Email Home 3-22-13

So I would normally try to respond to emails individually but I don't have the time! I'm so sorry! I feel so blessed though to have everyone's support! Every night I think my Heavenly Father for all of the wonderful people who grace my life. I nearly cry every time reading letters from my amazing family! You all are the perfect family for me and without you I wouldn't be able to do this. Mom, Dad I love you both so much!  You were such great examples and I don't know if you totally realize how much you have helped me obtain my own testimony. You are the reason I started believing in God and I miss you all a lot! It is so hard not being able to talk to you and that goes for Austianna and Connelly too. I am so glad my companions are frantically typing because I am really fighting back tears. I just love you so much and I hope you know my favorite lesson to teach is the plan of salvation. It is the most comforting thing for me, because I want to be with you all for all eternity and I am going to live my life right so I can do that. Thank you so much for the package! I loved it! Getting a package really does feel like Christmas came early. Also Austianna, I wanted Cheezeits because it is one of my companions favorite things in the world and I know she has her struggles too....(edited out minor personal rantings)

So I have two new room mates...they are both super cool but they like to wake up at 6;15! I mean what is wrong with waiting 15 more minutes! Oh well I am learning to live without sleep, it is hard though because i nearly pass out in personal study almost every day. but after 11 I usually wake up. Oh speaking of passing out. I have been running everyday since i wrote my first email about getting fat. But the other day I was doing sprints with two other sisters and I literally thought I was gonna pass out! Like I couldn't get any air! I am really blaming the altitude because I was super light headed and woozy and yeah i was a little worried that I was gonna drop like a rock and it took my the whole day to recover...it wasn't fun.

Oh so another funny story about my floor in the apartment building. We have the bathroom above us, leak water into our bathroom. It was sketchy because it wasn't like there was a legit hole that water was pouring through but there was a ton of water pour out of the ceiling. It made me laugh. And most sisters didn't get to shower that night haha!  Oh so the other day I heard the MTC is 42% sisters but then at devotional they said it was 50% so either way there are a lot of sister missionaries going out. Oh and I don't think I will make it to Argentina for a while. The consulate hasn't come in a while so most missionaries are being called to Utah to wait for an appointment and then they have to wait some more for their visa to go through. So I am hoping I can meet with the consulate so then I can leave Utah but there are literally hundreds waiting for an appointment. I am kinda excited to serve somewhere else as well because then I can say I served state side and aboard. Oh if you get a moment you should watch Joesph Smith and the Restoration. I watched after devo last Sunday and it was so good! Like it made me realize my trials are so small.

Oh so my district sang in sacrament meeting last Sunday so that was really cool. I felt the spirit so strongly even though I have no idea if we even sounded good. We also have a new elder in our district because his Spanish was too good for a beginning class. Yeah I think heavenly father saw that we were getting along really well so he wanted to toss a wrench into the engine to see if we can handle it and at first it was hard! like this elder is kinda a rebel and tries to bend rules, thankfully he is starting to calm down a little, but every now and then I wanna put my referee face on and tell him off...or just punch him... Thank goodness for the Atonement!

(slight edit out as nobody really needs to hear EVERYTHING she writes!) So I have a minute to finish! I love you all so much! I am so thankful for this opportunity here at the MTC because I feel like it is the perfect opportunity for me to be converted myself. Oh my companions wanna move. Love you! I think of you all the time, well when I can and especially when I am teaching.

Hermana Quick

3-14-13 Email Home

So I just lost 5 minutes of email time because I was reading something! dang! and it really isn't that fair because the timer starts before you even get completely logged on... oh well! so it is week two and things are going really well! I mean if you asked me 4 days ago I would have told you it wasn't going as well, but that was just because we had a suuuper tough investigator (pretend role player one of course) and I couldn't remember any Spanish, but after a good devotional by Brother Johnson of the seventy and his wife, I got my head where it needs to be again. The Spanish has been coming slower that a crippled slug, but I know if I keep working hard I will get it...eventually. I saw Perrin Romney the other day. Oh, and my first day here I met Hermana Lake(distant cousin). Those are the only two people I know. Well before I came in that is. Oh, we had a huge wave of missionaries come in Wednesday! We had just said goodbye to our past roommates Monday and now we have two new hermanas in our room. They seem pretty cool but they aren't in our ward or anything so we see them before we go to bed and that's it.

The weather has been super nice! I even got a small little tan line yesterday from studying outside. So Hermana Crawley, one of my companions, hates the sun! She burns really bad and she is always warm, so she was complaining the whole time about being hot and the sun was touching her and the birds were singing. Yeah it was hilarious and we totally made fun of her and her little spot of shade that she was clinging to. She still got sun burned! haha! She is headed to Buenos Aires north, but she has la tierra del fuego in her mission so she got the best mission for her because it is super cold.

Oh so I have never sat so much in my life! I love to do my personal study for an hour and my language study for another hour. Love it! We then have another hour of language study on the computer and that is fine for like the first half hour and then the computer tries to lull me to sleep. and well I will take a picture of my schedule so you can see because it is packed! We don't have much down time, but that's okay. I wish I had more time to study my Book of Mormon. Lately I have been presented with a dilemma. My hands are going numb from typing...like they are tingling and everything!

