Happy Half-Way to Me!

Hey fam and friends~

So Friday marked our half-way point here in the MTC. It's so crazy how fast this is going. Sorella Crandall's mom sent her a half-way package with Martinelli's and stuff and Sorella Hughes fam sent her brownies too, we all sat in a circle and talked about our favorite memories so far. ha ha When I say favorite memories, mostly we wrote down a lot of the funny quotes that have been said by our teachers and other people in our district. Oh man our group is hilarious. So happy half-way to us! We're getting more anziani and sorelle in this week. 17 in fact! We're getting 3 sorelle, but they're all going to Milano. And of all of the new missionaries, only 3 of the elders are going to Roma. We're so excited to get more missionaries in our district. When our last two districts left we lost so many so we're excited to get more Italians in here at the MTC!! There's a district of two: Anziano Fernandez and Anziano Smith that are the only ones older than us now. They're leaving next...Monday I think. After that, we're officially the old ones and are supposedly supposed to sound like we speak Italian an stuff....uh...we'll see how it goes. We've all learned so much and it's cool to see how much all of our district has grown and changed but I think the idea of us being the oldest ones in here makes us all a bit nervous. But we'll step it up. We've gotta make this place as wonderful as it was made for us. (Is it just me or was that sentence a mess?) For devotional this week, Elder F. Enzio Busche came and spoke to us. Holy smokes! It was so good. If any of you need something awesome to read...pick up the book that he wrote. Unfortunately, I have no idea what it's called, but they undoubtedly sell it at Deseret Book. That man blew my mind. Heand his wife were incredible. He told us about his conversion story and about how we have God's love in us. It was seriously amazing. Um...what else...OH! So this week in the TRC (for those who are still unfamiliar with the 8 million acronyms that the MTC uses, it's where volunteers come in who speak Italian and we talk to them and teach the lessons.) so up to this point we've been talking for like 15 minutes with them in Italian and then we teach a lesson to them in English. Well, this was the first day that we had to talk to them in Italian and then teach the whole first lesson to them in Italian. Holy cow it was a doozey! Well...okay so I think it went pretty well but, it's just nuts that we're supposed to be teaching in all Italian now. So for our 15 minute conversation part with them before the lesson, we were supposed to talk to them about food. So we were supposed to have memorized all of these different food words and when we were with the volunteers we were supposedly in a cafe and had to order food and then share a scripture with them. So we had gym on Monday before the TRC, and Sorelle Watson, Hughes, and I all work out together. So we do tons of abs, arms, legs stuff. Anywho, since we weren't feeling really comfortable with all of our food terms I decided that whenever we were in the middle of our crunches or lunges and we were about to yell in pain, INSTEAD, we had to yell out a food word in Italian. ha ha It was so funny. We'd be counting crunches and this is what someone from outside of our exercise group would have heard, "72, 73, 74, 75, il pomodoro!....100, 101, il cucchiaio! 102, 103". It was a good time. The examples I just gave you were tomato, and spoon. It was so funny. Especially doing that during crunches just hurt our abs even more because we'd burst out laughing when someone yelled in pain something like, "meatloaf!". Good times in the MTC. On Sunday we had a former mission president of the Milano mission talk to us and it was so good. He quoted a scripture that I've rather enjoyed the last few weeks here in the MTC. You should check it out: Hebrews 13:24, and he told us some cool stories. Hearing from people who served over there and love those people so much make me so stoked to get over there. I already feel like I love those Italians. I can't wait to get there...and yet, I know I have tons more studying and learing to do until I mutter my testimony to them in Italian. So one of the funny quotes of the week before I go: We have an Anziano in our district who is an unsuspecting good time. I didn't think he would be as funny as he is. But we were doing this exercise in Preach My Gospel and it was a situation that said something like, "You see a mother and her child playing in a park. What do you think you should go talk to them about?" And Anziano Brooks leans over and says, "Definitely tithing." ha ha Well, that's all for this week. Hope everyone's doing well. Working really hard, learning tons, and loving life. The church gets more wonderful everyday I learn more about it--as does the Italian language. Seriously how I scored the best of both worlds is beyond me. I feel guilty here in the MTC telling people where I'm going because every time they kind of feel bad about their missions afterwards. It really is sweet, not just that I'm going to preach the gospel there, but that Heavenly Father has work for ME to do there. Till next week!

Sorella Hansen