God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. 1 John 4:16

Hola Familia y Amigos!!! como estan?! Que pasa?!!?

Life here at the CCM is as crazy and great as ever!! we are so busy every single day that it’s crazy!! We have 16 hour days and sometimes when i wake up in the morning i feel like i haven’t even slept and then we get back to work!!! So last week we had a special guest speaker!! A member of the 70 and his wife came to speak to us and it was an awesome talk!!!! He was so super cool!!! Tonight we get to listen to another one!! wahoo!!! I’m so excited!! They bring the spirit like none other!!! so yah, I love being here!!!! Last Tuesday was when we had the 70 come and then after that, the week flew by!!! Spanish here and spanish there, everywhere i turn there are spanish speakers!!! We got some new missionaries last week and we only got two new Hermana nortes (north Americans) but they’re both super cool!!! I feel like the world is so small because everyone somewhere knows someone else in the church!!! haha!!! So today when we were coming back from the temple trip at 6:20 a.m., we passed some "real" missionaries!!! haha!!! They were out here for the temple as well from the Guatemala Este mission and i met an elder named elder Hoffman and he has cousins in Layton and guess what! i know them!! He’s cousins with the Hootans in our stake and i was like no way!! she was my teacher in elementary!!! haha!! it was super funny!!! also, for the second week Presidente and Hermana Cox ran our temple session so that was pretty boss!!! i super love them!!! haha!! presidente cox it the super coolest!! He gives us the best talks ever and when he speaks, he reminds me of the one time when President Monson told his story about him and his brothers starting the fire!! His eyes get all huge and he has the biggest expressions and pulls the funniest faces in the middle of his talk and does things to keep us awake in the middle of the devotional!!! haha!! The other day he and his wife were speaking to us and they were talking on the iron rod and Hermana cox is sitting there swinging this broom pole at us and presidente cox was sitting there dodging it and freaking out that she was going to hit someone and it was hilarious!! He would sit in his chair and be like falling asleep\ looking super bored when she would use it to point out over us and he'd jerk back like she was going to wack him and his eyes would get all huge and it was the best!!! But they’re super spiritual too so that’s a plus!!!! so I’ve been doing those workouts that Linley gave me that are boss and I've been making a few sisters do them with me and since we only have like one hour a day to workout.., we do the workouts, and then sit the whole entire day so by the end of the day your cramping so hard because you've just been sitting and its the funniest thing to see them all limp around from their cramped muscles!! haha!!! el luchar es real!!! or the struggle is real!! haha!!! but i love these sisters and am really gonna miss them when we all head off to our different missons!!! It sounds like everyone is doing great at home and i super love getting all the emails!! I’m sorry if my replies aren't all that long because i really don’t have much time so I hope you don't feel like I’m not replying!! I’m trying!! time is limited! My district is a ton of fun!!! We have battles with flash cards trying to memorize and I’m pretty sure we break out in one hymn or another about every 20 minutes in class!! !ha!! but it’s a struggle because we either don’t know the english words, cant pronounce the spanish words, or stay on key ever—so its soooo dang funny!! haha!! i love it!!! i think there’s a total of 3 out of 12 of us in there that can hold a key but they all try so hard that you can’t help loving when we sing!! We found out this week that elder smith is color blind so whenever someone gets something new from the store or from home, they’re sure to ask elder smith what color he sees—funny! highlight of the week... I learned how to say PLATYPUS in Spanish!! heck ya!!! haha!! its pretty long but i like use it all the time and since i brought my mini platypus (stephen junior) or sj, all the latinas ( who taught me how to say it) love to hold him and teach me new words for Disney all of which i forget a mere 10 seconds later but its lots of fun!! One of the Latinas has phineas and ferb keychains and they were singing the song in spanish and it was so weird and funny!! i love them!!! so ya, you say platypus like - Hornitorrinco!!! boo ya! I am still a bit (like really bad) bad at the language but i try and all the Latinos laugh super hard when i accidentally say I’m pregnant when trying to say embarrassed or things like that! But they’re all way nice and they ask me to translate their testimonies to English and I’m all proud when i know English and can do that because i actually know something for once!! haha!! It’s the best!! Thanks for all of the love and support!! i love you all!!!! Yo se esta iglesia es verdadero! yo se que presidente Thomas S. Monson es un verdad propheta de Dios y recebir mandamientos donde Dios por la todo iglesia! yo se que Jose smith fue un propheta de Dios y recibir el libro do mormon y translated el libro por todos las personas en el mundo!!! Yo se que mi redemer vida y es el Hijo de Dios!!! Yo se esta iglesia es verdadero!!!! Yo amor esta evangelio mucho!!! i am so grateful for the atonement of christ and all he does for me and each and everyone of his childern!!! i know he lives!!! Yo dice esta cosas en el nombre de Jesucristo, Amen. 

