The famous MTC Map Picture we have been waiting for!
Ahoj everyone! This week has been really, really fast. And
weird. And eventful. And not eventful. Confused yet? Join the club. This email
may be a bit shorter than normal because I have to plan a lesson while doing
laundry while also emailing. It is an adventure to say the least.
Big updates for the week:
- My companion and I were called as Zone Leaders. We have no idea what we're doing. Not really, we're good. We have giant binders that help us to know what to do. As well as the Spirit. That one is a little bit more important. Basically, here is the breakdown. There are districts. Each district here is made up, more or less, of people going to your same mission. There is a district leader for each. Just one missionary. All the districts in our branch make up our zone. And they call a companionship to be Zone Leaders because there are multiple districts in the zone. So we have a phone! That can receive calls from the front desk and random telemarketers who do not speak English. Literally that is all. It does nothing else. We cannot make any calls, view messages, or do anything whatsoever. Basically they trust us, but not really. They just might need to get a hold of us. We also have meetings on Sunday. So instead of Sunday morning being really relaxing until after breakfast, we have the busiest schedule that morning out of our whole week. But it's okay, because it is a great opportunity. We are both learning to love and serve our zone more than we already did, and we are becoming more aware of individual circumstances. It really a great blessing. We also got to handle new missionary orientation yesterday. We had 3 Sisters and one Elder arrive. Basically we help them to not feel super overwhelmed and be their friends. It was a lot of fun.
Starší Pickett & Starší Chadwick- MTC companions
Sister
Heap got some reindeer antlers. The rest is history. (Czech Elders)
Sestras from our Zone with the famous antlers
- The
Bulgarians (6 Elders) and the Croatians (2 Elders, 6 Sisters) left this
week. That was very sad. Because with them, we won't have any chance of
seeing them until after our missions finish, but they were still in our
zone and we have spent the last 6 weeks getting really close to them. But
it's okay, we wouldn't actually want to take anyone away from the missions
that they have been called to. Maybe.
Sweater Saturday- this is our old Zone of
Elders before they left!
- I met
up with Elder Brown to take the legendary Map Pictures. They are so famous
that they deserve to be capitalized. He told me I have gained weight and I
look it. I have actually. About 5 pounds since week 1 or 2ish. I'm not
sure. Apparently that makes my face look fat.
Elder Jeremiah Brown (South Carolina Columbia Mission) and Elder Pickett
- We had
a party with SYL this week. Speak Your Language. We try to speak in Czech
as much as we can. We usually hold off at dinner so that we can actually
talk to the other people in our zone, but interestingly, we can usually
understand the Polish and Slovakian missionaries quite well. So we had a
dinner SYL party basically. It was a real good time. Because oddly enough,
no one understands any Czech, Slovakian, or Polish unless they are
learning one of those languages. So basically we could say anything and no
one could understand it. It was good times.
- Our
lesson with Martin last night was incredibly entertaining. We challenged
him to start reading the Book of Mormon last week, and he was freaking out
about how dumb Laman and Lemuel are when we asked him how he liked it. He
got super animated and was using hand motions and everything. It was
amazing. My companion and I were dying.
- I have a suggestion for Book of
Mormon scripture reading. Before you read, write down a specific question
that you have. About the gospel, about life in general, about whatever.
And then watch how you will receive revelation on that question as you
read. It will be awesome. I have tried it.
- My
language update: So Czech is amazing. One of my favorite things about this
language is that if you say something and it sounds like stupid or weird,
that's not the correct way to say it. They make it so that it has to flow
well and sound amazing while it is being spoken. It is awesome. We learned
a difficult grammar principle called "to, co" last week. It
doesn't translate well into English, but I will try to explain. Example
sentence: "I understand what you are teaching." In Czech,
because of casing that sentence has major problems. So the way you change
it is: "I understand that, what you are teaching." It is difficult
because it is so incredibly different from English that it takes kind of a
lot of thinking ahead, while also forming the sentence in Czech with vocab
and casing. But I used it correctly, twice in a lesson last week! And it
was wonderful. However, in the same lesson, I mixed up the word for more
and nothing. And I told our investigator we were going to say nothing
about Joseph Smith this lesson. So yeah. Basically, there are a lot of ups
and downs with the language and I know that I just have to be patient. It
will come. It is also very helpful to be able to laugh at my own mistakes.
Another funny one was my companion mixed up the word for breakfast and
easy, and almost said it was not breakfast for Joseph Smith to receive
revelation. Which I guess is almost kind of accurate. But still not.
- We got
to Skype with members in the Czech Republic! That was super awesome! This
keyboard does not change to Czech so I cannot type his name, but he was
really awesome. He is a college student from Brno. It was super fun to get
to Skype with him. And our teachers knew all of the people that we were
Skyping with. Also fun fact, the verb to Skype in Czech is Skypovat. For
real. I could not make that up. I Skype is skypuju. I think that is rather
wonderful.
- Spiritual
thought for the week. Watch and share the Christmas video. The Church has
an AWESOME Christmas website and video and everyone should go watch it. We
got to see it during a Devotional a few weeks early. It is super cool. The
most important part of Christmas is celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ.
Presents, trees, lights, decorations, and spending time with family are
all great, but we cannot forget that all of those things are vastly
overshadowed by the birth and Atonement of our Savior.
I love you all, thank you for the love and letters, packages
and prayers, and support and singing. (I don't know how accurate that last one
is, but I wanted to continue my fun alliterativeness)
-Starší Pickett
Mountains
Journal writing party spot
No comments :
Post a Comment