with memorizing. So we've had to memorize things like Joseph Smith's quote of the first vision, the Missionary objective, Moroni 10: 3-5, and a lot of other topics in the Preach My Gospel. And all of it is in Spanish of course. There's also been tons of thunderstorms and power outages across the training center and it's actually raining a lot right now. It doesn't last very long though. But the people here are great! I've made some friends from places like Haiti, Tonga, and even someone from Hawaii but is Japanese! They have really neat stories! We also got to hear from some members of the Presidency of the Seventy at a devotional! They came to speak to us here. Responsibilities are getting pretty level. Yesterday my companion and I had to attend a meeting about improving the CCM. It was with the CCM President, his counselors, other officers and another few companionships. There really isn't a whole lot to improve on, one of the things I brought up was our service activities and how there aren't always enough jobs for all the elders and hermanas. There are a lot of them that either aren't doing much or just go back to their casas. So one of my solutions was to just split the groups up depending on their service days. For example, one group has their time en the morning and the rest have their service time later. They thought that might work so I guess we'll see if that changes in the next couple weeks. 

Alright I'll talk to you all next week!!!

-Elder Markham 

Here are some more pictures from the last couple of weeks! The are some with my roommates and I, pics of the city, us at the Temple!!!!( Which we were told that it's the largest temple outside of the United States)

Blake's Birthday treats sent from his family