Goodbye MTC :(

Hi Everyone! 


This is the last email you will get from me in Mexico! This is my 6th and last week here at the MTC, and I will head to Idaho on Tuesday, the 26th! I am so sad to leave!! The MTC was one of the funnest times of my life for sure. The saddest part will be leaving my district and my companion. They have become some of my best friends, and knowing that this is the last time I will see some of them is awful! But I am so proud of and excited for all of them and know they will be the best missionaries. Also, half of my district is serving in San Diego so I'm pretty jealous. Watch out for the missionaries if any of you are ever down in that area! 

This week was pretty normal, nothing too exciting. It did go by soooo fast, though! I swear time started moving like triple the speed these past couple weeks. We did an activity during class this week where we taught a lesson to an interested person over Skype. The lesson itself was alright! We are definitely improved so much in our spanish and in our ability to talk and teach naturally with people. The hardest part was dealing with the faults of technology! The connection was so bad and it's one thing to try and understand a native spanish speaker in person, but it is another, much harder thing, to try and understand them over video chat... we tried our best, but there was definitely just a lot of smiling and nodding on our part. 

Since this is our last week, we decided to play the "Mario Kart" spanish game that is famous here at the CCM. To play, everyone gets 3 "lives" and you keep track of them with multicolored sticky tab things that we stick onto our tags. If you get caught speaking English at any time during the day, you lose a life. At the end of the day, the loser (the person who lost all 3 lives first) has to buy the winner(s) a treat from the tienda. Yesterday was the first day we played, and it was exhausting. Speaking spanish literally every second of the day definitely was challenging and required a lot of thought and patience, but I was surprised at how well we all did! We ended up with like 4 people who never lost a life, including me! It was cool though to see that it wasn't impossible to speak only spanish, we could definitely do it! 

Other than that, my week consisted of the same old things: class, studying, and volleyball. We did have a pretty exciting Sunday though because instead of our normal Sunday night devotional where the MTC President gives a gospel presentation to us all, we watched a movie instead! It was still a gospel movie of course, but I have never been more excited and happy to watch a movie in my life! It was like a treat for all of us! We watched Legacy, maybe some of you have seen it before. I don't know if it was actually a good movie, or if we just loved it so much because it was a movie and it had a love story in it, but it was definitely a good time! 

Next time you hear from me, I will be in Idaho! I hope you all have a good Thanksgiving with your friends and family! 

Miss and love you guys!! 

Talk soon! 

Hermana Rawlins

Pictures: 

1. Me and Hermana Oliveros

2. District 7a (my district) and 7c, our "sister district" aka our fav friends who left this week :(

3. District 7a and 7c hermanas

4. Hermana selfie with some friends in the back

5. Me and Hermana Merrell (featuring Elder Hurst and Elder Sorensen) 

One Month Down, 17 More To Go!

Hola!! 


This week marks one month that I've been here at the CCM. So crazy!!! It's even crazier that I will leave the CCM and be out in the field in Boise in like a week and a half! I'm excited but also getting very sad, because I totally love it here. I'm especially soooo sad to leave my district and my companion. They're like my best friends! But I know that the work waiting for me in Idaho is what is most important, and the time when I will really be able to see God's hand in my life and in the lives of those I will serve. That's when my mission will really start!

So much stuff has happened in this past week! My district and I got the chance to go to the temple again last week, and it was another amazing experience. The work done in temples is so important and I am so grateful that I have been able to go and perform those sacred ordinances for 2 of my ancestors since I've been here at the CCM! It's so cool to go back and look at their charts on the Family History website and see which temples their work has been done in, and to now see "Mexico City" on there! 

