The Very First letter

Ocotber 22nd  2013  First letter from the MTC

Thanks for the letters this week mom and everyone! It´s been good to hear from everyone. P.S. Ethan´s letter came a couple days ago. They only gave us like 2 seconds to write a letter the first night and I did, but promptly forgot to send it the next day. Sorry! Oh and thanks for the pictures of the cats dad. They´re always so funny. It´s weird that they´re being so nice to everyone all of a sudden. My companions name is Elder Cowley. He´s from Salt Lake. We get along pretty well for the most part and we laugh quite a bit.    He´s really strong and I´m really small so we make kind of a funny companionship. He keeps making me do pushups and stuff which is probably a good thing. We´re in the West Campus MTC so we don´t get to go to the main campus very much. We did get to go to a devotional there on Sunday though that was really good. It helped me to realize that I´m not the only one here that might be having a tough time adjusting. Almost every missionary goes through it. We´re living in an apartment with 4 other Elders. We are all going to the same mission. It´s just us six in our district but they´re all great guys and we have a ton of fun together. I saw sister Robison i.e. the temple girl on the bus the first day but she isn´t in our zone or district but I talked to her yesterday when some of us went to Salt Lake to get our visa pictures and she seemed nice. When we went to Salt Lake I went with another Elder from our district because we were the only two from our district that could go at this time. His name is Elder Kelson. He is hilarious. He´s very very similar to Scott which is pretty cool.

The MTC is weird. I kinda hated it the first couple days but I´m starting to get more used to it and to feel the spirit more and more. The spirit is very strong here. Elder Cowley and I both had a good experience in recognizing the spirit when we were practicing teaching with one of our teachers. The language is kinda hard for all of us but we are all trying to improve and rely on the spirit to help us learn as much as we can. It feels like we´ve already been here for weeks. We´ve had to teach 3 lessons in Spanish to a Spanish speaking investigator. She is a very good actor and it is like a real lesson. I´ve learned that if we have love for our investigators and if we can invite the spirit that we can still have a decent lesson even if we can hardly speak the language. We all really like to talk so it makes studying hard sometimes. Ethan was right about the food here. It is definitely not stuff your face good. We have had a couple of good meals though. It´s probably a lot better than some of the things that we will be eating in Mexico though. I´m glad to hear that everyone is doing well. Oh and thank you for the letters. Getting letters is gold. It can make the day a lot better. So thanks! Thanks for all of your love and all of your advice. I love you all and hope to hear from you soon!

Elder Schow

P.S. Mom or Madeline could you try to get me Kyle´s email adress_ He sent me a letter this week and I´ll probably send a paper letter back but I would like to have it for the future if possible. Oh and I didn´t really get a chance to take many pictures this week so I will send some as soon as possible. Oh and I don´t know where the question mark is on a Spanish Keyboard so question marks are _ until further notice haha.