Monday, August 31, 2015

8/31/15 letter

Hi family!
It's been a great couple of weeks. I finished strong at the MTC and am now in Casa Grande, Arizona (about an hour south of Tempe). I got to Tempe on Tuesday at about 9:30 am and we went to the mission home. We basically did a 2 day orientation type thing with all the new missionaries. In this group of about 20 new missionaries, there are 3 who are temporarily reassigned to Tempe while they wait for their visas to Argentina, New Zealand, and Australia. There were also 2 sisters from Temple Square who get transferred somewhere else for 3 months. As far as people originally assigned to Tempe to speak Spanish, it's just myself and Hermana Allred. She went to the Mexico MTC. It sounds like the Mexico MTC had about the same amount of Spanish instruction as the Provo, so I didn't miss out on too much.
She said she got to go to the Mexico City temple twice. Once to go to the open house, and once just to walk around. She said that the missionaries there get to go to the dedication in a couple of weeks.

Anyway, so the mission home was super nice. The beds were super soft and the food was great! We did lots of get to know you stuff with the Mission President. On Wednesday, we got to go to the Mesa Temple and do a session. We only get to go to the temple every quarter, but we can take investigators to the visitors center occasionally. We're taking one on Friday. The Mesa temple was one of the first dedicated temples (around 1930) so it was cool to see all the old architecture inside. I looked in the sealing room where Kelly Briggs (rugby) was sealed or is going to be sealed (I don't remember when her wedding is) and that was really cool.

Thursday morning was transfer meetings. My companion is freaking awesome! Her name isHermana Sedgwick. She's from Connecticut and has been out for 7 months. Her Spanish is really good. We set a goal yesterday that we are going to try to speak Spanish all the time to each other and I think that will be really helpful for me. About 2/3 of our lessons are in Spanish. The other 1/3 are people who speak Spanish and can attend the Spanish branch here, but are more comfortable in English. We have one guy named Lorenzo that is going to be baptized in 2 weeks. He's really awesome. The last missionaries taught him everything, so it's kind of nice to show up here and have a baptism already and not have to do any work for it.

There is one other set of missionaries serving in our branch (Hermanas Allred and Greenhaulgh), so our area is divided in 2. Our area is super big (Like 45 minutes from one end to the other) which means...we have a car with a large allotment of miles. YAY! The bike I got is really nice, but I don't think I'll be using it at all in this area.
Hermana Sedgwick served in Yuma before and she said she was always on her bike. It's really nice to have a car in the summer though. We have great air conditioning and are rarely in places without air conditioning, so the heat hasn't been a problem at all. The only problem is that my tan isn't getting any better since we're always in a car.

Also, we use Facebook in our mission for proselyting purposes. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be cleaning out my old posts and pictures. I don't think I'm allowed to write anything on FB for the first 10 weeks or so though.

My area covers Casa Grande, Coolidge, and Stanfield. There have been super cool lightning storms every night which I love watching while we are driving from place to place.
My new address is
351 N Peart rd #1511
Casa Grande, Az
Our apartment is nicer than I expected, which is very nice.

Also, I'm typing this on my new IPad. It is awesome! All I carry in my backpack is a hairbrush and my IPad and it is super nice. We're allowed to check our emails anytime during the week on our IPad, we just can't respond until Monday.

Hope you're all doing well with an empty house now, Love, Hermana Gubler


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