July 8th. Week Two!

Elder Wilson and Sister Kim Allen, from St. George! Keeping a safe distance, missionaries...

So all is well here at the MTC! Days are long and weeks are short. The language is slowly progressing as my vocabulary steadily increases, although getting the grammar down will be quite the fun thing. The sentence structures are Subject Time Place Verb Object. So like "We tomorrow go to park" but then it gets more confusing with longer sentences.. Alright! So we finished our first investigator last week, and she ended up accepting our baptism invitation! We could have either said something completely wrong that she liked or she just felt bad for us so she accepted. But it was kinda just to get us introduced to the whole investigator concept.

We have two new investigators this week. Zhang Yu An and Becky. Hah ya just Becky. Zhang is a Buddhist, likes basketball, watches as Pastor on TV, and is just wondering who God is. Becky has divorced parents, no religion and seems like she just needs to be loved. She seemed to have a bad attitude when we were introduced to her. So me and my comp. are going to take the God is our Heavenly Father and first part of the Plan of Salvation for our first lesson for both of them, but just adjust how we teach to their needs.

I heard mom did great on playing the organ?? And ya me and my comp. haven't taken any Chinese in school before hand, everyone else has basically hahah. So in our district we have a lot of great guys. Like I said last week two of them are super smart and attending pretty nice schools. We have Elder Nesmond (has two dots over the e) he is from eastern Finland. He is 20 years old, involved in 3 businesses, plays actual horse polo!!!!!, and his just a total stud. He wears a yellow polo shirt often and I just think how good of a model he could be for mom and her clothes hahaha. I'll send some pictures when I can. Although I need a card reader if that's what they are called.

So for our schedule her we usually have personal study in the morning for an hour and have breakfast at 8 every morning. We have two Three hour classroom instruction times a day, they are usually split up into different things each hour, and we have a set hour for language study everyday. We have devotionals every Sunday and Tuesday night. Sunday is a lot of study time and have sacrament meeting later when all talks are given in Chinese. We did watch some of the fire works on the fourth. We ended up going to bed at 11:30 instead of 10:30. Not homesick at all really hah, I just want to go to Taiwan! And new rule I guess is that they don't want missionaries to carry backpacks in the field anymore. Crazy huh? Not sure if that has applied to Alex yet or what, but that's what they told us the day we came in. They are going to apply the whole tablet concept and such. My chinese name is only for here at the MTC, it will change once i get to Taiwan. I believe the church assignes our names that we get here. I did get the cinnamon rolls the other day haha. They were awesome! And I did get my district open reign on them so you know. I'm not a complete selfish person. Also the temple is closed till the 8th of August for cleaning. So we'll go a time or two before we leave, but it opens our P-day a whole lot which is nice.

Having a great time here! Hoping all goes well with our new investigators this week!

- Elder Wilson

July 1st. First email from the MTC!

It's been a really busy and long first few days. The first day was basically welcoming us to the MTC and showing us around and telling us all the rules and regulations. And now everything is blending together haha. We show up to our first class or study time at 7am everyday, always starting in our class room. We always have something till 9:30 to fill our time. If I remember correctly they had to make a whole new zone for all the new Mandarin speaking missionaries. Big deal.  We have 8 Elders and Two sisters in our district. All pretty solid guys and from all kind of backgrounds. Two got 34 on their act and are attending the AF academy and Yale. One from the western coast of Finland who can speak Finish, Swedish, English, and to be Mandarin. My companion is Elder Mansell. From SLC and is a big tennis player. He turned 18 three weeks ago so could very well be the youngest missionary here. Although his age shows in how serious he takes what were doing.

 Our first Chinese class was on Thursday which was pretty ridiculously insane. We have a super cool teacher who went on his mission to Taiwan as well. And naturally he came in and only spoke Chinese... 3hrs!!1 I thought one hour was bad haha. But the first one was actually really fun. Now it's just depressing realizing how much i don't know hahaha! Friday we got our first investigator, Arwen. She was given a BOM from her friend, read the Bible i think and her family does ancestor worship. So we are doing our best to teach her in the Chinese our books tell us to say haha! When she asks us questions it takes like thirty seconds for us to figure out what she is saying as she makes hand motions and points to things. And then another probably minute or two as we look up words and piece them together to form a four word sentence that we probably didn't even pronounce right. It's ridiculous how everything sounds the same. Or at least to me.

I've seen Elder Suman and Sorensen and a couple other of friends back home. It's fun to see them around.  They say the first several days or terrible and they are right hah. Especially if you are learning a language!! But we made it to Sunday and it was mostly filled with a bunch of personal study time which I need to work on. Ended up going to choir with the rest of my district later that day also. When we got there we had to split up to what part were were going to sing and I didn't know what anything meant but bass so I ended up going to the tenor section with some others in my district. Big mistake! I be sure not to do that again hahah. If I'm going to gain weight somewhere it would be here. Lot's of not that great unhealthy food but starting this week we get field time everyday which will be nice.