Last week in the CCM!

Our District (everyone is from Utah, except me)

My CCM (Peru MTC) stay has been moving right along! This last week, our teachers mixed up all our companionships, just for when we teach lessons and have in-class companionship practice. I can see how it’s helpful to learn how to teach with different companions, but it’s easy to leave an elder behind now because we’re always switching who we’re companions with. As zone leaders, my companion and I interviewed each elder this past week to get to know them and see if they need help with anything, but everything seems to be going well and the new principiantes are really cool.

We had a devotional yesterday given by an area authority. His name is Fabio. Anyways, it was in Spanish, but they had headsets that we could choose to wear to listen to the translation given by the guy in the back. I tried it for a few minutes but decided to just try it without the headphones. I usually take notes during devotionals, but I didn’t expect to write down very much since it was Spanish. However, I wrote down more than any other devotional we’ve had so far. One of my favorite takeaways was that “Listening is more than just hearing.” I thought about how I could apply this to the Holy Ghost. Since then I’ve been trying to think more about how I can apply even the smallest promptings of the Spirit to my lessons and studies. I was reminded of an analogy that Bro. Brown told us in seminary my freshman year that we can’t go about our day with “blinders” on and say at the end of the day that we didn’t see any opportunities to share a message or help anyone. We need to be actively searching for ways to be of service to others.

On December 1st I’ll be officially leaving the CCM and entering the field! I couldn’t be more excited, or nervous either! I don’t know which area I’m going to yet, but it’ll be exciting to actually put into practice all the things I’m learning here.

Elder Smith and Elder Linares

We got a vending machine about a week ago, and you’d never guess, but the Chips Ahoy cookies here are so much better than in the United States. So needless to say I bought out what they had in the vending machine, then today while we were shopping I picked up a bulk package.

A couple of Latino elders also going to Lima West!

Summer is kicking in! not as many cloudy days, and it gets decently hot during the day. still super humid too.

Blue skies and warmer days at the CCM

Do they celebrate thanksgiving here? Nope. The lunch ladies might cook us some turkey and stuffing but it's not an official holiday here. By the way, the area I was talking about last week was a proselyting activity we did for an afternoon.

(In case anyone is wondering about how the mission is organized) It's kind of like an umbrella of authority. In the field, there's your mission boundaries, then a bunch of zones, or areas. Each zone has zone leaders, then there are districts within the zone of smaller groups of missionaries. So the district leaders help their group and report to the zone leader, who collect all the reports and help whoever needs it and report to the mission president. But in the CCM it's just on a smaller scale. Basically we just help all the north american missionaries (our zone).

My District at the Temple