Josh Mission Feb 23
What’s up party people, we’re back for another P day update.
This week was pretty solid, we’re locked in to a good routine at this point. There is so much Chinese class it is crazy, but I am seeing progress. The hard part about learning more about a subject is learning just how much you don’t know, so Chinese feels a lot more daunting after this week. My teacher says the best way to an elephant is one bite at a time, so I’m trying to take that to heart.
The flu has been WRECKING the MTC lately, we’ve had a couple people in our district get quarantined. As a result, the MTC presidency instituted a no contact policy, which means that no one is allowed to touch each other in any way until further notice.
You better believe that a bunch of young people are NOT feeling that because we all think we’re invincible. People are making a big show about dapping each other up in secret now, or freaking out when somebody bushes by them in the hallway or cafeteria. Our branch leadership is even in on the bit, I had a couple forbidden handshakes yesterday. The MTC president’s wife almost forgot yesterday too, and she ended up swerving this guy’s handshake at the last second in front of a crowd of several hundred missionaries. I don’t know if that aura is recoverable, but luckily he’ll be thousands of miles away in Finland for the next 2 years.
We got some good snow on Wednesday RIGHT BEFORE the new arrivals came so we had to drag all their stuff through the snow in the cold. Apparently the sidewalks are heated though so basically as soon as we were done the snow and ice got melted and cleared. It was Elder Toganivalu’s first time being in the snow and he LOVED IT. He was not a fan of the aftermath where it was freezing for a few days.
Having a super diverse district from all around the world is great, most of the time. We played UNO the other day and it got heated. We tried to have a good old fashioned American Democatic discussion about the rules, and it went up in flames. There were all sorts of Australian, Finnish, English, and newly created Fijan rules (it was his first time playing but he got creative). You better belive I still won, but in the future we are going to exchange American Democracy for American Property Rights (shoutout the constitution) and we will be playing the right way. No World Health Organization advertisement has ever made me so concerned about the state of affairs in foreign countries as this game of UNO has.
We had our weekly general authority devotional and this week’s was great. They don’t announce the speaker beforehand so we were all just sitting in the auditorium when they announce that President Uchtdorf would be addressing. We all tried to reverently pop off but it got loud in there for a second. President Uchtdorf and his wife gave great messages and being in the presence of one of the Lord’s apostles is always a great experience. We learned that hope is not a naive or wistful feeling, it is a lot like trust and faith in that it motivates us to take action.
That’s all I have for this week, keep emailing me though! I should have some more time today to get back to everyone who emailed me the last couple weeks.
Elder Banks
