Wow, Jonathan must be having fun. Funny thing, our zone has
12 missionaries going to Madagascar. I’ll make sure and tell them to take their
malaria pills.
And
yes you can call while in the airport, I can either get a card here or you guys
can send me one.
Dad:
so my camera ate its batteries insanely fast so i purchased some rechargeable batteries
and a charger at the bookstore here. Thing is I wasn’t thinking and bought a
bunch of stuff right before we went to the temple. So not wanting to take a
grocery bag in I unwrapped everything and shoved it in my pockets, not thinking
I would need the directions. Bottom line I don’t want to wreck the batteries or
charger, can you look up the directions online and email them to me? It’s a Sony
Power Cycle 4 battery ni-mh AAA or AA. I have that adapter we got so you don’t
need to worry about that.
I was
going to send you guys a bunch of letters but realized I was out of stamps. Since
we’re in the new place I can’t get stamps until Thursday. Ugh. So I’ll be
sending you guys like 15 letters today. Still haven’t received your letter unfortunately.
The
language is so weird, but also fun. The
language is coming along great, I have the basics mostly down, I can teach
lessons without any notes and such. At this point it’s just vocab and the prefixes,
suffixes and other things. The ixs are SUPER annoying. Basically it’s like English,
you have active, passive, etc. The hard part is figuring out which to use while
you’re using it in speech. Also some root words are already one thing while
others are already others, so you have figure that in as well. In addition for
some of the prefixes you drop the first letter of the root, so you also have to
deal with that. There is also no "is, was, the, etc.". You also
combine words to make others. For instance if i wanted to say "can you
tell me what this scripture means? It
would go like this "Bolehkah(can the kah is for questions) komu(you)
beritahu(tell, beri(give) tahu(know)) saya(I,me) apa(what) maksud(meaning) ini(this)
tulisan suci(writings holy). "Bolehkah komu beritahu saya apa maksud ini
tulisan suci?" At least I think.
Thanks
Sister Ward for the encouragement, my brain has stopped melting at least a
little bit, I no longer slur and stutter when I speak English, though my grammar
and punctuation is totally shot to ribbons. How long did it take you before you
could speak somewhat fluently to people?
I
have been reading the Old Testament for the last week and just finished 2nd Samuel,
I swear that if I ever read about how to sacrifice an animal again my brain
will melt. I have some really good
scriptures that I found but I can’t remember them now because I don’t have my
scriptures with me. Really I have learned a heaping ton of deep profound things
since I have been here. I will include them in my last email next week, it’ll
be cool.
One
thing I do remember is that while I was waiting for my turn for an interview on
Sunday I was reading hymns out of my mini hymn book and humming the tunes as I
read "A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief." I’ve always liked that song but
never really read it. Very cool song. On top of that I realized the last verse
has 2 meanings. First off, remember that he has now died. So now you can take
it both literally, he realizes that he has been helping the savior all along
and the savior calls to him. There is also a 2nd meaning, pay attention to the
wording, see if you can find it. People who aren’t married or haven’t gone on
missions don’t even try, you won’t find it.
Our progressing
investigators are progressing! Finally after like 3 weeks of teaching and
learning that were are teaching wrong and then doing it all over again, both Jeffrey
and Rosalina are getting baptized!!!!! So ya, learning how to teach, plan and
properly use study time is probably harder than the language. It’s actually
counter intuitive. You would think that you would take a lesson say lesson 2,
the plan of salvation, and then teach it asking the people to make commitments
that have to do with that lesson or topic. Nope, all wrong, I’ve been teaching
and planning wrong my whole life; no joke. You start with what you want people
to take away from it, whether that’s a commitment to read and pray about the Book
of Mormon or obey the word of wisdom; or in the case of teaching members what
you want them to know or do better at. Once you do that you look at what you
can teach them and what would move them toward baptism and then you integrate
it together. Sort of kind of. That way when you teach about things it’s moving
them in a direction not just feeding them useless information they might not
understand or appreciate.
Out
of time, the breakfast food is still literally 75% sugar (the only thing not
sugar is the milk, water, oranges and bananas and the bagels and cream cheese),
love you all, goodbye
Some pictures:
My MTC District
Elders: Thatcher, Sheranian, Halpin, Paul, Rodriguez and finally Hill.
My Companion Elder Rodriguez and I
(don’t look at my face, the sun was right in my eyes)
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