Day 16 MTC

Kamusta ka, pamilya?

This week was great! I've been learning SOOO much here! I thought I'd be learning mostly Cebuano here, but I've been learning more life lessons (ex: how to get along with different personality types, how to understand investigators' needs, etc.). It feels like I've been here forever already. The weeks go by so fast here! I literally feel like it was just Saturday--all the days blur together. Here's typical schedule:

6:30- wake up and get ready for the day
7:00- personal study
8:15- breakfast
8:45- classroom instruction (ex: learn Cebuano, teach investigators, study preach my gospel, companionship study, etc. etc.)
11:45- language study
1:10- lunch
1:55-additional study time
2:45- classroom instruction again
5:45- daily planning session
6:10- dinner
6:55- TALL (when we go to the computer labs with headphones to practice hearing and speaking Cebuano)
8:10-Gym
9:30- personal time/prepare for bed

Mondays we have service at 6am. . . it's actually not too bad. Plus we get an extra 15 minutes to get ready.

On Sundays, our meetings are all spread out. For Relief Society, we watch Music and the Spoken Word and then have a guest speaker to talk to all the sisters at the MTC. We still have all our normal study hours on Sundays. Sacrament meeting is after lunch. For talks, everyone in the zone prepares a talk on the same topic and then they announce who is speaking during the meeting!! So if you're not prepared, too bad. It's a really smart idea though: I'll have 6 talks prepared to use on my mission. :) Sunday nights are awesome: first I have choir practice at 5, then the Sunday night Devotional, then we watch a talk or church video.

Tuesdays are cool too because we don't have to stress about teaching and we have Tuesday night devotionals. Afterwards, our district has a sort of testimony meeting about what we thought about the devotional. We have all become so close! I think we have the most unified district.

We're teaching two new investigators: Tintin and Bal (our two new teachers: Brother Young and Brother Taylor). They're both very different from each other. Brother Young is CRAzy, but he's very enthusiastic about the gospel. He brings the Spirit very strong into the classroom. Brother Taylor is one of my favorite teachers. He has a quieter personality, but he has a very clear vision about the purpose of missionary work. After his first lesson with us, I felt so much better about what my role is as a missionary. My teachers are finally starting to speak a little more English. The first week, they spoke almost exclusively Cebuano. Now, the spiritual thoughts are 80% Cebuano.

Since I'm in a tri-panionship, we switch the role of senior companion every 2 weeks. We just switched yesterday. I learned a TON about being a leader from this experience. Even though it's hard to keep track of two companions (especially when they go in different directions, haha), we are growing so much together.

Here's some cool linguistic stuff for ya, Dad. :) The phrase for "eternal life" is kinabuing dayon, which literally means "life continuing." There are two words for the word "know:" kahibalo-which means to know in your head, and nasayud-which means to know in your heart. Also, the word for "fulness" is kahingpitan, which includes the word "perfect" in it (hingpit). The more I learn Cebuano, the more I see how flawed English is. Cebuano is so cool to learn! The grammar actually isn't all that bad to learn. There's a lot of markers to memorize (ex: mga is how you make things plural, etc) but the conjugations are fairly simple, depending on what the main focus of the sentence is. Cool stuff.

One of my companions has been really really sick lately. And then just yesterday she sprained her ankle really bad. Even though we're been missing a lot of class and study time everyday, we are being blessed. We should be far behind everyone else, but we are staying caught up. It's cool to see how my MTC experience thus far has been more about helping people, rather than teaching or language skills. God really knows what experiences I need to become a better missionary and person.

Spiritual thought of the week: In class this week, Brother Young told us to write questions (in Cebuano) on the board about the plan of salvation, as if we were an investigator. We ended up answering one about why repentance is necessary if Christ has already paid for our sins. Brother Young explained that repentance is not a negative thing. Repentance means change---changing to not only commit no more sin, but changing to be better than we ever have before. Repentance means turning towards God. We turn towards God in so many positive ways, so we should not think of repentance as something we only do when we do something bad. Remember: good, better, best! (Dallin H. Oaks, I think?)

How are the students from Taiwan?? Have fun entertaining them with all the kids gone, haha. Alex and Jared: here's the deal, I'm writing you letters today, so you have to write me back! K? k. :)

Anyhoo, I love you all so much! Thanks for all the support and especially your advice! Keep it coming! And sorry if it takes me a while to write anyone back--I didn't finish writing even half of my letters last p-day, haha.

Kinasingkasing,
Sister Amanda Smith :)

Standing in Dad's parking spot and pointing to his office - sooo close!