I've seen fire and I've seen rain. (Mostly rain though)

¡Hola! ¿Cómo están?

There was nothing that happened this week that was more entertaining than last week. Sorry. This week has flown by though. Last week I didn't explain much about the CCM. I will try to do it better today. So my companion and I live in the dorms. There are four other people that live in the same room as us. In that one room there are three separate rooms that each have two beds in them. There is a bathroom and a commons area with a table. I don't remember if I mentioned my roommates in my last one. There is Elder Hawkes(Bountiful) and Elder Christensen (Gunnison). There is also two Latinos staying with us. It was Elder Rabell (Leon México) and ElderZacarias (Guerrera México). Elder Z and Elder R left on Monday for the mission field. We have two more Elders that moved in last night. I'm not sure what their names are yet. They don't speak nearly as much English as Elder Z and Elder R did. Elder Z and R are both headed to Juarez, México. Elder Hawkes and Elder Christensen are going to Tampa, Florida. We have a lot of fun in our room. Elder H and C epitomize Gringoism. We have a lot of laughs about that. Last week on Tuesday, Elder Thorpe and I were helping some of the new Elders find their room. When we made it back to our room we discovered all the lights were off. We were wondering where everyone was. I tried to turn on the lights but they didn't turn on. I thought that was weird. I thought something must have gone wrong with the lights. I looked at the breaker switches which is right above the light switches. I saw a sticky note covering them and I assumed that it was a note from a maintenance crew or something. I took the sticky note off and went into the main hall to read what it said. Elder Thorpe had made it all the way down the hall to our room by this time. He tried opening our door but it was locked. (We had already locked our keys in our door once, and we had to get Elder Dennis to pick the lock.) As I was looking down to read the note, of which there was none. I heard the loudest bang. I turn around and see Elder Thorpe scrambling on the floor trying to get out of the room as fast as he could. He had slipped and fallen trying to get out of the room. Turns out there wasn't a problem with the lights and our door wasn't locked. Our roommates had been hiding and they shut the breakers off so we couldn't turn on the light. The sound of those doors slamming is the loudest scariest thing. Anyways we got them back even better a couple of nights later.

     Here is a normal day at the CCM. We wake up at 6:30 and work on the Plan ofSwollvation. (I hope that's not sacrilegious.) It's our work out plan to get swoll or big. I came up with it. For every article of clothing we put on we have to do ten push ups or sit ups or dips. Garments are free though. So after we get dressed we go to theComedor for breakfast. We have personal study after that for an hour in our classroom. Then we have teachers teach us about Spanish and teaching. Hermano Hill and Hermano Zamilpa are our teachers. They're awesome. We have lunch after that. Lunch is the biggest meal here. After that we use a computer program called TALL thatBYU developed to help us learn Spanish. Its really good. We have Language study after that by ourselves in our classroom. Once that's over we go to Gym. Elder Thorpe and I play basketball alot and soccer. We generally take a shower after gym. Daily Planning follow gym and we are not good at that at all. We need to get better. Dinner is after daily planning. Around dinner time, almost every day, it starts to rain. When it rains it pours! I've never seen it rain like it does here. Also the thunder here is incredible. It is so loud. One time the thunder lasted for at least 5 minutes straight. Even though it rains the weather here is amazing. It's not hot and it's really not that humid. Once dinner is over we have another teacher, Hermano Rasmussen (who played our investigator Cristofer). There we learn more Spanish and more about how to teach. Some nights we will get to go to devotionals. I really like those. During the first teaching time in the morning and during the last teaching time at night we have a progressing investigator that we teach. We committed Cristofer to baptism last week. We got Karim and Bernardo this week. It´s really helpful to teach these people. I thought I knew how to teach before I got here. HA yeah right. I´ve learned a ton though. This place is revelation city. It's really amazing to just be constantly fed information from the spirit. Teaching "investigators" is good and it's cool to see them change (they are based on real people that the actor taught on their missions). I can't wait to see real people really change. I'm kind of envious of Porter and Scott right now. They are out teaching real people and real lessons and it's not hard for them to get their message across. But I'm really grateful to be learning Spanish even though it gets difficult at times. The amount I've relearned is incredible and its cool to see all of the people who didn't take any or much Spanish prior to the MTC learn alot. I've only learned a couple of new things when it comes to Spanish grammar but I'm way better at speaking and understanding it then I was. I'm going to chalk that one up to the spirit.

