5th letter...and halfway through the MTC experience

Ola Minha familia? Como Vao? Eu Amo Todos Voces!!!!

Well I hope everyone is doing great!! I'm doing great here at the MTC! Not much of anything new has happened here. Once you get settled into the schedule, it doesn't really change much!! But I have really been enjoying myself!! I see people I know all the time!! I run into Elder Vellinga probably every other day, and yesterday I saw Elder Jennings. It was his second day here!! How exciting!! Well the language is getting better and better. It's still not that great, but I have definitely learned a lot more than I used to know so I can't complain about that!! As district leader, I helped us come up with a goal as a district that would help us be more diligent with the language so that we can learn faster. We have decided that we are going to take Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of every week, and speak absolutely nothing but Portuguese!!! We call them English fasts and whenever someone asks us a question that we don't know how to answer, or talk to us and we don't know how to respond, we have to look at them and say "Nos estamos jejuar de Ingles" which means "we are fasting from English" haha its crazy. During this fast, if you want to speak English, you must first walk up to the wall and press your nose against the wall while speaking English!! If, however, you are caught speaking English without your nose on the wall, I put a mark for every word down by the name in a notebook and when we get back to our residence halls, I go around and (try to) make the elders do 5 push-ups for every English word they spoke!! It's absolutely hilarious because I myself am pretty terrible at it. Two nights ago, I had to do 130 Push ups!!! It was incredibly hard!!

Me and Elder Bell have signed up for a program called the TE. Not exactly sure what it stands for but it's really cool and helpful. It's a place where you can go and teach lessons to teachers that are pretending to be investigators!! You don't even need to teach a lesson, sometimes you can just go in and do a workshop. They are very helpful. Elder Bell and I have signed up so we are teaching at least 2 lessons a day!! We also have progressing investigators now!! It's really cool. Next week we signed up to teach a teacher named Brother Campbell. This guy is so cool but he told us that the investigator he pretends to be is extremely tough to teach. We read his story and the investigator he pretends to be is a war veteran who stepped on a land mine and is paralyzed from the waist down. He pretends to be in a wheel chair. Brother Campbell has told us that he has made some missionaries cry before so I guess we'll find out how this goes. Wish us luck!! hahahahha.

Well, I'm loving it here!! My district is so tight, and I don't think there has been any major contentions in our district once. My testimony continues to grow!! The other day I was thinking and I realized that these next two years are some of the most important years of my whole life!! It was an overwhelming feeling! It hit me so hard CRAZY!!! I have never really thought about my mission like that before. But I'm so excited. I want to be in Portugal right now but at the same time I know I'm not anywhere close to ready. I can't believe I'm half way done with my MTC experience!! Unbelievable!! The first two days were probably the longest days of my life but once I got used to it, everything started speeding up!! Time meshes together here. I don't really know how to explain it, but here I am, emailing you on another P-day and it seriously feels like last P-day was yesterday. No joke. Time flies by so fast. I think it is because I'm constantly busy here and there is always something I can be doing.

Well I better go. Stupid computer only gives me 30 minutes. But I love you all. Thank you for being the coolest family ever.

-Elder Coulton Willes