Letter 1

Hola Familia,Before I start I want to say that I want to hear all about Girls camp from Savannah and Summer, I wanna hear about how Steven is doing, I wanna hear from Seth about Superactivity, and about Savannah and Seth´s experience at EFY when they get back of course!Today, Thursday is my Pday. We have 30 minutes to type as fast as possible on a spanish keyboard so Im sorry if I dont get a whole lot written. This week as gone by pretty slow just because its hard to get into the rhythm of things here. There are about 60 elders here and they keep it at a steady number like that. Umm... its about half and half, Latinos and Northamericans. It turns out i will be here 9 weeks bc a few latin missionaries werent able to get there passports in time so their report date had been delayed. one of them would have been my companion. Umm... so 9 weeks but president said that its better that way for a north american so they can be totally assimilated before they jump into the real world. So I am totally cool with it. I have been called as the District Leader for my district. The district consists of me, and my companion Elder Carter; then Elder Papenfuss, Elder Pratt, Elder Griffiths, and Elder Fry (yes Brother larsen that is THE Elder Fry) hahaSo I am pretty happy with that. Umm... we have classes for most of the day, but we have a time of Preparation for lessons and Physical Activity amidst all of it. We have learned to pray and testify and teach almost the complete first lesson in Spanish already! now we just need to learn better ways to teach for understanding. The teachers are awesome and they are all native and live in the Argentine area. My teachers have both been to Uruguay so they have told us all about the areas and stuff... umm.. its fun we get to teach our teachers english while they teach us spanish. I am not the only one with a few years of spanish, but i am the only one that retained most if not all of it. My companion took 5 years of French and so Spanish is coming well for him. But im kinda like the translator for the group, and thats cool too!Now on to the food... We eat really well here.(not as well as the Provo MTC) They have full meals for breakfast lunch and dinner. I have had spinach for breakfast lunch and dinner(they love to use spinach in everything, sauces, cassorole, you name it!) I have had cow tongue which is great until someone talks about us really eating tongue and recognizing the tongue similarities to our own tonge... then the gag reflexes come hahaha, we have had variations of everything and whale fin! whale fin is not bad at all... I still have some food from the airport so ill eat that sometimes too.Umm... We are going proselyting on Saturday! it is the first time since early june that they are letting missionaries out because of the swine flu scare all over the world... we only get to go out for two hours but that should be good enough for the first time. I am pretty excited but a little nervous.I have kinda been homesick but mostly for my little brothers and sisters who add so much to my day! The only real company we have is ourselves, our companion, and our latino roomates who are hilarious! its easy to communicate with them bc they know alot of american things but they are always singing and ansking us if we know the songs... etc.. Elder Lopez and Elder Camposano are awesome! they are helping us so much with our conversational spanish. Well I am almost out of time, Im going to try sending a letter home to see how fast the system down here is. so expect that sometime soon haha... umm I love you all, thank you so much for your love and support to meThank you for forwarding my emails to my other family and friends. Can you send a copy to Jake possibly? thanks...Miss you all, but I am happy to be preparing to serve the Lord!Love you,Elder Stapley