Wilhelmsen, Kyle

Hey family!! This is my last week in the MTC!! I'm so excited to get to Scottsdale. I leave Monday at like 12 and then should get there around 4:30, so I'm really excited for that!! But I'm also really nervous. I don't feel like my Spanish is ready but I guess we will see. This week we had promix 2 more times and I absolutely loved it. My Latino companion is so awesome. His name is Elder Fuentez and he's from Ecuador. He doesn't speak a word of English and so it's hard to communicate sometimes but he's hilarious and we have a really good time together. That's pretty much the only thing that is new this week really. I packed my bags yesterday and so now my room is all empty and I'm so glad I don't have to live in that house anymore. Thanks everyone for the packages and the letters they've been helping me out. My Spanish is still really bad and the mission is still really hard but one of my favorite quotes is "pray not for a lighter lo...

Hola fam! Only like another week and a half until the field. I can't wait! I can't wait to eat some normal food. So this week there were a couple new things that happened. The first is that we had TRCs which is basically when they put you in a room with someone that speaks only Spanish and you have to talk to them, get to know them, find out their needs, and then teach them a lesson based on what we think they need. It actually went surprisingly well. I understood everything they were saying and I just had a normal conversation with them and just got to know them. And we both perfectly understood each other. My companion had no idea what they were saying and so  I had to do all the talking and it made me feel like my Spanish was coming along pretty well. Then, on Tuesday, we had promix. Which is where they put us with a Latino companion for the whole day. And then, I realized that TRC was just a fluke because my companion and I couldn't communicate at all. It was such a bad...

Hey fam!! This week was just like all the other ones haha. But it's good. My Spanish is showing minor improvements. I can hold a basic gospel conversation and my conversational Spanish is getting better so I guess that's exciting but I still feel really discouraged about it. My Spanish teachers keep telling me that I need to be progressing faster because in a couple days we start practicing teaching real investigators and real inactive members!! I'm really nervous because I'm not very good at listening to people speak Spanish. It's really hard for me because they speak really fast. The other day my investigator asked me why we invited her to church at 9 when we went at 11 and I answered yes. Just little things like that. I'll ask a question and then I have no idea what their response was and so I'll just keep going with the lesson. I just can't wait to get out in the field. I'm past halfway through the MTC. There's seven guys in my district that ...

Hey guys!!! Happy birthday Emily!!! This MTC is hard!!! My Spanish is coming along I guess. We are now teaching two different investigators instead of one and it's really hard to prepare lessons in Spanish for two different people with different needs every day. I've been extremely overwhelmed this past week. If I could just learn the language so that I could communicate with my investigators.      I'm so grateful for all the letters of encouragement and advice that everyone has been giving me. I know that the Lord is mindful of me and what I am going through. An experience that happened to me this week was on Sunday morning. I woke up feeling the worst I have on my whole mission as far as depression about everything I've been going through. That morning in testimony meeting, one of the Elders got up and shared Alma 26:27, which says, "Now when our hearts were depressed, and we were about to turn back, behold, the Lord comforted us, and said: Go amongst thy brethre...