October 13, 2016 - Hello From Mexico!

October 21, 2016

Hello From Mexico!

Note from parents: Elder Bruner apologizes for some of his grammar, he's trying to get used to the Spanish layout on his keyboard.

Hey everyone! It's been a really overwhelming week at the CCM, it gets easier each day though. I'm feeling much better today than I did on day 1. I can drink the water here, but they said its hard water with minerals and they prefer for us to drink filtered water which they have lots of, so I just do that. I've only gotten a little stomache ache or two the first day just from nerves, but never because of the food. One elder in our district had to go to the hospital for a day because the food did something to him, I forgot exactly what, but after a day he was better, and hasn't had any problems since. America can really learn from the food here. Everything is so great, except the milk is a tiny bit different. For mom: I tried rice con leche, pretty much rice pudding. It was very good. It had apples and I think cinnamon in it too.

There's so much to say about the first week, so I'll try to get it all in in this first email.

I love our district so much. We are already extremely close and have told everyone pretty much all of our stories. We had one elder that had to go home for a time for some personal reasons, and he was our district leader, so we'll be getting a new one soon. We all miss him because he was such a great leader.

I have learned so much in this first week it's crazy. Hermano Medina is our teacher each day, and not many teachers here speak much english, so we learn very fast. Our schedule is extremely filled, and it feels like there is no time to study. We taught our first "investigator" (really a teacher) in Spanish on our second day here, so that was a bit hard. It went ok though and we've been getting lots of teaching practice.

The weather here is nice, still in the rainy season so we have had a little rain, not enough for an umbrella though.

It's crazy how many cops and sirens you hear here. It was hard to sleep the first night because of them, but I've gotten used to it. You also hear booms, which aren't gun shots though, it seems we may be near some cop base or something because we're near the hills. At night we once saw Cops on the back of cop trucks apparently with guns too. I'm glad I'm in the CCM where it is extremely safe!

I've met up with Elder Anderson (Rhett) and recently Elder Templeton (Alec) as well! It was also cool because we had a live MTC devotional broadcast from the Provo MTC on Tuesday, and I'm pretty sure I saw Elder Gray (Josh) on the live cam when it pointed at the audience!

We are going to the temple today in an hour, which will be awesome! I'll send more pictures later today from there.

A couple funny stories before I forget: Our teacher told us to have SWAG on our missions. Not the american SWAG, but in his definition, it meant to have confidence in yourself, and more confidence in God. It was great.

I've included some pics in the email. They're a bit blurry since I still need to figure out all the camera details.