MTC Wednesday Letter - June 13, 2012 ""Jesus is going to come again! I'm going to tell everyone!! The only problem is I have to tell them in German."

This weeks quote is from Katie after having watched the movie "The Testaments".  She was overcome with the excitement of her upcoming missionary service and exclaimed "Jesus is going to come again!  I'm going to tell everyone!! The only problem is I  have to tell them in German!"

"Family!! I don't even know where to start. Okay seriously I don't even know what to say. I'm on a mission! Oh sad story. I'm not a schwester. I still like schwester and everything but my nametag says sister and it's because schwesters are more like the nuns and nurses in German. So we are sisters. But it's okay because my nametag still says Kirche Jesu Christi der Heiligen der Letzten Tage. It is really fun to be with so many foreign missionaries.So now I have one companion who is from Lindon and one who is from Finland. But from the part of Finland that's like on the Arctic Circle.  Okay so I get along really well with Sister Kervinen (the sister from Finland). She studied German for 6 years in school (but also English and Swedish). She is so much fun and she doesn't take things more seriously than they should be taken but she loves the gospel. Sister Packer took German for 3 years but she's really good because she worked on it a lot while she was preparing for her mission. And she's had her call since December (she deferred because of a boy). I kind of miss my first companion and I know she really misses me. She doesn't get along so well with her current companion and every time she sees me she just wants to talk to me. All of you that have been on missions should take this opportunity ro reminisce  about your missions and tell me mission stories. I would love to hear your stories.

Okay so you wanted to know about my first day. I got here and said bye to you and tried really hard to not look back. And I didn't. My host missionary took me to my room and then to the book store to get my training materials. 

Most important training material in addition to scriptures
"Preach my Gospel" in German
(picture obviously not taken on the first day because that
is not what she was wearing)

Then I went to my classroom and met my teacher and my district. And then when my companion, Sister Wood, came in I met her. 

And then we went to a welcome meeting by the presidency of the MTC. Then dinner. And then we did this cool teaching experience where we were in classrooms of 40ish people and we all taught an investigator together. For the first two missionaries that have been in the MTC for a while helped us get started, but the last one we did by ourselves. That was basically the first day. Then we kind of unpacked and just went to bed. Every day is a little different. We've had different workshops and orientations and branch presidency interviews but mostly we all the following.... gym (yay I love it when we have gym), classroom instruction (a lot of that), meals, TALL lab (technology assisted language learning. It's great.), and study time (personal, companionship, language, additional . . .). 

I am singing on Sunday!! I will be there! Uh I hope I don't see you ha ha. That would be too hard. We switch off every Sunday after Sacrament meeting who is the Senior companion. I still don't even really know what it exactly means to be a senior companion, particularly in the MTC. But right now it's me. This email is going to be soooo disorganized. Don't put it on the blog like this ha ha. Also I have two different teachers. One in the morning and one in the afternoon. My district/class has only five people in it. There's my threesome and then two elders. My old district/class now has only two elders in it. When my companion left me I had to leave them. So yeah our districts are small. I loooove our zone/branch. And the people I love the most are going to my mission. We have people from Scotland, England, and Finland. The two sisters in my room that are Finnish speak Finnish alllll the time. So funny story. Our teachers never speak English to us, always German (which means that a lot of the time I am lost.  I am the only person in my district who has not taken any German. It shows. But I'm not the only person in our zone/branch.). It's really weird if the teachers ever do speak English. But in order to avoid speaking English they act things out or find weird ways of explaining them. And he said a word that no one knew and in order to tell us what it meant  our teacher started acting out "touchdown" and then he said "zwei punct" or whatever two point is and we were supposed to know that the word that came after that was the word for conversion. The word that we didn't know was conversion. But I was the only person in my district that had even heard of a two-point conversion! So I was the only one that got it. Proud of me Daddy? Ha ha. And my teacher complimented me on that during my personal interview. 

Hey I looooove letters and dear elders and everything! Thank you everyone! Keep it coming! I seriously believe Heavenly Father exalts people who write missionaries.

So I have a fake investigator! We call him Marcus. Funny story I had just joined my new district and met my new teacher and he took me out in the hall and told me stuff in German and said the name XXXXX  and stuff and then he said in English, "I just didn't want you to be surprised." And I just agreed and said everything was fine. I thought he was just explaining to me that the investigator was actually fake and I said, "Yeah I had an investigator in the other class too?" like I was confused about why he felt like he had to explain that to me. Duh they're fake. I figured he just didn't want me to be nervous so he told me the investigator's real name so I would know he was fake. XXXXX is a common enough name. But when we walked in to teach our investigator I was like "Ohhhhhhh. Our investigator is XXXXX!" Ha ha I know the kid. He went to Timpview. He liked Madelyne in the eighth grade and we talked all the time in art class. So I guess they try to avoid that or something so he must have seen my name and knew that I would know him so they warned me. And then I told my teacher after our first lesson with Marcus that I got what he was saying now. It's just funny because since he said it in German I didn't know what he was really saying. I love you alll!!!

I love Himmlischer Vater and Jesu Christi! We watched the TestamentsSunday night and I just got way stoked for the second coming. I basically ran around saying, "Jesus is going to come again! I'm going to tell everyone!! The only problem is I have to tell them in German." Bye! Love you! Sorry this is so scrambled.