MTC: Week One

Okay so Here I am at the MTC and I finally made it to my first P-day. That's code for preparation day. The MTC is crazy! Our days are planned out to the T, but let me start at the beginning. After eating free breakfast at Ihop the morning that I came to the MTC, we stopped at the park and took a few pictures.... which I am still waiting for my family to send me. Then we drove in, said our final goodbyes (in like 2 minutes) and I was off! Two elders took me to a Sister, Sister Lamp, and she took me to my Residence, which is basically like a dorm room only without the loud noises and parties. Then I got ready and went straight to class.

That's where it got a little intense. The teacher asked me first thing what my name was and where I was from, only in the MTC you only talk in the language that you are learning, so it was all in Tagalog. I was all sorts of confused about what he was asking me, but quickly figured it out. We have non-stop been speaking the language since then. In the Philippines it's a grammer rule that consonants have to be surrounded by vowels, so all of their sentences and words are really long. To give you an example (a pretty extreme example, but still my favorite) the word for faith is pananamalataya. Like I said, that is the most extreme example that I could think of, but I'm going for sympathy here people!

Each day we spent 12 hours in the classroom studying our language and sentence structure, then we spend 1 hour in the gym, and an hour and a half between for meals. Right now we have an investigator that we meet with for 3 hours during class. Each of us usually only ends up taking about 15 minutes but sometimes it takes longer. Our investigators story is that he is in the United States because he needs to have surgery on his foot because he has an infection in his toe. His uncle told him that he would pay for the operation if he would take the missionary instructions. For all those people who know.... I know. Anyways, while we were teaching the lesson yesterday, my companion accidently stepped on our investigators foot! It was the funniest thing that I have ever seen! I had to try so hard not to laugh.

We do the best that we can to teach him, but we both struggle a lot with the language.... imagine that, struggling with the language after only five days. Anyways, the food here is really good, but my companion and I try to eat salads for all of our meals everyday, we are determined to not get fat. If you have any questions, feel free to post them at the bottom and my sister will forward them on to me.