Elder Thornton Version 2.0 (in Puerto Rico!)

Hermanos y hermanas, What a great time I have had here at the MTC, so much that this goodbye is almost as hard as when I left home. It has been so bittersweet (and nerve-wracking). I leave at 4:30 tomorrow morning (in less than 9 hours as I write this) and arrive at the beautiful island of Puerto Rico around 9. I am so excited. This week a surprising amount of exciting things happened despite being locked up in the MTC for our final week. The rain here has been crazy, and while we didn't get any hurricanes we got some beautiful rainy weather. At least, it's only beautiful when you are looking out the window, or playing volleyball with your district -- it's basically like swimming when it rains as heavy as it did this week. We got to go out into the field again to do transfers with missionaries in Santo Domingo. I had the privilege of joining Elder Hawkins -- who celebrated his 6 months Friday -- and Elder Hamblin -- who left the MTC only 3 weeks ago. I feel rea...

Hola amigos! What a crazy week! I wish I could tell about everything that happened to me this week, but it seems that I won't have quite enough time to tell everything, so I'll just share some highlights. All last week we were dreading going out into the field (probably because surprisingly none of us are quite fluent after 4-5ish weeks of training), so when we arrived at the chapel where we were meeting I was stressing out of my mind. However, after I met my temporary comp, Elder Gividen, I was eased a little bit. As a fellow Utahn and being out in the field for almost exactly a year he is quite fluent in English and Spanish. I was very happy to be able to communicate with him, whereas many of the missionaries did exchanges with natives who had little English-speaking abilities. Most of the time (2-8 pm) was spend travelling as the area we were going to was pretty far away, but we got to take the really-nice metro and then a couple of junky Guaguas (busses where everyone j...

Hola! I am happy to report to y'all that all is well at the MTC and I am not feeling sick this week! Unfortunately I have to report that the new arrivals are going through the EXACT same thing all of us did 3 weeks ago. What a great tradition!😂  This week was full of excitement. We prepped a lot for President Nelson's arrival including a one-hour training session on how to shake a 93-year-old's hand. Unfortunately that meeting did not pay off, because even with shaking almost 500 missionaries hands... the prophet didn't go for the fish flop hand shake that we were informed we would be receiving. He is still an extremely healthy old man. What a guy! On Saturday morning we boarded a bus with all 80 missionaries - some 50 of them had just arrived only days before - and arrived minutes later to a gated chapel where we could barely fit all us MTC missionaries, and the East and West Santo Domingo missions around 450ish missionaries. Before the meeting began, all of us missio...