MTC Hits 3,000 Missionaries

Family!!!! Hi!!!!

How are you guys!?! I'm first just going to go through the dumb boring stuff that we have to cover real quick before we get to how the week's been. First, did you ever find out anything from the Stembridge lady about getting my stuff out. I think maybe Twit should call Skanchy this week and see what he'd be willing to do. I really don't want to have a carry on because 3 bags it's just too much and I have enough stuff that I can send home that I think it'd work. Matthew's number is in my cell phone. Hopefully he'll comply?? Eesh, I just don't know. So there's no AC in our classrooms, just fans. Haha, it's hilarious because it's honestly not too bad, there's only been a couple days that have been not good, but you'd think the elders were going to die of heat in there or something. They're going to kill over in the Philippines if a room with 3 fans in it is too hot. Haha. Yep, and all of our elders are super tall. Elder Gallacher is actually the 4th tallest I think. We have 3 elders that are 6'5", 6'4" and 6'2". They're seriously going to dwarf the Philippinos like none other. The little Philippino girl here comes up to Elder Webster waist. It's pretty funny to see them standing next to each other.

This week we're about to hit the highest capacity ever seen at the MTC....almost 3,000 missionaries at the same time. i honestly don't know how this place functions so smoothly. They have to have some serious coordination going on. And every time I eat breakfast, it just blows my mind how much milk and cereal they must go through. It's incredible! For our devotional on Tuesday we watched some of the Mormon commercials and they showed the one with Allie Schneider. It was funny because my companion was like, that's so awesome! and I was like, I totally know her! What exactly happened to her again? She was born like that, right? I couldn't remember and my kamasa is curious.

So I'm wondering if there's a book out there of Tagalog verbs like the 500 Spanish verbs book that I have? Would you mind looking and let me know. I doubt there will be, but it would honestly be so helpful. The language is such a cool one. It's all about just knowing roots and then you manipulate the root to make it say what you want it to. For instance, bayad means to pay. To make it a gerand you do, pagbabayad which means paying, and then if you do pagbabayad-sala, it means "paying of sins" or, the Atonement. How sweet is that. Everything is just used in such a simplist and clear way which makes it awesome. It just depends on what prefixes you use and how you hook it together. Like "Liwanag" means light, but if you put "Ipa" onto the front of it, it makes it a causitive verb so it mean "to cause to come to light" or "to explain" in english. It's a really sweet language.

I heard that Kamas was on the news this week. My teacher told me it was because someone drowned in the river? Super sad. I also got the HP magazine and news article this week which was the highlight in the Philippino hallway. Everyone wanted to read the HP article. It was hilarious. I loved the part that compared it to the book of Mormon. That was my excuse for saying it was totally "mission appropriate" material. haha. Oh yeah, and got the emails from Jeannie and Kim too. Salamat Po.

So pretty much I've decided that since there's like 4 days packed into one day, I go through about 27 emotions with in a 24 hour period though. Honest to goodness, It's so annoying. It's like the world's worst emotional roller coaster. It's because you're really tired, but then you're happy, but then you get frustrated with the language, but then you're on a spiritual high. It's honestly comical how quickly it can change… and slightly annoying too though I might add. I'm loosing all my muscle in this place too! I have no calf muscles left at all. I seriously sat on my bed yesterday morning before gym and mourned the loss of all my muscle. It was a sad day indeed :( Hopefully I'll get it back quickly after the mish.

Ok, I'm out of time that’s the lamest thing ever. But I love you all and I'll talk to you next week. Maybe I'll send a handwritten letter too so I feel like I got everything in. Love you!

Just kidding, my Kasama is amazing and is letting me use the rest of her email time! Yay! Ok, so next on the list:

So the two older districts from our zone left this week and it was seriously so sad, but so great. They were all just so excited to go and so pumped and I couldn't help but get excited to go. I'm kind of glad they're gone though now because while they were here it was just making me too anxious to leave too. And note to everyone, I still have 3 weeks to go, so no reason to get anxious already. It's good though; I have way too much to learn about teaching and Tagalog to be jetting off just quite yet. Crazy thing though, I get my flight plans next Thursday! AAAAHHHHH! I can't believe it's honestly here already! So the next email I send will have my flights and travel plans and then we can figure out when I can call you guys. I don't know if I'm going to need to buy a calling card though or something? Haven't quite figure that out yet but I'll let you know. Oh yeah, and Sister Dyer is from Orem. Thanks for letting me know about Gma Bennett. That's so sweet of her to help out. I'll be sure to send her a thank you soon. I hope she's doing ok though. And Mike too. Kind of funny that he broke it at the ATV rodeo of all places, I have to be honest, but I hope he's doing well and that it heals quickly. Not so much a good thing to be without when you're a mechanic you know.

Funny story from the week; so we were all talking about how long it takes to learn the language and our teacher said on average 6 months. So we were saying how that's a perfect Christmas present, and Elder Larsen goes, with all sincerity, "I'm going to wake up Christmas morning and it's going to be like, bam, "Kumusta po Kayo? Mag-fluent ako!". Hahaha, oh my goodness, it was so funny. I realize it's probably one of those stories where you had to be there and part of the funniest may just be that we'd been cooped up for hours by that time in the day, but it was so funny. Hopefully we'll be fluent by Christmas. Man, I sure hope so because spitting it out now is seriously painful it feels like. Last story, so the fire alarm went off a couple nights ago at about 2:30 in the morning. Yeah, kill me now. So we're all evacuating out of the building. My kasama was pretty upset, but I just thought it was humorous to be quite honest. Mostly because I knew if I got mad about it, it'd wake me up too much and then I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep. haha. I'm out of time again, but I really wanted to tell you about a talk by Elder Holland that I heard this week, so maybe I'll write it in a letter. Love you so much much much! Ingat po!