Joy's 5th week letter!    Dated  July 5, 2016

Hey this week came and went and I don't know how, but I'm cool with that. The MTC has been great and all and I do appreciate that I don't have to live off of oatmeal and rice quite yet, but I also think I have a little cabin fever.  I think this is the last email from the MTC because next p-day I will be traveling to El Salvador.

Like I said, this week was so fast I don't even know what happened.  I do know, however, that I, for the first time in my life was excited for Fast Sunday.  Learning a language is pretty hard and even though I know that I could not have learned half as much Spanish without this experience, I still need help, so when Fast Sunday came, I definitely had purpose. I felt the spirit so strong all through Fast and Testimony Meeting and I really wanted to share my testimony but there was a line of 30 Latinos. It was the best meeting ever though!

One of the Latinos calls me Rapunzel because of my blonde hair (even though it is shoulder-length) that is usually in a braid since there is no time to actually do my hair in the morning.  When he called me that I could not figure out what he was saying to me so I just smiled and nodded.  I think I will have to do that a lot for a couple of months.  I am praying real hard for my trainer.  Bless her.

The Fourth of July here was great.  All the girls in our suite wore our red white and blue.  We looked so cute and some of the workers here wished us a happy Dia de Independencia.   We ate watermelon and they made a flag out of cupcakes decorated with red white and blue.  As I was brushing my teeth last night I heard some pops out the window so I ran in to our room, flew open the curtains and in the air there were big fireworks just a street over. It was like a present on Christmas day! They were beautiful. I love fireworks so stinking bad! It made me so happy!

The girls are all trying to put together an intermediate hymn for our last Sunday and if we can ever end up making it sound alright we will sing "Come Thou Fount". I love that song.  It is so pretty. It gets stuck in my head all the time though.

So for laundry we have a set schedule and a set machine that we have to use when we wash our clothes. But this week our machine was  out of service so we asked one of the workers what we should do and she said to use the one next to ours. So we popped our whites in and thought nothing more of it.  But when we came back we looked into the machine and there were clothes but they were not ours.  We went to every machine and none of them had our clothes.  We thought it was so weird because why would anyone steal our whites? As we were running around looking for our clothes, probably looking similar to chickens with the heads cut off, Hermano Duban, the guy in charge of maintenance came in and asked us if we were missing our clothes. We said yes, so he opened the closet and pulled out a basket with our clothes, which were now with a stiff crusty feel having been taken wet from the washer and left to sit in a heap to dry. He got mad at us for not following the schedule so we explained what had happened and how the lady had told us to use the other machine.  His heart softened a little, but it was still a very stressful moment in our lives.

I know that this is the gospel of Jesus Christ.  This is His church.  The Book of Mormon is the word of God and is truly another testament of Jesus Christ and that Joseph Smith was called of God to restore His gospel on the earth. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Love you all! I hope that everyone is having an awesome summer.   Everyone needs to be safe okay?

Love, Hermana  Ashton