MTC Week 3

Our District

Another short week has gone by, and I'm still enjoying my time here at the MTC! As I have been focusing on the language and my other studies, the time truly has been going by fast. It definitely doesn't seem like it, but it's been two and a half weeks already since I came into the MTC! I can't imagine how fast it's going to go when I am a few months in.

Decoration in our room

As per request of my mother, I will briefly go over my day-to-day schedule in case anyone is curious. Each morning, we wake up at 6:30, shower, get dressed, and plan for the day. At about 8:00, we go to breakfast at the cafeteria. The food actually is pretty good! They're pretty good at switching up the food, so I've only had about one or two repeat meals in the past two weeks. After breakfast, we either go to class from 8:30-11:30, or we have study time for the same amount of time. The classes are fun, and the teachers are great. It feels a lot like school, but instead of having a variety of classes, we spend almost all of the time exclusively working on French. Occasionally we will read the scriptures together, but that only lasts about 30 minutes. At study time, we are basically on our own to do what we need to do. We have to do an hour of personal study, companion study, and language study each, and so we usually space those out a little bit so we don't have too many times where we sit down for too long. After class or study time, we eat lunch, and then go right back to class from 1:30-4:30. Then after that, we have dinner, and then either go back to class from 6:00-9:00, or study for the rest of the day. So each day except for P-day and Sunday, we have 6 hours of classroom study. We also get exercise time, either at 11:20-12:20 or 6:20-7:20. Usually our district sticks together, and we work out and play basketball, volleyball, and four square (Which actually gets fairly intense and competitive sometimes; it is super fun). Then we are supposed to be in our residence by 9:30 and in bed with the lights out by 10:30. Having a set schedule and getting used to it really makes it easy to focus on our studies and the language and not have to get stressed about planning.

The Elders in our district at the Provo Temple this morning

 This week we had two apostles come in, Elder Ballard spoke on Sunday night and Elder Anderson spoke on Thursday. They were such great talks! Elder Anderson's talk particularly resonated with me, and it makes me so excited to learn to love and serve the people in Montreal. He spoke about missionary work in general and gave a few stories of missionaries and investigators that really made me excited to bring others unto Christ. It was super cool!

I'm now the assigned bodyguard for the Zone Leaders

Every night, the Elders in our zone gather together before bed time to sing Cantiques (French for Hymns) and mess around. We have what we call "artifacts" that are passed down from missionary to missionary, and each one has certain "blessings" and "curses" that are pretty funny. There is a "French Council" of 5 Elders, including the Zone Leaders, the two bodyguards to the ZL's, and the "Cantiques Master," which decide what gets to be an artifact and what rules are attributed to them.  On Sunday, I was chosen to be one of the two bodyguards to the ZL's, and I got a nerf gun that we have "executions" with if someone doesn't obey the rules of their artifact. It is honestly super ridiculous, but it's a ton of fun and we have lots of fun with it. On Monday, we had 7 of our 11 districts leave, which amounts to about 75 people. It was super sad because we really got close to them, but it's exciting that they're getting out to the field. On the night before everyone left, the whole zone gathered around the fountain (Which lights up and is gorgeous at night) and sang a Hymn that is only in French called "Souviens-toi" which is really pretty. It was super solemn and sad, but we're super excited for them.

The note we left the new Elders in our room, so they'd find it after we were gone!

 We've had a lot more lessons this week, and they've been getting increasingly better as time goes on. We now use no notes for our lessons, and are able to understand French very well, and are able to speak well enough to get our point across. Now that the language is becoming less of an issue, all we've been focusing on is the content of our lessons and keeping the doctrine simple. French is really hard, and my Spanish does conflict sometimes (I sometimes speak Spanish in my lessons which gets pretty comical), but It's crazy how much we've been able to learn.

It's been another great week here. I love my district, and we continue to get along well. Although I'm loving my time here, I'm getting more and more excited to get out in the field and serve the people in Montreal. Love you all, talk to you next week!

Love,

Elder James