MTC- Week 1

Ahoj rodina! That is Czech for "hello family," although the grammar may be off. More on that later. The MTC is sweet! We have lots of good times in here. It's a lot of work and we do a lot of learning and stressful stuff, but we also have a ton of fun while we are doing it. 

Highlights of the week: sand volleyball. My zone is awesome. My district is awesome. Czech is such a cool language. Devotional Tuesday night with Elder Richard J Maynes from the 70. My favorite thought by him was that the First Vision was basically just the first missionary lesson of this dispensation. Joseph Smith was the investigator, and Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ were the first missionary companionship. That was a cool way of thinking about it. Other highlights: Lots of letters from the family. Cookies from Hannah. Ice cream whenever I want.

My District includes 10 missionaries going to Czech Republic. 6 Starší (Elders) and 4 Sestry (Sisters). We also had 3 Starší visa waiters when we got here. One got reassigned and the other two are leaving soon.  (The District is pictured in the 2nd & 3rd pictures)

Our Zone is made up of people going all over. 6 Sisters and 1 Elder going to Poland. Several learning Bulgarian. One Elder going to Macedonia, which currently has 8 missionaries in the whole country. He is learning Bulgarian, because it is very close and there is no Macedonian teacher. We have 4 Elders learning Slovakian. But one is going to England, speaking Slovakian. One Sister going to Slovenia. That is pretty much what I know. (The Zone is the big group in the 1st picture at the Provo Temple)

My companion is Starší Chadwick from Provo, UT. He is number 7 of 13 kids. Plus 5 adopted kids. If you can do that math, you have realized that makes 18 children. He is cool. We get along really well. Even though he is really different from me.

Here is a schedule of my week.

Class starts at 7:45 goes to 11:45. This time is for personal, companion, and language study. No teacher, but we have access to TALL, an online learning program for Czech vocab and pronunciation. Class resumes after lunch, this time with a teacher. We have two teachers. Bratr Knapp and Sestra Godffrey, they are both really good. Return missionaries from the Czech Republic. Our teachers speak almost exclusively Czech in the classroom, which is both extremely helpful and extremely challenging at times to follow/understand directions. In the afternoons we sometimes teach our "investigator" Terezie. Who speaks nothing but Czech to us. Quickly. And we have to try to respond and teach. It is very difficult, but she is also very nice about it. My companion and I were able to give her a Book of Mormon our 2nd lesson, so that was cool. We teach her every day except for Sunday. We learn grammar and stuff in the afternoon and/or teach. 

Gym time is at 3:30-4:20. Every day that we are allowed to, we go outside for volleyball. If not...volleyball inside the gym. My companion plays basketball, so we do splits, he goes with another basketball guy and I go with our District leader to volleyball. We went outside yesterday, when it was so cold that I wore pants and a sweatshirt, and by the end of gym time my feet felt like they had frostbite and needed to be amputated. But it was all good. Because a lot of zone goes out to volleyball together and it is AWESOME. So yeah, gym is cool. After gym is dinner and after that is more class. In case you have noticed the pattern, we do a lot of class time. 5:35-9:30 is that one. If we didn't teach in the afternoon, we teach during that time. Our teachers switch off between afternoon and evening, and one is pretty much always there.

Tuesday morning we do service (we clean another residence hall, toilets, sweeping, mopping, trash emptying, vacuuming and whatnot) Tuesday evening are devotionals where the heavy hitters come and talk. This Tuesday we got Richard J Maynes. I missed Elder Neil A. Anderson by one stinking day. After devotional we do district review, where we share thoughts about the Devotional until 9:30.

Thursday is preparation day. Wake up, eat some food and go to the temple at 8. Temple was awesome today. We did an Endowment session. Laundry whenever. Basically after the temple we have free time until dinner. Then after dinner we have the Teaching Resource Center/class. TRC we don't do yet. It's where you teach member lessons to people in your mission language. Like a home teaching lesson basically. We can't actually teach fluently, so we will just have more class. That goes until 9:30

Sunday is Sacrament meeting & District meeting. We talk about things that we want to change in our District or do better on. Temple walk, study time. Sunday night devotional .Movie (inspirational talks. Watched Character of Christ Sunday. They have all the new missionaries watch it. It's a Christmas devotional by Elder Bednar. Phenomenal) Then we have mission conference (whole MTC). We talk about missions oddly enough. And that's my weekly schedule.

Language-Czech is awesome. It is also really difficult. Some fun facts, you probably did not know about Czech. The pronunciation of "c." Is it like cats? Nope. Like city then? Nope. It is pronounced oats. Because reasons. Also Starší is pronounced like Starshy. The í makes the sound like meat. Also "ř" is madness. It is entirely unique to the Czech language. And it makes absolutely no sense. It is like a rolled r combined with the s in pleasure. Into one sound. Somehow...Shout-out to my Spanish teachers. Although Czech is nothing like Spanish, they taught me how to learn another language and understand grammar and all that jazz. Oh, and about the first grammar thing I said. Starting in a few weeks we are going to learn what cases are. There are 7 in Czech. It basically means that every noun and adjective has 7 different forms. That are used according to who knows what. Hence why rodina may be the wrong word there.

Thank you for all of the letters and what-not. Love you all!