My first week in the MTC has been great. Very eventful and also very crazy. I love it.
I had some pretty hard things but for the most part I've been really resilient and I just feel like everything is fun here even when it's not.
Lets see, I got here on Wednesday. It was pretty fun. I was so excited because my kasana (companion) is Sister Kylee Jenkins. Basically we are best friends. We are aggies... we have mutual friends... we have nervous laughs... it's been real fun. The first day we had a devotional and this cute (as in like kid cute) hispanic elder turned to me bouncing up and down "We are at the MTC!" like it was better than disneyland. and it is! We started learning some Tagalog on the first day, but it was kindof hard. It didn't sink in very well :)
I had so many tender mercies on the first day that were so comforting. One was that we found a checkout paper in my room and my kasana said wow Baltic Mission. I was like Sister Bestenlehner?? I am in Halli's room. What are the odds? It was just like a boost to know that Halli was just there! Then there was a sister in my branch who knows Hannah and Jake (my uncle and aunt). I have met so many people who have really neat connections to me, including my companion, who I was able to text and talk to before the mission.
Thursday morning started off very exciting because all of our alarms didn't work. I'm not kidding. We woke up an HOUR late. Luckily we didn't have anywhere to be for a half hour so we just missed breakfast. But we felt really embarrassed and bad. It was funny though. The rest of the day went pretty good. We had some fun classes and also had a meeting with our branch president. He is so awesome. His name is President Howard and he opened up the Philippines mission a long time ago with Myke Weber. So that's pretty neat.
Friday we we got up and had a lot of classroom time. Like all day. haha. But it was our first time doing gym time and we played volleyball and we practiced SYL (speak your language) by counting our hits sa Tagalog. It is getting easier to use words here and there but it is also stressful because it is just not super intuitive and there is so much to learn. But I really like it. We learned how to pray and bear testimonies in one day. It was awesome. We also taught our first investigator. I was extremely jealous of english speaking missionaries. Our investigator's name is Angelyn. Oh yeah, before we taught her, we asked our teacher which room to go to. We thought he said 336. Well we got there and we were like okay lets' pray. Well we bowed our heads to pray and someone said "are you goijng to knock on that door?" and we were like "um yeah." and he was like "that's the women's restroom. You think you're going to teach in there?" moment of shame. We were like no it's our investigator's room. then I was like maybe we are supposed to go to 326. Yes. We were supposed to go to 326. That was really funny. Our investigator only spoke Tagalog and we didn't really understand her. She was really good at not laughing at us. We actually got the giggles while I was saying the opening prayer. That was sad. But, we had moments where we really knew what we were doing (or thought we did).
Well, everyone. Ako po si mga anak ng Diyos po tayo. Mahal kita all of you! WRITE ME. Preferably in the next half hour so I can read something. Haha. Love you all lots.
Love Sister Smith
Hi mom,
Thanks for the Dear Elders. I like them, but I have gotten more than the other people in my district. I really like the MTC. I love you a lot.I wish you would get on your computer haha. It's weird to me that you're not.
I have really liked it here. I had alot of funny stories and stuff but I forgot them and I wrote them down then left them in the classroom. I will have to send you them next week.
How is everyone doing? I really am so surprised. The only times I've felt homesick at all are when I think about texting you. haha. But other than that I haven't even cried because of being homesick or anything. i don't feel sad at all here. It's like hard because I sometimes do but I really don't. I don't miss my old life yet. I guess it's nice to just be here. Sister Blake has had a hard time too. I talked to her a little bit and she seems to be a little sad. Hopefully she gets better. I think she's like me and she just overthinks things a lot. Like we talked about how everyone told us once we were set apart we would feel better but both of us felt worse. So i guess it's good she understands.
My companion is awesmoe. It's the girl that the boy in my ward told me about. She actually dated that boy in my ward and had a similar experience as me as far as like deciding to still go on a mission. It's also fun because she knows a lot of people in my ward so we can sometimes talk about them and it really keeps me focused on this place in alot of ways because we have good memeories but we aren't distracted or holidng in too many emotions.
sorry the typing is horrible. I am trying to hurry so hopefully you might see this. love you lots!!!
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Sister Smith