I'm really grateful for your letters.

Work Hard Pray Hard.

Con Amor.

-Elder Rowberry

P.S. I apologize about any errors in my letter. I don´t have a lot of time.

I'm gonna teach some lessons, only got 20 words in my Spanish ah ah I'm preaching. This is really awesome.

This week and couple days has been good. Real good. Like they say the first couple of days are the longest days of your life. Luckily, it gets better. Now the days are flying by but six weeks still feels like its going to be a long time. This first week has been eventful though.

My email is going to be pretty much just scattered thoughts and events because I didn't have time to write an outline and a rough draft. Chistes.

Anyways I'll start from Day 1. Mi comapañero is Elder Payton Thorpe from Springville. He's an awsome guy. He played quarterback for Springville last year and he played Baseball as well. We get along really well so that's good. CCM stands for Centro de Capacitacion Misional. It means Missionary Training Center in Spanish, big surprise. The first day was orientation and kind of getting to know how things work. It was long like I said. Oh and my P day is Thursday. We jumped right in on the first day. We had class and learned some Spanish. We learned how to bear our testimonies and how to pray. We got seperated into districts and that who we have class with. My district is the best. We have a lot of fun. All of the guys in my district are going to my mission. There is: Elder Hicken (Hurricane) and Elder Mitchell (St. George), Elder Evans (Sandy) and Elder Sparks (Arizona), Elder Brown (Morgan) and Elder Salmons (Alexandria, VA), Hermana Israelson (Logan) and Hermana Johnson (Sandy) in my district. On the first day we were told that we had to teach an investigator on the third day, in Spanish. That was pretty intimidating. Thankfully it wasn't a real investigator. But we have been progressing with this "investigator" this whole time now. His name is Cristofer. We asked him to get baptized but he said he doesn't think he has enough faith but he wants it to be true. But we know from Alma 32:27 that all he needs is a desire. All of our lessons are in Spanish and each of our lessons are all in Spanish. I'm so greatful that I stayed in Spanish. It has helped more than I would have ever thought. It's nice because I have words that the spirit can draw from when I teach. Jane, take Spanish. Isaac, stay in Spanish. Josh and Kate buy Rosetta Stone, en broma. But seriously I love being able to help out my district with their Spanish because I know more than them thanks to Señorita.

