July 29, 2016 One more week until I leave for Curitiba!!!

Note from Emily's Mom : apologies for the garbled July 22 post if you received a garbled post. It was due to the third picture being put into the post incorrectly. It has been corrected if you want to look on the blog. :)

This week was pretty similar to last week. In fact most of the days are pretty similar and they tend to blend together. The weeks are going by so quickly! I can´t believe I only have one more week in the MTC until I leave to go to Curitiba!!! I am sooo EXCITED!!! I am excited that I will be teaching real people and I will be able to help real people! I am a little nervous about Portuguese but I know eventually it will come! I just need to be patient :) Also I am excited that I won´t be sitting in a classroom for 11 hours a day. 

Anyway, this week I don´t have a ton of new things to say but it was a good week nonetheless.

On Sundays we have personal study from 7:30-8:30 and we can use that time to prepare a 5 minute talk. Then right after we have sacrament meeting with our zone (which is about 30 Americans). After the announcements and the sacrament they announce who will be giving talks. I got called on to give a talk and it was actually really fun! It was all in Portuguese and I felt the spirit so strongly when I testified of the truth of the Gospel in Portuguese.

My favorite Sister, Sister Boldrin left for her mission on Tuesday. Muito Triste! She was our companion for divisao (Splits) and it was so fun to teach with her and learn from her! 

One of the days we had a substitute teacher come in and say Irmao Fatori wasn't going to be here today which also means we wont be teaching Andre and instead we will be teaching his friend. ``okay he will be waiting for you downstairs in three minutes!``... Sister Gimm and I grabbed our scriptures and then went down to teach him. We taught about how God is our loving Heavenly Father, the gospel blesses families, the Book of Mormon and how we can learn about the truth of the gospel through feelings in our heart and thoughts in our mind through the Holy Ghost. It went pretty well! It is amazing how we can have no idea what we are going to say but as long as we have the Holy Ghost the lesson will be okay. Also the most important thing is to focus on teaching the person and not just teaching a lesson. 

When he came back the teacher was asking us where we were from and I said Texas and he said ``Texas? pecan pie... Texas? what is pecan pie... Texas, Texas, Pecan Pie..`` for about two minutes. I had now idea what was happening. But anyways apparently that is the first thing he thought of when I said Texas. Other people have said ``oh you are from Texas! Did you have horses?``, and ``Oh Texas! You are a Cowboy!!!``

Yesterday (Thursday) our district did an English fast! If we said a word in English we had to put a mark on the board and then for every mark we had to do 10 pushups and the Elders had to do 30 pushups. I only got 6 marks!! But that meant I had to do 60 pushups during actividades fisica. It was pretty challenging but it was actually pretty fun. It was a good challenge especially because in 10 days I will be speaking only Portuguese with my Brazilian companion. 

I love you guys so much!!! 

-Sister Hancock

(I would love to hear how your lives are going! You can send me an email at emily.hancock@myldsmail.net)