First Epistle of Élder Hobbs

Good day! Élder Hobbs here. Firstly I preface this epistle with an invitation: I invite you to share these emails with friends and family so that all may recieve some degree of benefit from these.

Secondly please email me if you have any other people's emails I should send these newsletters to. It's on a big spreadsheet so I gotta add people to that or I'll forget to email them.

Third, if you reply to this email make sure you're choosing to reply to just the sender instead of everyone who received it. I think I've correctly setup BCC but I may be wrong.

Also feel free to email me at mario.hobbs@missionary.org , I can read them anytime throughout the week. But I have to wait until Wednesday to answer them.

Now let us progress with the epistle.

Home MTC was quite the unpleasant experience, and the proper MTC has been quite the improvement.

The food at the MTC save the ice cream and beverages has been utterly mediocre at best. The schedule has left me little time for rest and recreation, and I've experienced several difficulties in my process of learning the Spanish language.

Many devotionals are also terribly dull

But despite these numerous challenges, the benefits of the mission remain numerous.

I have been blessed with a lovely companion, Élder Paul Miner. Elder Miner has been a wonderful companion thus far, we get along very well and we share many a common interest.

My district has also been a great blessing, before I detail how lovely they are, I'll provide some brief descriptions.

Though I'm lazy; so I've had them write their own descriptions:

Hi! My name is Hermana Tanner! Im from billings, Montana. I'll be serving in the England London mission!

Hey mate my name is elder troncoso, im from Australia. I am serving in the colombia medellin mission

What's up Elder Hobbs' fan club!! Mi nombre es Hermana Jensen I'm from Bountiful UT and I'm serving in the Spain Madrid South mission!!

Hey, I'm Hermana Knudsen! I'm from Orem UT. I am serving in the Lima Limatambo Perú mission!

Mae govannen! I am Élder Miner from Hayden Idaho. In a few weeks I'll be headed East to serve in Richmond Virginia.

Hola! I'm Elder Rasmussen. I'm from Eagle Mountain UT, serving in the Peru Lima Northeast mission.

Additionally I've been somewhat starved of real music. All we get are hymns through gospel library and the insufferable christian-pop found in the youth album. Luckily for me, folk music doesn't care about restrictions. I may not have access to instruments or recordings, but so long as I still got a voice; I can sing folk songs myself.

Though that being said, I have a limited memory; and if you folks were to reply to this with some lyrics or sheet music to some Guthrie, Seeger, Ochs, Robeson, etc...

Anyhow continuing,

The Ice cream here has been extremely good, it's some BYU creamery stuff and it's pretty hard to beat. I've been having them pretty frequently from the ice cream vending machine ($2.50 per serving, usually a pretty decent amount takes like 20 min to eat). I've usually eaten a bit of the "Inshanely Chocolate" during nightly branch prayers in the building, where the Chinese-speaking missionaries have mentioned the Bing chilling quite a bit.

There's also a lot of Chinese-speaking missionaries. Most going to Taipei, many going stateside and others going random places. (Though I've met nobody who's going to Hong Kong or mainland china)

I think we may be the only spanish-speaking district in the branch, which is kind of interesting in itself.

The chocolate milk also lives up to its great reputation. It tastes pretty good, though not nearly as good as some of the ultra-pasteurized stuff of Latin America.

I've also gotten really good at fixing my bed, it's actually not ugly for once!

Our resident Australian has also been having people try vegemite which has been utterly hilarious

Overall TLDR:

Everything sucks, but I've got some new pals to help me through it, and I know that the work is good.

Though I hope I don't run out of room in my notebooks, I'm like 50 pages into my journal and like 75 into my notes lol.

Future emails will probably be written more professionally. And complain quite a bit less.

¡Ádios!