Weekly Update!
Wow a lot has happened
this week! My first full week here at the CTM (Missionary training center) has
been a full one. I really like the food here! The lunch meal is a little bigger
and there is always rice and a beans and meat mix called fezolada- this is
spelled wrong- at every meal and its good. My companions don´t like the food as
much haha. I really like how theres a lot less sugar in the food and it fills
me up so much more than American food i dunno why. My companions, sister
Nielson and sister Covey are both from Utah and we make up our own district
because your district is assigned by language level and we all started out
here. This is great too because we are taught by our teachers here as a
district so the classroom size is very small and can help
specifically to our language needs. Today new Americans arrived but
for the large majority they are all brazillian or south American here which is
great for learning the language. I really like the Brazillians they are so so
friendly and nice. There are about 150 missionaries here at the CTM. It is very
challenging here for sure! Learning a language is super hard! Portuguese
is very hard to understand and pronounce I think, but it is coming
along and I try speaking in Portuguese to the Brazilians every meal and
ask tons and tons of questions! My companions and i really like
excersise time because we get to go outside and we play volleyball with
everybody who has the same work out time as us which is super fun. Here at
the CTM we are able to take a bus to a different part of São Paulo and go
to the temple in the morning which is really great. São Paulo is Huge Huge
Huge and people drive crazy here.This week i had an Ah Ha moment. Here at the
CTM on your first full day, that night you teach a 30 minute lesson all in
Portuguese to an instructor playing the role of a Church investigator who does
not break character and only speaks Portuguese. On top of this you do not
recieve your first grammar lesson until the third day here and you have to
teach a 30 minute lesson for five days straight except we don´t teach on
Sunday! Everyone here will answer your questions Que se escreve... Que
significa... and you get all your books that you will need but no
lessons until later, just a teacher helping you study your Preach My Gospel and
how to introduce yourself and answering any questions. At first I was so
frustrated and I thought there was something wrong with the curriculumn of the
CTM but then I asked another elder who had been to the Provo MTC and he said
they taught in a similar way. So I thought about it and now I really appreciate
it because this taught me two lessons. The first was that we need to ask
questions and seek after the language learning and really go out of our comfort
zone instead of waiting for the language to come to us. The most important
reason though is that sometimes in life we tend to want to prioritize our lives
after the Gospel, but this is not what is best for us. We must ALWAYS put the
Gospel and God before everything in our lives even in things you would think
would not matter, such as language learning. If we do this we will be so
blessed and so much better off than trying to do what we think is right instead
of the Lord.
I love and miss everyone
so much and I am loving Brazil so far!!
-Sister Haggard
P.S. Also my companions
and I can leave the CTM and walk around the area and buy things after our email
time so Im super excited!!!!
