Melissa's First Letter !!!

Woo Hoo! I finally get to e-mail my family! I have about 25 minutes to write this e-mail. We get thirty minutes each monday to e-mail. Anyone can e-mail me and I can print them out and read them later so they don't take up time for my e-mail writing. As you probably have figured out, my P-day is monday, hence, me writing this e-mail. We just got back from the temple. We go to the 7am session so we have to be at the temple at 6:30. It was good to be able to go there this morning. These last couple days at the MTC have been crazy! The first day was so long! We got in and they had us drop our stuff off at our rooms and then brought us to our classroom. We kinda did some getting to know you stuff with our district. We started out with 7 elders and 4 hermanas but 1 elder and 2 hermanas went to the advanced spanish district. My comp was one that was moved up so Hna Sanders and I ended up together. We get along really well. She is a lot like me and we laugh a lot. I am so happy that I have such a cool comp. The only sad thing is that she is leaving in 3 weeks to go to the MTC in Peru :( After that I will be a "solo" sister because I will be the only sister in my district. Once that happens I'll have a comp but she won't be in my district and probably not in my zone. I just do things like laundry and gym with her. The rest of the time I always have to be with two elders. It will be interesting to see how that goes. So I don't even remember much of wednesday, it seems so long ago. I didn't sleep that night, suprise. Thursday we learned how to pray in spanish. I am getting ok at it and when I pray I say as much as I can in spanish but do part of it in english too. We met our branch presidency on Thursday and they are aweomse! They love the hermanas! They told us that if the elders get our of hand that we can pull our "sister" card and let them have it. Ha ha, no wonder so many elders don't like sisters. We get treated very good here. The elders stand whenever we walk in a room and whenever we sit down at the table to eat and they always take our trays for us which is way nice. Friday was a very difficult day for me. They kinda just shove spanish down our throats without teaching us things like how to pronounce words and simple words like, the, it, he, she, etc. It has been very hard for my comp and I because neither of us took any spanish. All the elders have had spanish and they are WAY more advanced than us. We try not to compare ourselves but it gets pretty difficult when we can't understand anything! We both broke down on friday because we feel SO overwhelmed with things we have to do. It was such a hard day and night and deff the longest day so far. Saturday was better. I prayed so hard that I would feel some sort of comfort on satruday and try not to get overwhelmed. Saturday the pressure of all I needed to learn was still there but I was able to feel calm about it. It reminded me of the scriptures when Christ says he will make our burdens lighter, even though they don't get taken away. That scripture rang true to me on Saturday. Sunday was awesome. We get to listen to music and the spoken word and then have relief society. Sister Matsumori taught relief society. Sacrament meeting is about 75% in spanish with one talk being in english. We had a "temple walk" where we got to walk around the temple, take pics, etc. It was fun and I saw some people I know. The fireside sunday night was by a branch president for the MTC. He talked about proof that the Book of Mormon is true. It reminded me a lot of Brian, he would love it. I'm going to try to write him about it but it was kinda confusing stuff so we'll see how well I remember. All in all I am doing good. I now understand why a mission is so hard. It is hard not to be envious of the missionaries that are going english speaking, a lot of the time I wish I was because the spanish is SO difficult for me. But I'm spanish for a reason so it will all work out. I miss you so much! As cheesy as this sounds I look at a picture of my family to give me strength when I feel like breaking down. It helps a lot. The spirit is so strong here and it's a very unique place. I like it more and more as the days go on. Please let people know they can e-mail me here! Also, dearelder is the best thing in the world!!!!! It is so cool getting the letters that fast! And thank you to everyone who has written me and sent me stuff. I haven't gone a day without mail yet :) I can't wait to hear from you!
Love, Hermana Passantino