What life is like here:

We have breakfast at 6:30, then usually class from 7-10 (where we either learn about the language, gospel, or how to teach effectively). We also will have another 3 hour class period sometime later in the day, but the times vary a little bit, except that they are all 3.. hours... long..... and sometimes that gets hard. Also, during those class times our teachers will pretend to be investigators (people who are looking into the church) and we have to teach them. In Portuguese. Oh yeah, we also have this computer program to help us with the language called TALL, but I don' like it very much so I just usually study on my own.

We've been teaching the same two 'people' for the past 2ish weeks and we've been making pretty good progress. It's really hard but I love it. Aside from class time, we have personal study time 10-11 where we can choose to study anything we want (gospel related of course).  I've been really enjoying that, especially once I've started to keep a journal about my studies. I've never done that before and I'm surprised at how much I like it! Then we have lunch at 11. The food here is killing me because it is all soooo fattening! And I have a really hard time just eating salad all the time! Haha 

I guess that I am a neat freak, or everyone else is a slob

. 

Throughout the rest of the day it varies but we have a lot of additional study time (for language/gospel stuff/piano for me) and language study for a couple hours. Also, we get 50 min of gym time at varying times every day, and that's something that I always look forward to. Usually I play basketball or 4-square (Parker was telling me about how fun it was and it's pretty crazy), but I've been planning on switching it up and lifting more weights.

Then we have dinner at 4:00 P.M. which is a weird time of day to eat dinner.  Anyways, then we have a planning session every night from 9 -9:30 to plan out our next day (what we're going to study, what we're going to teach, etc.). 

Not sure which end of the trade this is?

Then we have personal time until 10:30. I usually exercise a little bit during this time/trade ties with other missionaries.  Then it's lights out and that's basically my day to day schedule! 

The only two days that are different are Tuesdays and Sundays. On Sunday we have our church meetings and a TON of study time. Haha it doesn't actually feel that different from any other day because we're doing so much church stuff aleady, but it's always a nice day. We have Sunday night devotionals where we have speakers come! We also have quite a few musical numbers and afterwards we watch a church film. Tuesdays we can sleep in until like 6:30! That's really late for us because we usually have to get up around 5:45 every day, and an extra 45 minutes is really nice! Anyways, all we do on Tuesday is write letters, do our laundry, work out for a little bit, and then go to another devotional at 7. Then our district returns to our classroom to talk about how the devotional was. Then we get to go back to our rooms and have our last hour of the day to do what we want. 

We share a tiny room with 6 elders.  This is a view from my bunk of the other 2 sets of bunks!

One of these things is not like the other......What can I say, I was trained to make my bed every day. This picture was taken just to make my mother happy!

It's been that way for the past 4 weeks, so I'm just about ready to get out of here! Anyways, things are great, even if they're a little slow sometimes, and I have had an amazing experience here that has really really helped me. I hope you're doing well! 

 

Elder Colvin