Hola Familia!

Wow! This week was jam packed with lot´s of incredible things! It´s really weird thinking that today is the last time I´m going to email you from the CCM, but If I want to remember everything I should probably start at the beginning (ha ha).

So last Tuesday right after we emailed I went to check the mail and got four letters! Two from Tennessee, and two from Mom (one of which was dated August 12th, which is crazy that it took so long to get here!) There´s another Elder in our district with the first name of Jonathan, and when he saw there were four letters in the mailbox and that the top one was for a Jonathan he was pretty excited, but not as much as I was because I got every letter. ;) We watched a video of a talk Elder Holland gave to the Provo MTC last year, and it was really incredible. I can´t believe that he was at the Corner Canyon Football game! And I´m sure he was very impressed with Jacob´s singing. ;) Tonight we have a devotional that´s being broadcast live from Provo, so I have my fingers crossed it will be another general authority. =) On Thursday, Elder Bagley and I had a really special experience with one of our investigators. We have two teachers here, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and both pretend to be investigators for us for one of our hours of instruction. Our morning investigator´s baptism date is this week, and he brought in the actual person he was pretending to be, his father-in-law. So we got to meet the actual investigator, and his whole family which was really cool.

This Sunday was interesting as well, very bitter sweet. I was asked to give a talk in sacrament meeting, which is always a little scary because everyone writes a talk, but we don´t know who´s speaking until the actual meeting.

The first week we got here our whole district was a little frazzled and lost in our district games we play on PDay as expected, but the district across the hall which had been there for one week longer than us pretty much became our older brother district for the time we were here (which is kind of a weird concept because I was actually older than a lot of the Elders in 14A, but they seemed older because they had been here longer.) These 14A missionaries have now left for their missions. Hopefully we´ll be able to see them again because a lot of them are going to go to BYU after their service, and their whole district minus like two Elders are going to a Salt Lake City Spanish speaking mission! So if you see an Elder Bombauk, Matson, Wheeler, Bennet,  Hoopes, or Meadows, then you should definitely say hello. =)

Then yesterday was the Mexico equivalent of the Fourth of July, and saying they like to party here is a bit of an understatement! We had a special ´´cultural building activity´´ where we got to watch a show put on by a group of Spanish dancers for an hour and a half, and that was really interesting and fun. But we didn´t exactly get much sleep last night (ha ha). But it was a nice change to the routine here. I honestly don´t know how Dad was able to stay in the MTC for 12 weeks! (ha ha)

Today has been a blast so far though, because we got to go to the temple in the morning! (That´s why I´m writing so much later today) It was such a good experience, even though the actual temple is closed right now. We got to take a tour of the visitors center, and at the distribution center I was able to get a Spanish Primary book, and a Mayan copy of the Book of Mormon! I was so excited! This is by far the best four dollars I´ve ever spent. =D Our afternoon teacher, Hermano Silva, came with his novia to say hola, and get a few pictures with us at the temple. I was actually pretty happy that Bedstamor sent me the pictures of the Sun and Moon pyramids because they sort of modeled the temple to look like those. 

I´m so happy things are going well at home! Best of luck! See you next week in Ecuador!

Elder Hales

Jonathan's district in front of the Mexico City Temple

 A tree full of bees