Aug 30, 2012 - written letter via USPS

Aug. 30, 2012 – written letter via USPS

Dear Family, 

Hello!  How are you all doing?  I hope school is going well.  So we usually can only write our families on P-day (which for me is Tuesday) but the President told us we could write on our first or second day here since our families are probably worried. J Haha I hope not.  

I am having a great time! (I almost hate to admit it. I haven’t been homesick at all).  Heavenly Father has been so nice to me.  I had my first Tagalog Lesson and met my district.  They are great.  My companion is Sister Bloxham from Utah and we share a room with 2 other sisters.  One is from Tonga and the other is from Hawaii.  They are all a lot of fun!  Tagalog was awesome.  It was fun to hear our teacher speak it.  I like how it sounds.  We did learn Mabuti! J But we say “Mabuti poako” for “I’m good.”  “Oo” (“yes”) is pronounced Oh-oh but is sounds so much like uh-oh that I still sometimes do a double take like, “what’s wrong?” haha.   

We then went to a meeting with all the elders and sisters.  We sang “We’ll Bring the World His Truth” but sang “And we are now the Lord’s missionaries…” (yes!).  It made me smile.  We also sang, “Called to Serve” which made me smile as I pictured my whole family singing it so well.  Dare I say, better than the missionaries, just less strong.   

So today we had our second Tagalog lesson and tomorrow we teach an investigator (fave) the first lesson in Tagalog.  Ah!  We are trying to be optimistic about how that will go.  I am excited.  Can’t wait until I can properly announce the guttural tongue sounds of ng (similar to nong) and nga (kind-of munga if your tongue is stuck on the back of your throat  J).  They are really excited about dearelder.com because the letters come the same day.  But not in your handwriting.

I love you all so much!  Hope you are doing well.

Love,

Sister Hamm