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Love Hermana Josie Morris

Train your mind to see the positive in every situation!

Hola mi familia y mi amigos!!! que pasa?!?

These keyboards they have are throwing me off pretty hard core cause they are different so i don’t know how to add punctuation and i don’t really want to try all that hard with the little time i have.. also.. the computer is set to Spanish so it says every single word i type is mis-spelled so i don’t really know what to do about that so i guess I’ll just keep typing and hope that mom corrects it before the blog!!! ha!! :) thanks mom!!!

So this week flew by, crawled by and was super awesome!!!! We have been doing a ton of Spanish like always!!! siempre siempre siempre (always, always, always) which is every single teachers life motto i think! but its pretty chill!!!!! so I’m thinking in spanglish so i apologize if none of my sentences are making any sense!!! haha!!!! so i flippin love sundays!! They’re in english!! yay!! and we have the coolest flippin meetings!!!!! so luckily i didn’t get called up to speak in our Spanish sacrament meeting.... they randomly call you out on the spot so you never have a heads up as if you were doing it in our future wards where we get no warning... however, i think the bishop might be nice enough to tell you before the meeting so it was pretty great i didn’t have to give my talk because i wrote it in English and then translated it word by word with the dictionary to Spanish...and although i may have learned a ton of new words (which i forgot all of them already.....oops) none of it made sense because with Spanish you do not translate it straight over to English so it was all over the place and i had one of the nice Spanish speakers read over it for me to make a few corrections and she was like... uhh.... where do i even start?? Haha—lol!!!

We’re supposed to prepare a lesson for district meeting but we completely spaced it this week so of course when we get in there we’re called up to go first!!!  So once again on the spot teaching!!!! But, lucky for us this one was in english so we said a prayer in our hearts and got up and started speaking and teaching and the spirit was so dang strong it ended up being 20 minutes long and it was incredible!!!! I’m so glad the spirit was with me while i was teaching because it felt like i just opened my mouth and the words came out!!

I read some really cool things in preach my gospel this week that was like, don’t try to think of a response while someone is answering your question, but listen to them and the spirit will fill your mouth... so i tried really hard not to come up with an answer before and incorporate what they said into my answer and it was really great!!! Loved it!! and i loooove so much feeling the spirit every single day!! the spirit is my BEST FRIEND!!!  And when I’m feeling down, i cuddle with my platypus stephen and say a prayer and i calm right down which is great!!  The book of Mormon is THE BEST!!!!! i don’t know how i kind of didn’t realize this to the fullest extent i could have before but I’ve made a goal to finish it while in the CCM and its been such a blessing!!! It’s so dang cool that you can literally apply every single scripture to your own life!! what a blessing!!! wow!!!!! you guys neeeeeed to read it with a sincere heart having real intent and the truth of it will be manifested to you!!! It is actually my second best friend right after the spirit and i love it so much!!!

The sisters here are so dang great!!! However, tons of them left this morning because they were either two week Latinos or the six week nortes (North Americans) so their time was up here and it was way sad to see them go!!!!  i basically have learned spanish from them since i got here and they have so much patience with all of us hooligans that can’t even speak a bit of their language!! They’re nice and sweet and sincere with everything!!! Talking with them.. (well at least when the spirit is there so we can understand each other because if not.. we just sit across from each other and stare at each other while I’m trying to do charades in english and trying to explain it using a billion different spanish words that none of us know!! ha!! life is great!!)

When we really get talking, it’s incredible what these girls have sacrificed to be out here!!!!! tons of them are the ONLY member in their family and their families don’t support their decision for coming out here!!! Tons of them don’t have the money to afford a mission and can barely be out here with the Church funding and all of them are so grateful to be out regardless of the support back home, the money they have, the struggles they go through or the difficulties at home!! yes!!! at home!! like one sister got here, and then four days into her mission, her dad killed her mom and then himself, leaving her nothing, like absolutely nothing to return to and yet here she is!!! Ahh so incredible and my testimony grows each and every time i talk to them!!! i am so blessed to have such incredible family and friends writing me and showing me support!! They say- why do we need 1 hour of writing time?... and, i am like -do you have enough time to write everyone? and they say, “I only have to send one email to my mom and she never replies” how sad is that?! so i gave them my email and i promised that i would write them because that is so sad!!!

