Elder Emerson Hammer

Well this week I have been told that I suffer from an addiction! Our teachers told us that we are all addicted to speaking English! We need to break the habit, just like an alcoholic would break the habit of drinking. (Haha!) We have the best teachers ever!!! I love them all so much! They are all my heroes! This week has been a week full of emotions actually. We had a new district come in on Wednesday. They are a good batch of kids! It was a pretty depressing day on Tuesday. Elder Moser had to have heart surgery and was released to go home. It was very sad. It was hard on a lot of us to see him go. He wanted to stay but his body wouldn't let him. He was my zone leader before me. He is a very great missionary. He has been in the MTC for 11 weeks!! That is hard to handle! He was heading to Mexico, Cancun; his district was just waiting for their visas. It was hard to see him leave. The day that he had his surgery his district received their visas. We knew that the Lord had a hand in his district staying and extra 2 weeks here. If he would have had his heart problems in Mexico, that wouldn't have been good. But we had an up this week with the new district coming in. There is an Elder in the new District that came in and Elder Richens actually was in the MTC a year ago and had some stomach virus or something! He is back now and healthy and he is still going to the same mission he was called to go before and everything! So that lifted our spirits about Elder Moser, and that he could still go to Mexico when he gets better! His surgery went well and is recovering now, so hopefully he will be back soon! Elder Moser was a good friend of mine.

It is very fun, yet sometimes tiring being Zone Leaders. We are like the parents of the Zone, and we have 55 Elders in our Zone currently. When new missionaries come in or sometimes Elders that have been here for a while they get a bit sensitive and its weird, but apparently us men have emotional feelings too, so they come talk to us and we try our best to help all of the Elders feel loved and welcome at the MTC! But I love my Zone, we are all very close and we get along for the most part pretty well. It’s Elder Galati's Birthday in like a week or so, so he's been getting presents and all. He gets the funniest stuff! Someone sent him a Lego set, so we played last night during free time and had Lego men wars!! HAHA! It was pretty fun. We built some awesome dudes! I love all of the Elders here! Some of the Elders here are catching on to the Spirit of the Zone! Some Elders now started to do Meditation night!(HAHA) So on Fridays we bring our towels and sit on them in Elder Wymans room, we cross our legs and sit indian style on our blankets. We all make nature sounds, do breathing sounds, and Elder Wyman walks around with a mist bottle and says "Feel the ocean mist on your face!) HAHA! It’s hilarious! Every now and then some new Elders join us and think that we are being serious and they like think we are legitament, but we laugh half way through the ceremony cuz someone will toot in the middle of silent breathing time!! HAHA. We might be missionaries, but we still are boys and a good little toot will still crack us all up in the midst of silence!

Thank you for everybody’s delightfulness this week! I got a letter from Uncle Curt, he is awesome, and Cambria. They are sweet hearts! I love getting letters! Grandma Brennan is scoring some points with me, she sent me the best food ever on Monday!! I don't know what it was but it was like a cookie, brownie thing of heaven!! I ate that in like 2 seconds! It was delightful, and Aunt Diane represented this week and hooked me up with a box of goodies too! Gotta love the relatives!! Thank you mucho, mucho, mucho!! And family, I loved the Napkin Poetry! Very Clever, loved it all and yes I shared with my Poetry crew. Gotta love the napkin poetry, the winner of the napkin poetry will have to be tookies, she wins for having the best "I miss you poem!" If you need any tips for writing poetry, tookies understands poetry from the soul, and she makes it Napkin poetry! But all poems were good nonetheless, HAHA! I loved them all! You are all champions!! (BIEN HECHO) Bien Hecho is my new word I say! Since I now am a Spanish little boy I say words and Spanish, Bien hecho meaning "good acts" So I just say that to everyone!

This week we have a special program prepared for thanksgiving! We get like a 1 1/2 lunch and breakfast actually, and we have an apostle of some sort doing a fireside that night! We have some type of service project, I don't know exactly what it is but we will be serving. We basically have Thanksgiving off for studying, so that will be nice to have our minds relax un poco! We will be playing a Paper football tournament in our Zone that day! It will be wonderful I'm sure!

Parents, just to give you the heads up, I should be giving you a call later on this week or early next week. President Watkins says that our Visas are looking good and should be receiving travel plans sometime this week or early next week. We should be getting them Thursday but since its Thanksgiving, we don't know when we will be getting them! Hurray! So in like 2 weeks I should be in COLOMBIA! When we get our travel plans we are allowed to call home! I will probably call dads cell, just cuz he always answers and always has his phone on him. We only get 5 minutes to just say "Well, I'm heading to Colombia, see call you for Christmas." But we are all excited to go to Colombia! I am really doing better in my Spanish. I can read Predicad El Evangelio with hardly any problems, and I can read EL Libro De Mormon decently, its a bit harder just cuz it has the vosotros form and is older Spanish with harder words. I can read Spanish great .I feel I speak it decently, I can usually get my point across in a choppy way, and listening to Spanish is another story. I can pick out 1 out of 5 words in a sentence! It’s really ridiculous! But I am working super hard to learn as much as I can before I leave. There are 32 other Elders besides me in my district heading to Colombia and 7 that are going to Argentina. Elder Fuqua, and Elder Smith and I are going to Colombia; we are a good bunch of kids! So all is well, I love you all! The church is true and the work is going forward.