Friday, October 3, 2008
So, Mission life is great. Portuguese is way fun, I think everyone should learn it, it's a beautiful language. The MTC is intense. The first day was probably one of the craziest days of my life, as was my second and third day. Since then it's tapered off a little, or else I've gotten tougher. I missed lunch the day I went in, and they didn't feed me until like 6, so I was pretty much naucious with hunger by the time we got food, which was unfortunate, but I got over that eventually. They made me district leader, which was a little surprising but pretty awesome. My companion, Elder Tracy, is pretty awesome, and thankfully very easy to get along with. My district is pretty cool, and I think I ended up with the strictest zone I could have possibly gotten, which is fine with me, I think I got the best one.
The first couple days actually felt a lot like college, expept instead of everyone having no idea what they're doing, only about 300 people had no clue, and everyone else knew exacly what to do. But the older missionaries were very helpful. I say older, everyone here is basically the same age, but the missionaries that have been here a few weeks appear almost visibly older. I think it's the food. I've heard praises and horror stories about the food, but I'm finding it to be pretty ok, better than the U's cafeteria, but not as good as home food. Wednesday nights they try to go all out with stake and potatoes or something like that to impress the newbies, but it always turns out mais ou menos.
The MTC is pretty structured, so except on p-days I have basically no spare time, and what spare time I do have is study time. P-day I get a bit of actual free time, to write letters, email, do laundry (generally at the same time) and go to the Temple, which is great. But I do pretty well with structured things, i get bored when there's nothing to do.
The Portuguese is coming great, I can pray and bear my testimony and say a few things in portuguese, as long as it's in present tense. Other than that it's just vocabulary. We have two teachers, Irmão Zwick and Irmã Olsen. The first day Irmão Zwick talked and taught entirely in Portuguese. We didn't even know he spoke English until the end of the lesson, so that was pretty awesome. Irmão Zwick is really awesome, I enjoy his classes a lot- he makes Learning Fun!
Que mais...it's weird how quickly Portuguese is working its way into my vocabulary. We're encouraged to say everything we can in Portuguese, and having a teacher that speaks almost no English to us helps with that a lot, but more and more of my little words are becoming naturally Portuguese. I keep wanting to type 'em' instead of 'in'.
We play soccer here every gym that we're outside, although outside gym time ends soon, due to weather, which is sad. Indoor they have basketball and four-square (19 year olds playing four square makes for some intense playground games) but it's not the same.
Conference is this weekend, that's exciting. Not only do I get to hear the words of a Prophet, I get to have two whole days with little or know scheduled time. It'll be a challenge to keep my district reasonably productive for that, but I figure it'll be fun. I've committed to memorizing the First Vision in Portuguese by next Thursday, which turns out is a pretty ambitions goal, but I think I can do it. With Fast Sunday last week, and Conference this week, our Sundays have been a little unique, but after this week we'll have to start preparing five minute talks to give in Portuguese every week on a different topic, so that ought to be exciting.
Que mais...we have two Portuguese speakers in my district, which is cool. One lived in Brazil for 5ish years where his dad was a Mission President, and the other grew up with Brazilian parents. Both of them speak Portuguese wrong of course (with a Brazilian dialect) but it's handy to be able to have a quick tranlator around at all times. I have three Sisters (Irmãs) in my district, who are fun, and provide a nice balence to the other wise Elder filled world of the MTC. Lots of things guys just don't think about, like when things happen, people's names, etc. We sing and pray in Portuguese before and after every lesson, which is cool. Singing Called to Serve in Portuguese is way fun, and there are a couple of portuguese specific 'pirate songs'. They're lots and lots of fun.
Que mais....I think that's about all. I went to the TRC (Teaching Resource Center) on Thursday and practiced contacting in Portuguese and teaching a first lesson to a mock-investigator. I'm glad people's souls weren't relient on our performance teaching that lesson, but I think we did pretty well. Well, that's about all, and it'll cut me off in about 3 minutes. Maybe next time i'll attach some pictures, so, until then, Tchau!
~Elder Ammon