This week we had our first "real" missionary teaching lessons. We had this activity called TRC which is when volunteers from around the city come and are taught a 15 minute lesson by a pair of missionaries. The volunteers are a mix of all genders, ages, religions, etc. Me and my companion were SO scared because we haven't taught anyone besides our teachers up until this point! We got extremely lucky and both of our lessons were with volunteers who were members of the church. We first taught two girls who were in their early 20s, they were really nice, but it was very clear that they could not understand our spanish very well...we were struggling. We then taught two really young teenage boys. Our lesson with them went way better, they seemed to understand more and were more willing to help us out when we couldn't find the words to say in spanish. They boosted our spirits a little after our first lesson with the girls, but overall, it was a hard and scary experience. We have to do TRC again next week, and I am dreading it, but we have been working harder at our lessons and our spanish since the first time, so hopefully we will see some improvement! 

Our district has still been having tons of fun. We play volleyball together everyday for our gym time, and we always have SO much fun. My 3 years of volleyball experience are really coming in handy too because I am the only person in my district who at least knows a little of what they are doing when we play. Needless to say, they are all very impressed with my skills. Hahaha. Gym time is definitely me and my companion's favorite part of the day. We get to just do whatever and play sports for an hour, and then we have "prep time" for like 45 minutes so we get to just go back to our room, relax, eat snacks, and take a break for a little. Seriously, that time is a luxury to us. It really gets us through the day. 

Last night we had the incredible experience of having Elder Soares from the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles come and speak to us. Everyone here was SO excited, it was like having our very own celebrity come here! I actually was stoked because I have never seen or heard from an Apostle in real life. It was amazing, when he walked in the chapel the spirit was just overwhelming and  immediately testified to everyone in the room that we were in the presence of a true apostle of the Lord. His happiness was contagious, and he assured us of how often the First Presidency and General Authorities of the church pray for the missionaries. It was a feeling like no other knowing how important me, and all the other missionaries, are to them and how much love they have for us and the work we are doing. It was so reassuring and motivating. The message he shared with us was about preparing to face evil in our lives. He stressed the fact that, most often, we don't seek out evil, but that it will always find us in the most unexpected ways, and so we must constantly be preparing to face this evil. If we are prepared, our goodness will ALWAYS overpower evil, it won't even stand a match. 

Normally at the end of my emails I share a scripture that I liked from the week, but this week I want to share a video. It is one that the church put out for Easter a couple years ago, so those of you who are members of the church will be familiar with it, but I think it is one of the most amazing videos. I have watched it SO many times, even since I have been here, but it never loses the effect it has on me. I will put the link to the video at the end of this. Hopefully it works, but if not you can find the video on youtube or lds.org and it is called "Because of Him" Everything we are and everything we can be is because of Jesus Christ, and the sacrifice he made for us. We would be nothing, and know nothing of joy and love, were it not for him. He is our Savior, our Redeemer, and our Brother. I love this quote from a famous church speaker, Brother Brad Wilcox, "How lucky are we, that we have a Savior who chose to become like us, so that we could choose to become like Him"  https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/media-library/video/2014-00-1420-because-of-him?category=topics/easter&lang=eng

Thank you all for your emails, prayers, thoughts, and constant love. It means the world to me!! I'm sending all my love from Mexico City! Have a great week!

Hermana Rawlins <3

Pictures:

1. Weekly dysfunctional district picture. It's impossible to get one with all of us looking/smiling so we take what we can get. 

2. Hermanas with our friends Elder Marcom and Elder Guiliani from a different district

3. Me and my comp during our service activity for the week- yard work!

4. Me and my comp at the temple

5. Hermanas at the temple wearing our (sort of) matching faldas we got from the tienda! 

Half Way There!

Hola my friends!! I miss you all! It makes me so happy when I get emails from you guys, even if it's just to say hi! This was a good week! There was no more fainting or being sick, thank goodness! But thank you guys for checking in on me and making sure that I was okay! I can't believe I am already on my 4th week here!! It is going by so fast and slow at the same time. This week was pretty uneventful, just class, studying, and more class. We started doing this activity everyday where we have to teach a 15 minute gospel lesson to an "interested person" (but it's really just either our morning or afternoon teacher playing a character), so everyday we have to prepare a lesson and then teach it as if they were a real person. It started out really stressful but we are slowly getting better at teaching in spanish!

