2nd letter from the MTC

Hola mi familia! Oh man! I there has been so much going on that I have no idea how I am going to be able to tell you all of it! First let me start by saying the MTC is awesome! The Spirit here is unbelievable! It is crazy how much stuff they have us doing everyday! On our first day here one of our Zone Leaders told is that the days are long and the weeks are short. I kind of thought he was crazy, but now that I have been here a week I can tell you he was TOTALLY RIGHT!!!! Ok I am going to try to answer some of your questions. 1. My companion is Hermana Schaser. She is from Bremerton, WA. She is awesome! You will know her in the pictures because she is the smallest Hermana :) 2. My District is AWESOME! We are a district of 8 (4 Elders and 4 Hermanas, including myself) and we are all going to Monterrey West! And Mom, Elder Harker is in my district! Tell his mom to use Dear Elder! He needs mail! :) The Elders are so awesome! They keep us laughing all day, but we Hermanas help keep them focused! So it is a good balance. 3. After I got dropped of I got my name tag put on me and a BIG bag of books handed to me (it is like 11 LBS!!!!) and then was stuck on a bus and shipped of to west campus. West campus is AWESOME. It used to be BYU housing so everything is apartments. Which leads to the next question. 4.I live in a 2 room apartment. I share my room with my companion and then Hermana Sumsion and Hermana Chapman (the other hermanas in out district) live in the other room. It is great because we only have to share the bathroom between the 4 of us:) 5. ok Schedual: we are supposed to get up at 6:30, but we eat at 6:45 so we need more time to get ready. So lately Hermana Schaser and I have been getting up some time between 5:50 and 6:00 so we can work on our lesson and get ready ( will get to the lessons in a minute). After breakfast we have class for 3 hours, then personal study time, lunch at 11:20, then we have more class or study time, some gym time somewhere in there, and then planning time. We try to be in bed with the lights out by 10:30. 6. My teacher is Hermana Osborn. She served her mission in the San Francisco area. She is cool. and She almost always speaks Spanish to us! If she uses English she always asks permission first. I guess that is how we will learn fastest but sometimes it feels like my brain is going to explode! But I have learned SOOOOOO much!!! I can pray in Spanish, say Our Purpose in Spanish and bear my testimony in Spanish. We are trying to speak it all of the time but that is really hard! 7. The food good. I hear it is better here on the West side than it is at the Main Campus but I really don't know that for sure.... 8. Dad I have not seen any Apostles walking the halls. If they do that I am guessing they have been sticking to main campus because I have not seen them.... Although I am in the class room for 8-9 hours a day so I dont know when I would see them Okay so now for the best thing that has happened! We started teaching our first investigator on our THIRD DAY HERE! His name is Roberto and he is from Mexico. He speaks ONLY SPANISH!!!! Do you know what that means?!?!?! Hermana Schaser and I taught a 30 minute lesson on our 3rd day here in SPANISH! I was kind of freaking out!!! We had our whole lesson scripted out, like litterally every word. It went ok, we challenged him to pray about our message. The next time we went to teach him we asked him if he prayed, he said that he did not then went into this explanation of why he did not. The only thing I got out of it was "es dificil" so all we knew was that something was hard for him. We explaned that because our spanish es no bueno we wanted him to write down his problem so that we could learn the spanish to address his problem. He did. When we got out of the lesson we asked on of the teachers to help us translate what he wrote. it said that he did not feel like he should pray, he wanted to know what God would want to talk to him if he has done so much bad. We were so excited because now we knew what he needed to hear! The next lesson we talked about repentance. We asked him if he loved his daughter Olivia. He said yes. We then asked how he feels when she does something bad he said he feels sad or frustrated. We asked if he would still love her. He said yes, but she is only 4 so she only does little things. so we asked if when she was 30 years old and really bad if he would still love her. Them we related it back to how God loves us no matter what. We challanged him to pray again. Then yesterday we had another lesson. We asked if he had prayed and he said YES!!!!!!!! We were speechless! He said it was a really good experience. We then taught a lesson on baptism (with just a list of words in front of us I might add, no script!) and the importance of it. We invited him to be baptized. He said he was not sure if he should, so we asked him to think about it, and he said he would. We asked him to say the closing prayer, he was hesitant but we convinced him. You guys he said the most beautiful prayer!!!! He prayed to be a better dad and son, it was so good! Hermana and I were totally crying. When he ended the prayer we looked up at him with tears coming down our face and asked him again "Will you be baptized?" and guess what?!?!?! He goes "When?" I through out the first date I could think of "28 de november". he was worried he would not be ready, but we promiced we would help him and that he would be ready. IT WAS THE BEST DAY EVER!!!!!!!!! We are teaching him again tonight. I love you all! I miss you but I am right where i need to be. Love, Hermana Ashcraft