We finally got an email from Hayden! Here it is:

So It turns out I didn't get to email you until pday which is today. I only have a limited time so i'll try to fit everything in.

My companion is elder taylor as you know and he was living in spring, texas before he got here but he grew up mostly in Louisiana. He is my height and weight, but he was a wrestler so he is a little bigger than I am. He is awesome, we have a lot of fun.

There are four other companionships in my district: Elder Adams and elder thoelke (pronounced like tolkien without the 'n'), elder brown and elder thorstenson, hermana wynn and hermana stratton, and hermana byam and hermana elsey. However, Hermanas elsey and stratton are being moved up to an intermediate spanish district so we are losing them which is actually pretty sad. The first day we got here, everyone we saw told us how lucky we were to have sisters in our district. I'm going to be sending pictures home here soon so you can see what everyone looks like.

We got to have General Conference this last weekend which was just incredible. There was over 1000 misssionaries in there taking notes and listening to the speakers. After the last session, we had a fireside where we sang a bunch of hymns and on some, the singing was so loud it hurt my ears and I couldn't hear myself sing. The spirit was incredibly strong.

Spanish is coming along great, but if I hadn't taken two years before this, I would be entirely lost. The first day, they just force you into it, they don't go over any basics whatsoever, no alphabet, no grammar, just learning words so we know how to pray. Praying is hard but Elder Taylor and I almost have it down to where we don't need notes. We are now trying to learn our testimonies in spanish which I'll try to share at the end of this letter.

Today we went to the temple with the entire zone. The Provo temple is beautiful and it was a great experience to be surrounded by other Elders of God serving in the temple.

I just realized I never explained why I couldn't email Wed. We were supposed to when our teacher had us take the gym orientation quiz on the computers but apparently he forgot and we didn't know that was when it was planned to happen so we couldn't remind him. That night, our zone leaders told us we should have done it with the gym orientation and then said, "oh well I guess we can do it tomorrow." That's a phrase used quite commonly in here because our days are so strictly planned that we rarely have time to do things we don't plan for which means we are always putting things off until the next day--needless to say, these things never get done.

So quickly let me try to share my testimony is spanish (Dad don't critique the grammar too much)

Yo quiro compartir mi testimonio con ustedes.

Yo se que nosotros salvador, Jesucristo, vivas, y el libro de Mormon es las palabras de Dios y (it was restored) atraves Jose Smith.

Yo se que Jose Smith estavo una profeta de Dios.

That's about all I can remember without notes but it's a pretty good amount anyway.

I love you all, I hope you felt the spirit in conference as much as I did. The talk about honoring mothers was especially good

Love, Elder Newey