We sent Steven a voice recorder for Christmas. Apparently, he received it. So here is some rambling.
He is starting to get that Spanish language cadence. How fun to hear.
Here is a transcript, I don't know if I will do this all the time -it took a lot of time. But here you go.
Hello everybody. Hope you're all doing well. So I don't quite know what to say to you guys but. What the heck. This recorder thing is really weird. I'm not exactly sure that it's recording. But oh well. The instructions say when it blinks blue it's recording. It is blinking blue. So. Here goes nothing.
Right now I'm sitting here drinking water out of a bag. Because they don't believe in water bottles here. I think I sent you a picture of one of these. They're actually pretty cool. You just have to bite off the corner and you squeeze the water into your mouth. It's like magic because you can drink it faster than a water bottle.
Guatemala is pretty cool I like it here. I really think I don't like about it is there's a lot of trash like everywhere. Anywhere there'repeople, there's trash because they don't believe in trash cans.
And there're preachers everywhere. Over here, there're two main churches. Number one. I think it's called Evangelica I don't know what that is in English you say Evangelical something like that. But it's basically like a Protestant type church. And there're a lot of little ones around. Is like a guy decided, "I like this idea of being a preacher. I'm going to make a church" and somehow got the money to buy a building. And then he started preaching. And he opened up his church. But there's a lot of those guys and they're kind of funny to listen to.
The other day we're on a bus. So we're on this bus. When we got on we realized there's a guy standing up and he was preaching but he looks like a pirate. It is really really funny. He has this scraggly beard and he had, it I think you know, like one or two gold teeth and then a few missing teeth. He just looked Super grubby. I don't even know what he was saying because, you know, Spanish is a little tricky to understand. But he was like, he just kept like quoting scripture. "Moroni" No he couldn't have said Moroni because that's in the Book of Mormon. (Spanish). I don't want to start speaking Spanish to you. But he said something about alcohol is bad but. got you there, cuz that's true. But it was kind of-of funny. But we're a little disappointed because we didn't get to preach. There are a lot of missionaries that are afraid to preach in the buses.
My companion just looked at me really weird because I'm talking to nobody.
But in this mission there's a thing called buscar (sp?) and it's basically. Just like when we're on a bus we stand up and sing a hymn to the people on the bus and then bare our testimonies or preach. Most of the missionaries are super afraid to do it; they get stage fright or something. But the preachers do it all the time. What my companion I realize is sometimes they give us free bus rides when we preach to them. Like they don't charge; it's kind of funny. Its like if we preach to them, they are "he's preaching the Word of God" and they don't charge. That's happened like three times where we tied to pay these people and est nada. It turns out it's actually kind of fun to buscar? I was a little scared to do it at first but. It's pretty fun. So we could hand out like a dozen or so panfletos….pamphlets. But I can hand out half a dozen pamphlets just about every time.
There's also a lot of people that think you shouldn't be baptized twice. We had one investigator like that. She's thought that it would be like playing with God to get baptized in another church because she was already baptized in a different church. She wouldn't accept it which was really sad. But the good part about is that is we can preach on the bus and get free bus rides because todo es bueno y todo es de Dios.
Spanish is coming along. Right now I’m to the point where I can understand just about everything people say. There’re still a few people that - I don't know what it is - they talk a little fast or pronounce things a little weird and so it's hard to understand some people. But the majority of the time I have a general idea what they're saying at least. But people still don’t understand me. I realized The other day- a couple weeks ago - we're teaching a lesson, me and my companion, and you know my companion (and he's pretty awesome. Elder Sunday, he is from Utah and he has a year in the mission -a little more than a year. And his Spanish is really good.) And so we're teaching this lesson in a Family Home Evening. The family invited a neighbor to come listen to us teach. We taught about the brother of Jared and how he had so much faith and basically used the story of the brother of Jared as an example to teach about faith. She didn't understand a single thing. It was really, really funny. In my part of the lesson she didn't understand a single thing I taught. I taught her a little part and I asked her a question. She just looked at me and nodded. Like “ah ha, that's right.” And I asked, “did you understand me?” “No, not a single thing.” She didn't understand much of what my companion said either. We asked What did you think about the lesson? and she's like, Well it was nice but I didn't understand hardly anything because you guys don't talk good Spanish. She said this with bad grammar which was really funny.
“I don't talk good Spanglish.” Our Spanish was good, his [companion] Spanish is super good. I could say a sentence grammatically correct but they still don't understand just because of the accent. Afterwards, we were talking about how important it is to lose the accent. 1, people understand you better; and 2, if you say it correctly but with the accent of the people then they're not going to pay attention to the weird way you talk, but they're going to pay attention to what you're teaching them. So it would better invite the spirit if you actually didn’t have an accent. "I am pronouncing everything perfectly. How can I work on my Spanish accent?" My companion said, you know there's a little section in one of those books (I had never looked at.) So I looked for it and found it. It was like an alphabet of all the letters and the sounds they make and it turns out the “d” in Spanish makes the same sound as the “th” in the word “that.” Who knew? The word “todo”, which means all, is “totho” It's like super weird. All of these sounds I thought made the same sound in English are completely different. No wonder no one can understand me, that makes perfect sense. But now I am trying to nail down these letters because it's pretty tricky. Your tongue is used to talking in a certain way, but you have to retrain your tongue to work in a different way.
What else can I tell you guys? I didn’t understand much of the last General Conference that they had. I think I understood two words because it was in Spanish. But from what I understand, there was a lot about the book of Mormon. That makes perfect sense to me because the Book of Mormon is super, super important. That's one thing that we stress a lot with our investigators here, because if the Book of Mormon is true, then the Church is true. As I was telling you earlier about how everyone thinks that everything is Todo es bueno y todo es de Dios, everything is of God. If you can convince them of the Book of Mormon is of God, then that convinces them that they were wrong. It's super important to have a strong testimony of the Book of Mormon. Because, if you have a testimony of the Book of Mormon, you have a testimony of the church. So I hope you're reading the book because that’s super important.
One thing that I have been learning is the more obedient you are to the commandments, or the mission rules for me, the more you are going to learn. So I think the more you read the Book of Mormon and pray and do all the little stuff, the more your testimony is going to grow and the stronger you're going to be in the gospel. The more you magnify your calling, the more you are going to learn about that calling and that small part in the kingdom of God. Whatever calling you happen to have, you need to magnify it, do the very best you possibly can. With those three things: reading the Book of Mormon, praying every day, magnifying your calling, you're going to learn. You're going to receive a bunch of blessings. So I invite you all to do that. I missed out on a lot of time when I was younger. I had a bunch of time as Teachers
quorum President and leadership and I didn't do anything, I did not magnify my calling at all and now I really regret it because now I can actually see all the good that I could have done for the quorum members that weren't going to church. So I invite you guys to do better than I was. You will receive blessings.
I Think we should probably go, cuz we have stuff to do today. Love you all,
Adios