On the fourth or fifth day I had a pretty entertaining experience at lunch. By the way lunch is the biggest meal here. All the meals are all you can eat but lunch has a ton of stuff. The food is great, some of the stuff is a little strange but I like the vast majority of it. Back to the story. I'm sitting there eating my refried beans with my corn tortillas when Elder Dennis (Bountiful), he's in another district but he is going to my mission, comes up to us and asks, "Who wants to do a dare?" I thought to myself, well if its not against the rules I'll do it. Also it's pretty hard to find a dare that will fit within the rules of the CCM. The rules are many and strict but in the end you have to keep the rules yourself there aren't people enforcing them. So he pulled out a pepper and told me to take a bite. I took a bite and was a little bit hot. It was just a Jalapeño. He was pretty surprised by that so he went back to where he was sitting with a bunch of Latinos. He returned shortly with another pepper. He told me to take a bite out of that. Thinking that it was another Jalapeño I took a generous bite out of it. I hear an audible gasp from the other side of el Comedor (thats cafeteria for you gringos). I look over and see 20 or so flabbergasted Latinos. At this time I should have realized I made a mistake. But alas, I had to look cool and the pepper wasn't very hot, or so I thought, so I swallowed.. They made gestures that asked me how it was. I gave them the two thumbs up. They continued to make the gestures. Shortly after swallowing all heck broke loose in my mouth. The scorching and excruciating pain of the pepper immediately made my eyes got real large and the involuntary tears started flowing. Needless to say that the pepper was not a Jalapeño. It was called a Chili Cerrado, which can be hotter than the Habeñero. To alleviate the spicy inferno in my mouth I started to chug glasses of juice. We had a full pitcher of juice on the table. I drank all but four cups of the juice. While I was doing this the Latinos were ROTFLOL, if you will. The one who put Elder Dennis up to it came over and kept handing me glasses of juice while he was laughing. The combination of the juice and the pepper just put me over the top. I stood up and, as calmly as I could, walked to el Baño. There was an Elder washing his hands and as I was entering the stall, I cooley told him,"If a Latino offers you a pepper don't eat it." I then lost the lunch that I liked so much. I took a ride on the porcelain bus and I paid my toll. As I'm kneeling there, heaving Buicks, the Latino that instigated the thing comes in the stall and says "¿Está bien?" ¡No! I replied as I turned to continue to purge my bowels of the awful evil that had entered therin. I finally finished and surprisingly my mouth wasn't hot anymore. Anyways that was the most entertaing thing that has happened so far. There is still 5 weeks to go so who knows what could happen. I have so much more I want to tell you but there is just not enough time. I'll end with the schedule of a normal day at the CCM. Wake up at 6:30. Drag yourself out of bed. Go to breakfast. Study, have class and study the gospel and Spanish. Lunch. Study, and then before we study again, we study. We have one hour of gym. Then we have dinner. Then we study. Then we teach. Then we study some more. After that estudiar. Then its bed time.

Well I love you all. It´s great here. I´ll tell you more next week.

-Elder Rowberry

PS I apologize for the Macklemore reference in the subject line. Kind of.

Arrived in Mexico

Well I made it to the MTC or CCM as they call it here. We had a nice drive, and by nice I mean slow and hot, through the city from the airport. I think Mexico City can be summed up in three words: huge, dirty, crowded. Someone tell Dallin and Ben that it fi's dirt. From what I saw of New York and what I've seen of Mexico City, New York has nothing on Mexico City when it comes to size and filth. My friend that I sat by on the plane Elder Thorpe (I'm pretty sure he'll be my companion because he is in my room) and I gave out a Book of Mormon on the way to Dallas to a guy named Frank from Raleigh, North Carolina. Mom, Elder Thorpe is the one we saw at the airport that you said I should have asked him his name so if I talked about him you would know who he was. Anyways that was pretty cool. I just barely got my name tag so I guess its official. It feels pretty good to have it on. Before we didn't really know what to call each other.

             We just had a dinner of pizza, juice and some fruit with flan for desert. There was one red fruit, I don't know what it was, but it tasted strongly of baby diarrhea, so that was nice. It's actually is quite cool here and it doesn't seem too humid. Also the spray paint industry here is striving, I have no doubt. It is so crowded. I'm looking out the window right now at the houses that are just stacked on top of each other on the side of the hill. Obviously, the CCM presents a stark contrast to the rest of the city because the grass is nice and trimmed and it's really clean. It's far bigger than I thought. There are a lot of soccer fields and basketball courts and I've haven't even seen all of it yet. Anyways it's pretty exciting. There are a bunch of Elders going to the same mission I am and they are in the same boat as me. Their missionary portals all say Santa Ana but they don't know about San Salvador West/Belize.  There aren't very many missionaries here right now. It's pretty empty. I haven't seen Tanner yet but I'm sure I will. That's pretty much it for me, just a lot of sitting today. I will have more great experiences for next time and my letter will be more exciting and I'll think of some funny jokes or something.

I love you all and thanks for reading.

-Elder Rowberry