I’ve got less than a week left in the CCM. Next weekend, I’ll be in Argentina. Nothing too exciting happened this week. We’ve just continued practicing teaching in Spanish and learning grammar. My favorite part of the day here is my hour of personal study in the morning. I’ve been reading through the New Testament with commentary from an Institute manual. I’ve read through the New Testament before, but I’ve always just read a certain number of pages each day, so I would often just rush through it. Currently, I’m taking copious notes of things I like from the commentary with no concern for how much I get through each day. This hour of study […]
Mexican Independence Day
Friday was Mexican Independence. It didn’t affect life in the CCM too much, but we had a couple fun things. At dinner, there was a mariachi band playing. Everyone loved it. It made for a fun atmosphere. It’s a tradition for everyone in a town to gather and chant “Vive Mexico!” (Long Live Mexico) while the mayor rings a huge bell. So that evening, all of the missionaries got together and chanted while the CCM president rung a big bell. I didn’t understand the significance of it until the next day when our teacher showed us a video of the President of Mexico ringing a bell in the main governmental plaza and it looked like […]
Still Alive and Learning Spanish
It’s been a long (almost) two weeks. The way our schedule worked out, we had a preparation day on our first Saturday, two days later on Monday, and then no break for 11 days. It wasn’t actually too bad, but we’ve all been looking foward to today and opportunity to talk to our families. My best friend from West Point, Caleb Watson, got here last week. Our schedules are totally different, but somehow we still bump into each other at least once a day. I live in a house with Sam Furhriman, whose dad is the bishop of the ward at West Point. We all did our mission preparation class together, so it’s fun to […]
The First Week
Tuesday morning I woke up at 3am to head to the airport with my parents. I then had a flight to Salt Lake, where ~85 missionaries were on my flight to Mexico City. We then meet up with a bunch of other missionaries from the East Coast and had an hour-long bus ride through Mexico City. When we arrived to the Centro de Capacitación de Misional, The CCM, we had some orientation meetings, dinner, and got checked into our houses. The CCM used to be an American boarding school run by the church, but when the age requirement to be a missionary was lowered in 2013(?), They turned it into another Missionary Training Center. The […]
Online MTC
This week was my first week of missionary training. Since Covid, the first week has been online at home for everyone because the Church decided it helped missionaries assimilate better than just throwing them into the deep end. Every morning at 9:00 I had a 3-hour long Gospel Study class. This would be followed by an hour-long workshop for everyone doing the online MTC, with topics like emotional resilience, The Plan of Salvation, and becoming lifelong disciples of Jesus Christ. The workshops would end at 1, so I would eat a late lunch, take a short nap, and then play a card game or bake with my mom until my 4:30 language class. This 4-hour […]