Hallo!
I'm sorry it's taken so long to send you guys an email! Today (Tuesday) is my P Day, so I'm just writing you from the laundry room right now. Everything has been awesome so far! Day 1 we were working like crazy already!! My district only has six elders and no sisters, so we're small, but already super close to each other. There's my companion, Elder South, who's from Texas, lived in Belgium for six months when he was like 6. He's been an awesome companion and we've both been learning a ton together. He did wrestling and swimming in high school and we're both 18. There's Elder Rauma, who's probably my biggest challenge while I'm here. He's this huge football player and just really prideful a lot of the time and is always interrupting me and trying to one up people... It's pretty frustrating. Oh he's from California and he's 20. His companion is perfect for him though. Elder Warner is way patient with him and has made it so much easier for the rest of us. He's from northern Sandy, UT and he went to Waterford for most of school, but then Bingham for his senior year. He's a really good soccer player and definitely outgoing and funny. Elder Silva is from Brazil and he was called to the Belgium/Netherlands mission to speak Portuguese! But, he's also learning English right now AND Dutch. He's getting really good at English and struggles a bit to keep up in Dutch though. He actually served in the mission field in San Paulo, Brazil for 2 months while he waited for his visa to come through; no MTC before this. He's 23, super funny, and jokes around a lot about learning our culture and getting frustrated. His companion is Elder Davis, who's from Colorado and also a great companion for Elder Silva. Elder Davis did a lot of theatre in high school and is just a really nice and curious guy, so he really enjoys being with Silva. So our districts really quite awesome and people keep saying how cool it is how we all pulled together so quickly. Each companionship is definitely inspired from heaven.
Anyways, I'm good. Waking up at 6:30 each morning is kind of like death, but we pinch ourselves to stay awake throughout the day. I've never studied so much in my life. If we're not eating or sleeping or getting ready for something, then we're studying. It's insane. I've definitely had the Spirit with me a ton though and I'm loving the language. Dutch is awesome. I didn't respect it enough before, but now I love it. It's actually come so much quicker than I would have expected! On Friday, (yeah two days after being here) we had to teach an investigator in only Dutch. Like three times a week, each companionship teaches this guy who's probably an RM or something, but he acts like an investigator. And he's super tough on us sometimes!!! So frustrating. We've taught him three times now though. Every time my companion and I tried to get him to pray, he would just say no and something else... The second time we taught him, we got him to take a Book of Mormon home to read. And the third time we totally went off script for half of the lesson and just riffed like the whole time about stuff we weren't even really prepared to talk about!!! It was amazing to say the least, and we got him to say he would pray at home =) score. Maybe tomorrow we'll bring a kiddie pool and practice baptizing him =D I'm only half kidding about that........... Anyways, the language has been awesome, the studying has been awesome (whenever we can focus), the food has been fattening a.k.a. delicious (not as good as momma's cooking though), and I've been eating three bananas a day sometimes ha ha. Oh and exercise time has been awesome when we play sports. I played soccer the first day with a huge group of elders and did actually surprisingly well.... I haven't had a chance to play the piano at all yet, I'm afraid I'm gonna break one of their rules somehow. We've had trouble getting used to all of the rules they have here. There's just so many that we don't understand them all quite yet and forget some of them, but I think we're almost true veterans.
So how is everyone? Sounds like you guys are getting used to having only Carly at home.
I wanna get more mail and stuff from people!!! I haven't had the stomach yet to devour all of Carly's candy yet, but I'm working on it. I got my contacts, but they're the old wrong prescription!!!! So I guess I'll send those three boxes back to you guys. I only opened one, but I assume they're all wrong. And my missionary rain coat fits well with definite room to grow. So thank you for those! Ummmmm...... De Kerk is waar! Ik houd von mijn familie en mijn vrienden. Jezus Christus is onse Verlosser en houdt von ons. Ik et dree banaans!! De Heilige Geest maakt mij geluk.
OH!! I'm... district leader......... I kept joking with the other elders before, saying that I was going to recommend each of them for district leader in my interview, just teasing them. Then all of a sudden, I got called district leader and they all just gave me a look like, "Gotcha!" It's been difficult at times, but we're all learning together and helping each other to be strong and smart about all of our decisions. We've really all grown close, despite certain hard qualities and times. I don't really know what else..... Oh! I actually leave October 14th.
My address for packages and stuff is:
Elder Preston Quinn Johnson
OCT14 BEL-NETH
2009 N 900 E Unit 170
Provo UT 84602
So please update that for me please! I can get DearElder.com letters everyday by the way if you guys wanna send those, just use the info from that address. And I might send some snail mail to you guys too sometime. Um yeah...
What am I supposed to write in these? This is hard...
