First Letter

Ni hao Wo de pengyou!

So Wednesday when I left for Provo I sat next to Elder Giles from Montana who is going to Kentucky I believe. I've seen him a bunch since being here, we have the same workout time and P-day. I'm kind of jealous because he's already halfway done with his MTC sentence (I mean, stay haha). But I really do love it here. When we got to the MTC they gave us our name tags, and mine is all in Chinese! Its really cool! I saw Sister (Tessara) Rollins after being on campus for about 60 seconds which was cool. When we went to our first class, our teacher, (ou yang lao shi) spoke   only in Chinese. It was very intimidating because, you know, I don't speak Chinese. Even though I couldn't understand anything, when our teacher bore her testimony in Chinese, the spirit was crazy strong. My companions are Elder Wickham from California and Elder Claflin from Riverton Utah.

That's right, I'm cursed (I mean blessed) to have a tri-panionship. It actually isn't that bad, and I love both of my companions. 

Our district is pretty weird. Most districts are going to one mission, but ours is going all over the world. Elder Claflin and I are going to Vancouver, Most Elders are going to Tabei, some are going to New Zealand, our sisters are going to Hong Kong, Tabei, and New Zealand, and Elder Wickham is going to London! Overall 3 Sisters and 9 Elders

Thursday was very long. We had about 6 hours of Chinese class which honestly wasn't that bad, just really tiring. We are totally picking up the language though, even if we can only say a few things. I can pray completely in Chinese, and bare a simple testimony in Chinese, after only a few days.

Friday, we taught our first investigator completely in CHINESE!!!!! It was insanely hard, and we crashed and burned miserably. But it was a ton of fun. This isn't a real investigator, it's actually one of the other teachers who will later become our teacher this week. his "name" is Lin Di Xiong, which means brother Lin.

By Saturday the days started to pick up. Honestly, the first three days of the MTC were the longest 3 weeks of my life.
But now that we are kind of on a set schedule it's getting better. The food is beginning to grow on me. Literally, I eat so much every meal because I'm so hungry, There's no way I haven't gained weight since I got here. We taught Brother Lin again Saturday, and that was pretty much as bad as the first time. We teach him again Monday night (tonight) and hopefully it will go better. I'm pretty jealous of the English speakers who get to actually understand what they are saying and what is being said to them.

Sunday was so awesome! We had tons of personal study time and our district took it as an opportunity to take a break from Chinese and just study the doctrine, which is really what we all needed. Our sacrament meeting with our branch was all in Chinese, which was fun. I could pick out a few sentences here and there, but for the most part I just kind of sat there. It'll be fun in a few weeks when we can understand the talks. At 3 we had our temple walk which is amazing. It literally felt like we were leaving the prison gates to freedom as we left the MTC campus and walked across the street to the Provo Temple. It felt like years since I had seen trees, and cars, and the sky; you basically spend all day in the classroom at the MTC. My district and I all went to sing with the MTC Choir which brings a crazy strong spirit to us. Something cool we found out was that we (the MTC choir) will get to sing with the Nashville Tribute Band next month which is like the coolest thing ever! Our speaker at the fireside was Elder Steven B. Allan from the 70. He was pretty good. But afterwards you get to watch a film, and we saw a talk that Elder Bednar gave at the MTC like 3 years ago on Christmas I think. It may have been the best talk I have ever seen! I don't know if you can find it, but you should try and look up "The Character of Christ" by Elder Bednar. It's kind of a long one, but SO worth it.

Then today, we went to the temple in the morning, did laundry and now I'm on the computer.

If anyone wants to handwrite or use dearelder.com, I can get those every day and write back everyday so that's fun!

I think that's about it for now. To sum the first (almost) full week up, life is crazy great here. The spirit at the MTC is crazy strong! Chinese is crazy hard! But we are learning it crazy fast!

So everything is CRAZY! ...(i'm sorry I'm weird)

Love you all and can't wait to hear from you!

Wo ai nimen.

Wang Zhang Lao

(Elder Wallace)

Badge and Brandon and Elder Wickham