We take sooo much for granted in the USA. They are having a hard time even having clean water down here and we get upset if we only have 3 hours on the tv, wii or computer or if the wifi is acting up!!! How blessed we are!!! We went on another temple trip today and it was incredible as always but we also took a trip to the mall down the street and it’s just sad to see the poverty these people are living in… yet, inspiring that they are still so happy!! every single person we pass, they are so happy to see us and they are so dang nice!!! haha! even though i struggle talking with them, they are so patient with all of us and it’s so great to talk with them!!! and the little kids are all so skinny!!! It’s SAD!!! so i super super feel grateful for everything i have!!!!  We went to the mall and they have lots of American food and it was a pretty good sight to see!!! also since we eat so many beans in the CCM, it’s nice to see good food!! still, we aren’t allowed to have food in the CCM so we could only buy what we could eat there!! We saw a pizza hut today that sounded good, but i probably will get some later on!! I think whitey (the white car that was my age with over 300,000 miles on it) would be a pretty nice car down here!! So many of the cars are beat up and have huge chunks missing out of them and not many of them have any lights in them!!! ha!! its super weird!!

Guatemala is so dang humid!! It’s either pouring like insanely or its super hot!! We go outside to play sports, and even though i have sports at night when the sun is down, i still work up a pretty good sweat from everything that I’m doing!!! its crazy!! i swear i didn’t sweat this much in the US... oh wait... i didn’t!!  We watch some of the awesome devotionals that are given in the Provo MTC and those are all so great, and we also watch a bunch of the Mormon movies and those are awesome!!! The spirit is so unreal!!! i cant even believe it!!! ah!!! its so awesome to feel the spirit here!!! We watched the Joseph Smith movie the other day and i flippin loved that!!! the spirit was unreal the whole time that we were in that room!!! i know that we've watched all of these movies before in the past, but it seems way different to watch them as a missionary... i think the main reason is that i come in with a better attitude…like before my mission when my mom would come up with the next movie for us to watch.. i was like great.. we have to sit here and watch this when i could be doing so much more with my life, but now, i go in like ahhh!! what a treat to watch a movie!! I’m so excited—that’s where the difference comes in— its so dang awesome to go in with the right mind set!! i can’t believe how cool they are!!! ah!!  The prophet Joseph Smith is so incredible and the inspiration he brings is the bomb diggidy!!! ah!! i love this prophet—and all the prophets and apostles!! they are so incredible!!! each one of them!! they are the bomb!!! Hermana Stoddard and Hermana McGee and Dosela and Chira say hi! i flippin love these girls!! i told them kayla’s lame farmer jokes and they love them and i get in trouble for telling jokes in English, but none of them understand!!  They are not funny!!!! but i don’t know how to translate farmer.

 Sadly my time is up but lastly, i love you all so much and I’m grateful for all of my many blessings!! Thanks for the love and support!!!! Te Amo

Love,

Hermana Josie Morris

Be strong and of a good courage Joshua 1:9

Que Pasa?!

 Life here at the CCM is super great!!! haha!!! let me just start off by saying that I apologize for the bad spelling but I’ve been noticing that as I have been writing in my journal that i have been  switching  back and forth between Spanish and English so it’s a whole bunch of spanglish and none of it makes sense and so when i try to write in english some spanish is coming out and the spelling is awful!! ha! but the CCM is lots of fun! it kind of feels like we’re in a prison because we’re locked in here and we have about 15 guards patrolling the outside of it at all times and the two times we’ve been let out to take a trip to the temple (one the other day for a picture at the temple and one this morning for a temple session) we had guards following us the whole way over and back! i kind of just want someone to try to do something to us so we'd see what they would do but it hasn’t happened yet!!  

Wow! i never thought I’d look forward so much to writing an email!  But this feels like it’s been a long time coming because this last week has felt like an eternity and now that i look back it flew by!!! When we first arrived at the Guatemala airport we heard Taylor swift, which was weird because it was in English, but apparently they listen to the same music here as we do in America!!!  Then we went through customs, grabbed our bags and headed out to the street to wait for our buses!  I flew out of the salt lake city airport with 11 other elders and no sisters but met up with 8 other sisters once we reached the L.A. airport! There we had around 50 missionaries and our plane for that trip was pretty late because it was slow getting in from a previous trip!  The landing in L.A. was crazy!! i haven’t flown much but even i could tell that it was a pretty bumpy trip.  The Guatemala plane flight felt like forever!! The whole time on the screens all over the plane, the flight said that we were getting farther and farther away from our destination because it for some reason thought we were headed to china so we didn’t know how much longer we had and it made it feel even longer!! Everything was in Spanish and the slc flight i was sitting by Spanish ladies who had no clue what i was trying to say so i eventually gave up, and then on my next flight i sat by elder Garry and elder Sabey and we didn’t know how to fill out the customs forms because they were all in spanish so we had no clue what we were doing!! It was the best!! My companions and i (well, my roommates and my comp) were trying to figure out how to say the struggle is real and when we looked it up in the dictionary it said the word for struggle is luchar so we went around saying el luchar es real and all the Latinos were giving us the weirdest looks so we asked our teacher what it meant and apparently it means that the fight is real!! haha! which i guess applies a little bit but whatever!!

