MTC - Week 7
Thanksgiving this week was really fun. I was
not that excited for it because I thought it would be lame and sad. I ended up
having a really good time. Our district was ushering for all the devotionals on
Thanksgiving, so we got to see some behind the scenes stuff. Dallin H Oaks came
to speak to us for our morning devotional on Thanksgiving, all of our district
got to say hi and stuff to him before the devotional. He brought a lot of his
family with him and they played some music for us, it was really good. He
talked about being thankful and talked about some of the history of
Thanksgiving.
Afterward, since my
companion, Elder Brandner, got interviewed by the church news, he makes it into
this article.
Here is the link to the article. https://www.lds.org/church/news/givethanks-in-all-things-elder-oaks-tells-missionaries-on-thanksgiving?lang=eng
After that first
devotional we had lunch, which they ended up making our dinner. They had turkey
and potatoes and everything for us. It was very good, but it was not as good as
my mother’s Thanksgiving dinner. Either way I was extremely grateful for all
the cafeteria workers that spent time away from their family to cook lunch for
us. They just had us pack up a sack dinner right after lunch so the cafeteria
workers could go home.
After lunch we had
another devotional where they explained our service project for the day. They
had someone from the Church Welfare speak and the head of Feeding Children Everywhere
speak. It was interesting hearing the head of the Feeding Children Everywhere
speak because he was not LDS. After we heard them speak we started doing our
service project. They had us preparing meals for children in need throughout
Utah. We only did about two hours of service but we prepared about 300,000
meals which we were informed is a new MTC record. It was fun to do service on Thanksgiving
because, as I would help assemble each meal, I could think about how fortunate
I am and how much I have.
In the evening they had a
Gratitude devotional where they just showed some short Thanksgiving videos and
then had Elders and Sisters share some of their talents. It was really nice to
watch and be grateful for everything. Overall, it was a really good Thanksgiving
and I was happy that I got one last good Thanksgiving before leaving the States.
Teaching the member in
Thailand via Skype was really interesting. It seemed to me that we could
communicate somewhat decently in conversation, but there were a bunch of times
that we would ask a question and they would just start going way too fast and
bunched together to understand. We would usually just say something like
"good" afterward to make it look like we understood. I feel pretty
confident now in the language though. I can understand almost anything now if
it isn't said to fast, I just don't know how to reply to some things yet. We do
another Skype lesson tonight so hopefully that goes well.
My ankle is doing better.
I still haven't been cleared to do gym time yet, but I think I should be able
to have it in a few days. I have been really missing running every day. The
last week, at least they have let me do ten minutes a day on the exercise bike.
They let me do that earlier because there is no impact on the bike, I guess.
Yesterday, I got called
as the online coordinator for our branch. I don't really do much except teach
all the new missionaries how to use the computers here and tell them all the
rules and stuff. Speaking of new missionaries our nun Thais come on Wednesday
(nun means younger in Thai) I am really excited to have them around. Apparently
in the new group there is someone who already speaks Thai. It will be fun to
have him around to help settle arguments about vocab and tones.
It seems weird that our
district is only two weeks away from leaving now. We should get our flight
plans this Wednesday I think we will be leaving really early in the morning,
and go through either Japan or Hong Kong.
Well not much else
everything is really good here and it is nice to think about how close our
district is to leaving.
Elder Cheney
Here are two links to our service project:
Keep up the good work!
ReplyDeleteLove,
Sister Levesque