Josh Mission Email Feb 16
Happy Monday y’all!
Coming at you again from good old Provo, hope life is good in the outside world.
I’m settling in at the MTC, I just about have the routine locked down. 6:30 still comes BRIGHT AND EARLY every day but I remind myself that I would already be in seminary (or on my way (whoops lol 😬)) if I was still in high school and it makes it a little better.
Language classes started this week on Thursday! I now spend around 7 hours every day in Mandarin immersion classes and it is wild. For these first few days we get some explanation, especially grammar instruction, in English but as the days and weeks go on it’ll be less and less.
I’m getting pretty good at asking questions that are too in depth to possibly answer in the tiny bit of Chinese that we know so my teachers are forced to answer in English which is hype. I feel like they’re important, valid questions too but it’s really funny to watch my teachers come up with the answer in Chinese and then realize it means nothing to us and then defeatedly switch back.
We spend most of our time with Brother Ferry or Sister Porter, who are both American and served Chinese speaking in California. They’re phenomenal though, they talk with the native Taiwanese teacher across the hall all the time and they have no problems.
My companions and I were assigned to be the Zone Leaders for our branch, which doesn’t really come with that many responsibilities. EXCEPT if you are the branch 1 ZLs, and you better believe we #1 out here🥇. The branch 1 ZLs are in charge of the early arrival Elders who get to the MTC before Wednesday afternoon. Throughout the day mostly on Tuesday but it could be earlier,we are called down to the information desk to go get the Elders. We take them to their residence hall, get them set up and then they have a class we take them to. It’s so cool to get to know the new people, especially because a lot of the early arrivals are on international flights.
Everybody has such divisive opinions on the food here, and I wish I could defend it. We get 3 meals a day and they are warm, decently well made, and there is a ton of variety so it feels like something is always good I can eat. The chocolate milk is just as good as everyone says it is, and there’s POG juice in the mornings, and unlimited red cream soda 🤑.
All that being said, the ham made me sick a few nights ago so that’s major points off. Elder Toganivalu said he wasn’t feeling great after it either, but there weren’t mass reports of food poisoning so unfortunately it may have just been a skill issue 👎. Womp womp, it makes a good story and email title.
Thank you all so much for your emails last week, I loved them all and they’re such a good way to break up the day. I’m going to try to reply to them all, bug me if I don’t get back to you! I have heard the news about Richie Saunders tearing his ACL, please know that I am devastated. Everyone please go pour out a bag of tater tots in his honor. I assume all of BYU is heartbroken, I’m sending prayers 💔.
Love you guys, talk to you next week!
No google photos yet, here’s a few pics tho