A highlight of this week: we got to go to the temple! The Mexico City temple is the largest temple outside of the US, I think that's what they told us anyway. It is beautiful! Inside and out! It was such a cool experience getting to get outside of the MTC for a little bit, drive through the city, and do a session at the temple. The spirit felt there is so strong. It was nice to be there and take a break from all the stress and craziness that goes on at the MTC. The day we went was the beginning of Día de los Muertos and so we thought that we would be able to see celebrations and decorations and different things like that throughout the city, but we didn't see anything! Kinda disappointing cause we were pretty excited to experience some of that! Even that night the city wasn't any more loud or crazy than it normally is as we were going to bed. It was a little weird being here on Halloween cause it was just a totally regular day. Normal classes, normal meals, normal church clothes, etc. It'll be fun when I get to Idaho cause I will at least get to experience holidays a little more than here. But, just Halloween, not a big deal. 

I know I say this every week, but I love my district. Everyday we only get closer and become better friends, and it makes missionary life more enjoyable! It's so important to feel and invite the spirit throughout our days and to study all that we can, but it is also SO important to have fun. Being able to laugh together and just be comfortable around one another helps get us through the looooong days. The other morning, we had a "spicy pepper eating contest" with our old teacher, Hermano Aceves. It's so cool because he just returned from his mission not long before we got here and he started teaching so he is only 20 years old. And, even though he isn't our teacher anymore, we are still great friends with him and so every morning he will eat breakfast and talk with us. Anyway, one morning he brought Jabañero peppers with him because my companion made a bet with him that she could handle spicy foods better than he could because she is Latina. When they ate them, they were both equally uneffected, but then the rest of us tried them and oh my goodness, my tongue was on FIRE for like 20 minutes. Those are so hot. But we were all laughing so hard because the elders were all CRYING. They couldn't handle them at all!! We had so much fun together. 

More good news: no one else from my district went home this week!! In fact, we got a new elder just yesterday. He transferred here from the Provo MTC where he had been for 3 weeks, and now he will finish here with us for 3 weeks. It's kinda weird having a new elder with us after we have been getting so close these past couple weeks, but he was a much needed addition to our district and we are so grateful to have him here. We received SO many new missionaries this week at the CCM. 300 new missionaries arrived here yesterday!! Crazy!! Me and my companion are pretty excited because 6 new hermanas were added to our branch, meaning we get more girls to be friends with and spend time with for our calling. We looooove all of our hermanas.

Sorry this email was pretty uneventful! I've been doing a bunch of stuff today and now am finding it hard to remember the things I wanted to talk about! But, I do want to end with this scripture that I love. It is in the Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 31:20, "Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life." This scripture gets me through everyday! The part I was focusing on this week in particular was having a brightness of hope and a love for all men. Often times we try to press forward with a steadfastness only in our faith in Christ, but we neglect those other important Christ-like attributes. We need to press forward through our good days and our bad days, having not only faith in Christ, but hope in his plan for us and for the world, and a love for all of those we come into contact with. Even here, surrounded by disciples of Christ, it can be hard to seek out that love for everyone! But, an elder in my district shared this thought, "There are only 2 groups of people in this world: those you love, and those you just don't know well enough yet." :)

Sending so much love to all of you!! Until next week!

Hermana Rawlins <3

Okay, lots of pictures...

1. Me, Elder Sorensen, Hermano Aceves, and Hermana Oliveros post Jabañero challenge. Please don't mind me and Elder Sorensen crying because they were too spicy.

2. District picture :)

3. District Hermanas

4. Front of the CCM, seriously sooo pretty!

5. My cute companion and I in front of the temple

6. District pic at the temple!

7. Mexico City Temple!!

8. Me and my comp in a CLASSIC mirror pic inside the temple's visitor's center

9. Hermanas in front of the temple

10. Me and my comp again in front of the temple

11. Hermanas and Hermano Aceves at breakfast