"Life Flies!"

Woah,

Life flies! This is my last letter as a teenager! I am staying in Hamilton!!!! I am 95% happy with this decision and the only reason I am not 100% is because it is winter... But I am acclimating nicely.

I got a new companion today. His Name is Elder Spjute, from Bountiful Utah. Cool guy, Way good in Spanish so he should teach me. Me and Elder Draper got along too well at times and spoke too much English. But I hear that Spjute is pretty insistent on speaking Spanish so he will force me to learn it! Good Stuff!! Spanish is coming along, I can communicate I just have problems at times. This week was not super eventful...

Thanksgiving was Swell! Pretty funny actually! Hispanics do not really celebrate it but we have a party at the branch... sooo on Monday night the Branch President asked (only the white Elders) to do a special presentation to explain how Thanksgiving came to be.... SOOOO my first thought was "wait... Didn’t I do this in 1st grade in Miss Richie's class?" The answer to that question was yes! I remembered that the Indians (Native Americans for those of you who are politically correct) used brown paper bags as chest plates for their clothing... And the Pilgrims made paper hats and wore them to the feast! Soooooo there are three of us who are white in our branch (the other three are Hispanic) so we had one pilgrim and one Indian, But what could the third person be??? My companion and I made him a beak and a gobbler and he was a turkey... (Hispanics call it El Dia de Pavo/Turkey so we needed to associate the turkey somehow).

So The turkey told the story as we acted it out in our costumes.... Now, I assumed this would be funny and the branch members would think it was kinda fun... The time came to do it and we all faced the realization that they were NOT going to laugh and it would probably be incredibly awkward.... We proceeded with the presentation and only the sweet branch president’s wife laughed (and the kids). They all kinda gave us a baffled confused look! The few people who were American or had more familiarization with the holiday laughed but overall it was a disaster! The Grand Finale was my companion (Elder Draper) singing a solo of "Count Your Many Blessings" on the Table as we pretended to eat him (he being the turkey). WOW!!!! HAHAHA!!

In other news everything is going very good, Maria is doing amazing! We taught her the Word of Wisdom on Friday and explained everything. She smokes and drinks tons of coffee so we were a little bit concerned. When we asked her how she felt about it she responded that she loved it and said that it makes sense that we should take care of our bodies. She said she always thought that there was more things that she should and shouldn’t be doing then she had learned before and said (translated) "It says that the past is straight and narrow so she was happy to learn more." She is incredible!!! Maricella has started to ignore us a little bit which is not good but she will come back around!

In other news I actually finished a full journal! Have not missed a day since June! Not bad huh? I figure it will be good to have to remember my whole mission in later years! SOOOO overall things are doing well!! I love you all and am excited to talk to you on Christmas!

Love Elder Stiles