We arrived at the airport and waiting out on the streets and this guate comes up and starts shining all the elders shoes so they ask him how much and he just says tip if you like so they start giving him like 3 or 4 $ and one of the elders had 30 cuatqseltez from him grandma so he gave those to him and then the guy picking us up was like what are you doing?  If you gave him a quarter you would be generous! haha! so basically we have no concept of money down here! Every American dollar gets you 7.55 dollars down here! it was pretty funny!! 

We rode on a bus all the way to the CCM and they were old school buses and can i just say the guates are insane!! their driving is ridiculous!! They have alto signs everywhere- which means stop and the guates don’t even slow for them!!!  They just  speed on through like they’re not even there! So a road will be merging and you just gun it and force the people behind you and the whole line behind them to slam on their brakes or to hit you!!!   You swerve lanes whenever you want without warning so they would just cut you off with about an inch to spare and almost ram you to get in front!  Also they love to honk.  It will be a stand still and the whole line of them are laying out on the horns!!

We saw a dominos, McDonalds, and a Wendys on our way in! ha! but i hear their sandwiches are like 10$... maybe guate money.  so yeah, we get to the CCM which is just on the side of the street and there’s a three way road going past it and three going the other way so we’re in the far right lane and our driver swerves left and cuts off all the cars and backs in the gate and we’re all thinking we are going to die as everyone is getting as close as possible to not hitting us and honking like hooligans!!  So we get inside and everything is in spanish!  All the workers talk in spanish! the teachers!! NO english ever!! so i felt crazy lost the first couple of days because they gave us a schedule.. in spanish! what the pansies!!  So we didn’t know where to go ever!!! the temple is super pretty and we can see it outside our window and the CCM is in the middle of a block that likes to party! Every night there are loud noises and music coming from this building a bit away and our teachers joke that it’s the great and spacious building!! ha! It’s funny because sometimes we show up in the wrong place or we don’t show up because we thought we were supposed to be somewhere else but we don’t know and so they get all upset and we still don’t know what they’re saying !  One of the ups to not knowing the language!! 

Every single prayer we are supposed to ask for the gift of tongues so i would appreciate it if you guys would also mention that in your prayers!  We learned how to pray in Spanish and now they all have to be in Spanish!! As well as songs, scriptures, and meal conversations!!  Its super funny because we'll try to talk to the latinos and they have no clue what we’re saying so they'll say something back and we have no clue so we all just look at each other and say no se or i don’t know! ha! and the few questions i do know are what’s your name (and they’re all wearing name tags! HA) where are you from, which I’ve asked a billion times, and how many siblings do you have!! ha! but i didn’t learn how to say do you watch the disney channel and i found a whole bunch who do and who love phineas and ferb which made my day!!

The workouts that Linley gave me are the best because you can’t play soccer because of how intense elders take it so the only things left are volleyball and basketball but all the balls are flat. I asked for a pump and they said they can’t fill them up more so if it hits someone in the head it wont hurt them so those aren’t much fun. So i just run and do abs and wall sits and such!

Sunday was the boss because it was in English the whole entire day which is the first time I’ve heard teachers/ everyone use it since getting here so it was way nice!!  Super dang spiritual and everything and i really loved it!!!  We watched a devotional given by elder Holland in march 2008 to the provo mtc and it was amazing!!!! He’s such a great, funny speaker!!! like he said quote: "i know a lot of you think that old men woke up angry, ran through cactuses and drake pickle juice before writing this white hand book but that’s not true!! It’s written by inspiration and a whole lot of experience! so obey it!!! and he tied in the atonement sooo cool—it was amazing!!  Foods okay even though they believe in having beans every single meal but the cooks are really nice and there’s always lots of fruit!! Singing in Spanish is lots of fun because half of us don’t know the tune and the other half can’t pronounce the words that quickly or the changes and such so its dang funny!  Look at a spanish hymn if you get the chance and look for a swish between words which means you combine it quickly and it never sounds how its supposed to!! ha!! we also learned how to bear our testimonies in Spanish this week so here goes—yo se que nuestro padre celestrial es amado y merciful, yo se que jesucristo es nos salvdor y redeemere y el es todo amado! yo se que la evangelio es verdado y que nosotros familias es eterndad. te amo mi familia y mi el salvador jesucristo y mi hermanos! te amo dis evangelio y la oportunidad nosotros quiere con la inglesia! estoy agredicido por mi familia y por la expecion y por la oportunidad por sevicio un mision. en el nombre de jesucristo, Amen. 

I love you all so much and am so grateful for the love and support you’ve given me!!! I know this church is true!! Thanks for everything!!! 

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Love Sister Josie Morris