MTC Time

May 30, 2011

Today was our first day at the MTC.  I’m sitting here at 7:40 in the evening totally and completely spent and wondering if it’s too early to just crash.  Boy, I am such an old person!  Todd and I got a lot of comments today on how young we were but I’m really not feeling it right now.

We got our missionary name tags this morning.  It was pretty awesome to pull them out of the bag and see ‘Sister Fife’ (me!) on a missionary name tag.  I promptly pinned it on and viola I looked like an official missionary!  I’m not real sure I feel like one yet though.  I was doing my homework tonight (yes!  They gave us homework the first day!)  reading in Preach My Gospel and it said that as a missionary, I am an authorized representative of Jesus Christ.  Wow~  not just a representative of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints but of Jesus Christ.  I think I had better start shaping up a bit more!   We have been so busy getting the house ready to go these last four months and gathering all the ‘things’ that we would need for the next 18 months and packing and seeing family and the list goes on, that I feel I have kinda slacked on my spiritual preparation.  I’m mostly there, but not quite ready.   Not quite as ready as my bags are anyway!  So I really want to take these next two weeks and just let the world slide into the background for once and let my Savior take center stage.  I am so ready for that.

We came in with a group of about 70 other senior missionaries.  Not all of them couples either, there are about 6 single senior sisters that are going out as well.  It was really neat to hear where everyone was from, where they are all going and what type of mission they will be doing.  The Lord needs us in all the corners of the world and for so many reasons!  We spent a lot of time chatting and getting to know people.  They are all so nice and fun to talk with.  At dinner one sister looked around and commented that of all the hundreds and hundreds of people there that they were all smiling and happy.  And it was so true, smiles and laughter everywhere.  This is a place of joy and I am sooo happy to be here!

We ran into Jonathon Bahr from back home today.  It was fun to see a familiar face.  Sometimes the world is a small place.  (Laura-  he looked happy and really good~)

June 1, 2011;

Today was number 3 at the MTC.  We spent most of yesterday in smaller groups learning how to be missionaries.   We spent a lot of time studying the manual Preach My Gospel and going through how to handle different scenarios.  Mostly we just learned how to talk to people.  Today however, they had us put our new skills right to the test.  They brought in volunteers from the community (most of them already members, thank goodness!) and they would pretend to be investigators and we would go and meet with them for a 45 min appointment.  Some people really got freaked out about this!  Not so much Todd and I.  We studied and prepared but didn’t stress too much and it went pretty well.  We had a very nice young woman from Hawaii that was here going to school and we had a great visit.   Challenged her to pray and read her scriptures and she excepted both invitations J

The food here though is going to be a problem.  It is too good!  We are finding that we are eating every time we turn around and not just a little bit!  We are going to have to start going to the gym if we aren’t more careful.   Or maybe we’ll just quit worrying about it and enjoy it~  because once we get to Africa I think the food situation will probably take a sharp decline!  (I’m not so excited to try cane rat)

We finally got a early evening tonight so I think Todd is going to try to get the blog set up and running.  I am excited to share our adventures with friends and family.  (even if it’s not very excited yet)

June 5, 2011

Saturday was our first ‘P’day and it was a great day!  We slept in until like 7 o’clock, we would have slept later but breakfast only runs until 7:30!  But it was still really nice.  We’ve been getting up about 5:30 just to get everything done before breakfast and it’s never enough, I’m always running short of time and have to skip something.  We did a temple session after breakfast at the Provo Temple.  It seems really kind of odd to walk to the temple, but very enjoyable.  Afterward there were at least 3 families in the front, all dressed in white with children running all over-  it was so neat to see!  There was even a wedding party doing pictures, it was quite the happening place!  Very busy.

We then ate lunch (again with the eating!  Always eating here!) then had to take a big long nap-  VERY much enjoyed it!  Afterward we walked over to the BYU campus and they were having a big book festival with tents everywhere and big puppet people (Kelsey would have hated it J) we had a great time just wandering through the booths and shopping.  It seemed kind of weird to be out in the real world though, like we were wandering in forbidden territory or something!  It was a great day.

Sunday was fast and testimony and frankly it was such a relief not to be eating for a few meals!  We got to church in a small branch of about 30-40 missionaries, mostly ‘juniors’  they love to bear their testimonies and a lot of them finished in the mission language.  It was really neat to sit and soak up their spirit.  We had a fireside that night and it was a great fireside, but in the beginning, Sister Nalley, (the wife of one of the Mission President Counselors) led us all in a great version of Called to Serve.  She showed us a picture of the 2000 stripling warriors then asked all 2000 missionaries to put themselves in their place.  Imagine we are marching into war.  There is a large hill we are behind, so for the first verse we sang very softly, like we were far off.  Then we crest the top of the hill and the second verse gets louder, by the last line of this verse we are singing loud-  Children of Our King-  We all stand at ‘King’ and the last verse we sang with mucho gusto- all 2000 missionaries on their feet!  It was very moving and inspiring to look up and see this huge sea of white shirts and ties marching as to battle.  Way too cool.  J  

June 7, 2011

Today was a day of big highs and big fears!  I started this beautiful day off with my first French prayer!  Todd and I have been studying our French pretty hard since coming to the MTC and on Monday we got all the church materials for language training.  It contained a whole chapter on prayer language!  So all Monday night we studied and this morning I said my first French prayer!  It is so cool to say that first prayer in your foreign language, it finally means I can carry on a conversation!  It might be very one sided, but it’s still a conversation and it’s so cool to share this awesome moment with my Heavenly Father.  So great start to a beautiful day!

We then sat in lectures ALL day.  I mean ALL day!  He let us have a half hour for lunch and 2, 5 min. potty breaks for an entire straight 9 hours.  It was a long day, we learned a lot of great stuff, but then in the afternoon he started in on all the tropical diseases and bugs and parasites that are prevalent in foreign countries.  Africa, by the way, has almost all of them!  So we heard lots of graphic stories and saw lots of graphic pictures.  By the end of the afternoon I was not really sure I wanted to continue on this little adventure of ours!  I know, these are worse case scenarios and we probably won’t get any of them, but some are really freaky and disturbing just the same!