So life here is good. I mean, I have my struggles especially in lessons because my companions kinda take over and i don't wanna be rude and jump in even though i might have the spirit telling me to address something...idk its tough, but I know it is only my second week so everything will work out in time...i hope. I love you all and I hope i left you enough time for maybe a quick response! Love You!  Hermana Quick :)

3-8-14 Letter to Dad

Thank you so much for writing me:) It makes me happy to get a letter from you! So dad it is so hard for me to believe that I will get better at Spanish...Like there are so many things to learn and remember...and I feel like here I can I can only apply so much, will it get better in Argentina? (Dad has assured it will of course. Dad was clueless for the first several months of his mission learning Spanish)

You were right about having a good district. It makes things way better. Hey, thank you so much for letting me know from a young age that you had a testimony and that missions are important. I came to the MTC to become a better person and to grow personally, but in a talk by President Bednar, he said that the only way to find yourself is through service to others. He said if you are getting frustrated and sad, i's only because you are letting the natural man take over. Jesus Christ was constantly worried about others, but never himself. I am trying to become more like hiim, but my natural-woman is so selfish at times:) (It's tough to think that Reinna can improve in her ability to think of others more, but it's sweet that she wants to keep working hard to help others...just dad's two cents worth)

Well, my P-Day is almost over. I am about to go to lunch and after that we have personal study and then are going to the temple! Yay! Then tonight we have class again for 3 hours! Ugh! All of our studying is done in our classroom and I am getting very tired of sitting in there...and sitting in general.

(She ends her letter by saying some very sweet things to her papa, so I'll leave those comments out. She seems to be doing really well. She obviously does a LOT of studying, which does require a lot of sitting....oh the fun! Her time is going to go fast in the MTC though with an April 8th departure date. It will be interesting if she gets her Visa in time for that. Hopefully! Thanks for following her blog!)

3-8-13 First P-Day

Hey there! It is my Pday finally and I have a half hour to email you. ... So life here at the MTC has been good, I have two companions. Which I now understand why people say that is so tough because although I love them both it is sooo hard to teach! Like we have agreed that only two of us can bare our testimony at the end of our lessons, because three people is too many! We just finished teaching our first investigator. His name was Pablo and I wanted to get him baptised so bad! But alas, he is now our new teacher ;) I am not sure what all to tell you...On tuesday my companions and I sang in the choir for devotional and that was really fun. It was a fantastic devotional oh and Sunday was amazing! The temple president from the Provo temple came and spoke and it was so spiritual that I could have cried! Afterwards we watched a video by President Bednar and that was so insightful! He talked about casting off the natural man and developing the character of Christ...It is definitely a work in progress for me:)

So every day we get like 45 minutes for gym time. I have decided that before I leave the MTC I will be a pro! At first it was super boring but one of the sisters in my district made a rule that if the ball went flying off the court we had to do two push ups...I was soooo sore the next day! Oh my district consists of 7 hermanas and 4 elders. They are all super cool and the more I get to know them the more I love them! They are all really down to earth and we are getting to that point where we talk way too much because my personal study time keeps being shorter and shorter. So I know why missionaries get fat when they come to the MTC. It is because we eat breakfast at 7, lunch at 11:30, and dinner at 4! Who eats dinner at 4! And we sit in the same classroom all day studying and learning like we don't need three square meals a day! I did run a mile the other day to try to counter act the food, but it is ten laps for a mile...it is really hard to motivate myself to run ten laps for only a mile! But I have decided next week will be my awesome week. I have already set goals for my spanish study and now for my gym time and well english study i haven't quite developed yet, but i'm getting there.

So the other day our whole floor flooded! It was the first night that I really got any really sleep, but then at 5am people started blowdrying their hair, well I thought that was happening and I thought the other hermanas were losing there minds! But it turns out every other room except for 6-8 of them had inches of water in them. Apparently someone left a sink on somewhere.

Oh and so I heard yesterday that the last two hundred people who tried to get there visas for argentina. Only 3 of them got it right away. Everyone else had to serve somewhere else as they waited for their visa. Some people are really upset about that but I figure there are people everywhere who need the gospel and the Lord needs me to go find them so I'm excited to go somewhere else too.

So my first day I get to class right away and it is only in Spanish! We are the first intermediate class our ward has ever had so we actually already speak as well as the people who are leaving this week...But seriously I wonder if it is even possible to master the language. Right now it seems super complicated and impossible, but it will be different when I am actually immersed in Spanish. Oh my teacher served a mission in Spain so he lisps! It is super funny and I am getting used to it now, but I was really distracted at first. Yesterday I had 6 hours of classroom time and it was all in spanish and I understood everything that was going on, but it's hard to make gramatically correct sentences in my head.

So I am running out of email time, but I will write you all! :) I wanna hear all about your lives and in turn I will tell you all about mine...on fridays. I am going to the temple in a few hours and I am soooo excited! I need that spiritual awesomeness right now! I love you all and I hope to hear from you soon!

Hermana Reinna Quick