June 18, 2009

Hello my family!!!!!
love you! thanks for everything as usual, mom thanks for typing that letter while dad was gone and thanks for the e-mail :) It is so good to hear from you. Linds thanks for the letter too, I can't believe you are in nursery now! woah, just as you were loving primary, but i know you will do a really good job, and good luck with everything.... ;) Thanks for the update on dad and jake's trip, that sounds so fun! I'm glad they get to go to a waterpark too, man water is one of the things I miss the most ;) but no worries, in mongolia there is no water, and if there was it would usually be frozen ;) when are you all leaving illinois officially? have fun with your day trip to your home town mom :) I keep forgetting that it is summer and that everyone is out of school, and good luck with the moving.
Things are good here, I can't believe it is p-day again already! I don't think I realized how little I would actually know when I left the mtc, 2 weeks is so short a time, and that is all we have left! We are still studying hard, I guess I just hadn't thought it out, you don't become even slightly fluent in a few months ;) we watched the restoration movie in mongolian yesterday and my teacher told us we would be able to understand it, I caught about 5 words, and never even understood a sentance. Me and the elders are pretty humbled ;) But not discouraged, faith and fear don't exist at the same time so we are trying to erase the word fear from our vocabulary, lets just say it is going to be incredibly humbling when we get to mongolia. I am trying to get at least the lessons down so I can say what I want to about the important things and add my simple testimony as we teach, but I think that is really all I will be able to do for a while. but I really am excited!! This message is so important and we are not alone in this work!! If the Lord wants us to learn mongolian, we will be able to learn it.
In the mean time however and with this "speak your language" thing, we have said some pretty funny things. I kept a little list this week.
"my potatoes are talking!" (suppossed to be "discusting")
"our bodies, are like dogs" (“sacred” - this was a funny one, an elder said it while we were teaching and dogs are about as low as you can get in mongolia, big insult)
investigator- "We can pray to God?" me- "no, we can't". (this was bad!i missunderstood the question, we definitely CAN pray to God;)
"I ate the shepherd that was killed." (sheep. they sound similar ;)
"are you drunk?" (ready)
"What is that?!" (who is that)
Thank goodness we have teachers, they read through our lessons and we had accidently said some pretty bad false doctrine:
"saturday is the sabbath"
"we can shop, and do whatever we want on the sabbath"
"we should desecrate sunday"
- and something to do with using a word that meant friend instead of spouse, and when teaching the law of chastity that is not a good mix up ;)
Learning a language is a fun and intersting thing, at the RC yeaterday I was trying to read a lady's name and I looked at it for 5 minutes and couldn't fingure it out, finally I asked someone and they told my it was Ethyl, I had been pronouncing it mongolian style (sounded something like 'ethoolth" with some spit). I also got to call a lady I talked to last week at the RC to follow up, she lived in an area where they didn't have missionaries but we are able to send some from another area, and she had had a really good talk with them, was going to church, and was so excited about the book of mormon, it is amazing how easy it is to share this message! She kept saying, "did you know joseph smith was only 14? its amazing!" :) ah I love missionary work!! and I keep telling myself I love the mongolian language ;) (i really do;)
My companion left for figi, she was such a great companion! I am with the indonesian sisters now who are great too, I've been lucky and have been with amazing sisters this whole time. things are good and still no word on when we leave, hopefully things will be on time ;)
love you all, and have such a good week!!
ashley / sister mansfield

cate- thanks for the letter, hope work is going good! I wrote last week but forgot to mail it! I am going a little crazy ;) love ya and hope you are well!

kat- thanks so much for the letter too! I'm glad you are liking the internship and I hope you have found some volleyball buddies ;) i forgot to mail your letter too! love ya!!

alyssa- thanks so much for sharing that story about how you went on splits with the sister missionaries! that was so great! wow thats cool you get to help with the missionary work in romania too :) I hope things are going good, sounds like quite a unique experience, love ya and I hope things are going good! (and that was so funny you had accidentally been cat-calling the kids! gotta love learning languages ;) love ya!