Okay I love you all very much! Hope everything is going well and continues to do so! Bye bye=)
I'm sorry it's taken so long to send you guys an email! Today (Tuesday) is my P Day, so I'm just writing you from the laundry room right now. Everything has been awesome so far! Day 1 we were working like crazy already!! My district only has six elders and no sisters, so we're small, but already super close to each other. There's my companion, Elder South, who's from Texas, lived in Belgium for six months when he was like 6. He's been an awesome companion and we've both been learning a ton together. He did wrestling and swimming in high school and we're both 18. There's Elder Rauma, who's probably my biggest challenge while I'm here. He's this huge football player and just really prideful a lot of the time and is always interrupting me and trying to one up people... It's pretty frustrating. Oh he's from California and he's 20. His companion is perfect for him though. Elder Warner is way patient with him and has made it so much easier for the rest of us. He's from northern Sandy, UT and he went to Waterford for most of school, but then Bingham for his senior year. He's a really good soccer player and definitely outgoing and funny. Elder Silva is from Brazil and he was called to the Belgium/Netherlands mission to speak Portuguese! But, he's also learning English right now AND Dutch. He's getting really good at English and struggles a bit to keep up in Dutch though. He actually served in the mission field in San Paulo, Brazil for 2 months while he waited for his visa to come through; no MTC before this. He's 23, super funny, and jokes around a lot about learning our culture and getting frustrated. His companion is Elder Davis, who's from Colorado and also a great companion for Elder Silva. Elder Davis did a lot of theatre in high school and is just a really nice and curious guy, so he really enjoys being with Silva. So our districts really quite awesome and people keep saying how cool it is how we all pulled together so quickly. Each companionship is definitely inspired from heaven.
Anyways, I'm good. Waking up at 6:30 each morning is kind of like death, but we pinch ourselves to stay awake throughout the day. I've never studied so much in my life. If we're not eating or sleeping or getting ready for something, then we're studying. It's insane. I've definitely had the Spirit with me a ton though and I'm loving the language. Dutch is awesome. I didn't respect it enough before, but now I love it. It's actually come so much quicker than I would have expected! On Friday, (yeah two days after being here) we had to teach an investigator in only Dutch. Like three times a week, each companionship teaches this guy who's probably an RM or something, but he acts like an investigator. And he's super tough on us sometimes!!! So frustrating. We've taught him three times now though. Every time my companion and I tried to get him to pray, he would just say no and something else... The second time we taught him, we got him to take a Book of Mormon home to read. And the third time we totally went off script for half of the lesson and just riffed like the whole time about stuff we weren't even really prepared to talk about!!! It was amazing to say the least, and we got him to say he would pray at home =) score. Maybe tomorrow we'll bring a kiddie pool and practice baptizing him =D I'm only half kidding about that........... Anyways, the language has been awesome, the studying has been awesome (whenever we can focus), the food has been fattening a.k.a. delicious (not as good as momma's cooking though), and I've been eating three bananas a day sometimes ha ha. Oh and exercise time has been awesome when we play sports. I played soccer the first day with a huge group of elders and did actually surprisingly well.... I haven't had a chance to play the piano at all yet, I'm afraid I'm gonna break one of their rules somehow. We've had trouble getting used to all of the rules they have here. There's just so many that we don't understand them all quite yet and forget some of them, but I think we're almost true veterans.
So how is everyone? Sounds like you guys are getting used to having only Carly at home.
I wanna get more mail and stuff from people!!! I haven't had the stomach yet to devour all of Carly's candy yet, but I'm working on it. I got my contacts, but they're the old wrong prescription!!!! So I guess I'll send those three boxes back to you guys. I only opened one, but I assume they're all wrong. And my missionary rain coat fits well with definite room to grow. So thank you for those! Ummmmm...... De Kerk is waar! Ik houd von mijn familie en mijn vrienden. Jezus Christus is onse Verlosser en houdt von ons. Ik et dree banaans!! De Heilige Geest maakt mij geluk.
OH!! I'm... district leader......... I kept joking with the other elders before, saying that I was going to recommend each of them for district leader in my interview, just teasing them. Then all of a sudden, I got called district leader and they all just gave me a look like, "Gotcha!" It's been difficult at times, but we're all learning together and helping each other to be strong and smart about all of our decisions. We've really all grown close, despite certain hard qualities and times. I don't really know what else..... Oh! I actually leave October 14th.
My address for packages and stuff is:
Elder Preston Quinn Johnson
OCT14 BEL-NETH
2009 N 900 E Unit 170
Provo UT 84602
So please update that for me please! I can get DearElder.com letters everyday by the way if you guys wanna send those, just use the info from that address. And I might send some snail mail to you guys too sometime. Um yeah...
What am I supposed to write in these? This is hard...
Okay I love you all very much! Hope everything is going well and continues to do so! Bye bye=)