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.