Hermana Lorraine Flake: HOLA FROM CHILE!

Ahhhh!!! I cannot believe I am actually here! Wow. Okay, so this is like the best thing in the world. I seriously love everything here! It is so hard. But so good! I have been so lucky to not have any homesickness. I am in a tri companionship. Hermana Stokes and Eaton are great. I love them so much.

A day in the CCM:

We start our day at 6:45 and get up and go downstairs for personal study, then we eat an interesting breakfast... okay, breakfast is the hardest meal for me here. I do not like the yogurt on top of fruit loops.. so I usually have the bread. Which is so fattening, but so delicious! I cannot stay away. All of the other sisters never eat it... but it is too good to pass up! And then we do some exercise. My companions dont like to run, so I go with the other sisters. I love going all around the streets! We live in the old Swiss embassy. It is called Alcantara and that is what street we live on. Its about 15 minutes from the actually CCM. IT IS SO BEAUTIFUL! I live in a room with 5 other sisters. After we exercise we get ready for the day and then get on some buses and head to the CCM. Then we go to class for 12 hours! Okay.. a little less than that. But pretty much. Its crazy hard, but so great. We have three teachers, hermana ceballos (who is the sweetest girl ever! She got home from her mission in bolivia 18 months ago and she is awesome) and then hermano alvarez (he served in long beach CA and he is great!) and then hermano henriquez (he also served in long beach. He is super hard on us, but it is so helpful) The spanish is coming along. It is super hard... but I know that I will get it eventually.

We are teaching our teachers who pretend to be investigators they had when they were on their missions. We are teaching Clelia, Cristobal, and Rodolfo. It is way hard to teach the lessons in Spanish, but when we follow the Holy Ghost somehow we know what to say. The gift of tongues is real. I dont know anything, but somehow they are always able to learn from our lessons!

Ok, there is just so much to say! I dont know where to start.

I like my companions! They are great. Hermana Stokes and I are best friends. Seriously, we feel like weve known each other for forever. And there are a few people in the CCM who were also at BYU with me. They are familiar, but we werent friends.

I miss you guys so much! But I am so glad that I am serving a mission. Today is Pday so we got 2 hours to go around the city and do what we want. We went to Liders (Chile equivalent to Walmart) and picked some stuff up. And then we went and got empanadas! SO GOOD OH MY GOODNESS! I got an empanada de pino. Okay, Hyrum and Devin were not exaggerating. They are the best. I just want to eat them all day! The food in the CCM is kind of... odd. So many carbs... Seriously, I need to run hardcore every morning so I dont gain too much weight! I just cant express how happy I am here. And how happy I am to be serving the Lord. I miss everyone like crazy. But it is so worth it!

We can only send one picture per email, because the system cant handle it. So Ill try to send a few. Here is one of me eating an empanada this morning! I want another.

We have lunch next and then we get to go to the temple. I cant wait. I really want to feel the spirit and have some peace. My mind is so full of words from two languages (and probably some made up words...) that I can barely think sometimes.

Oh yeah. Sundays are the best here. It is all in english, except for sacrament meeting. So it is way nice. The spirit is so strong. We get to watch a devotional by elder holland that he gave in the mtc in 2011. It was so great. I love him. And we also watched On the Lords Errand, the video about pres. monson. And our relief society lesson was great. It was on hope and the two sisters who taught it were so good! They were super good teachers, they are going to the north mission... I wish they were going to East.

We were on the street eating empanadas and we ran into 6 sisters who are already on their missions. There were 4 from east. we asked them so many questions. there were some scary things they told us... ok, i mainly just freaked out that they didnt have hot water... meh. i like warm showers. But oh well.

Anyway, I think thats all I can write for this week. We don't have much time. Oh and sorry that the punctuation and spelling in this is atrocious. These keyboards and hard to figure out! I love you all! You are in my prayers!

In front of the Santiago Chile LDS Temple