HUMP-DAY!!!!

Wo de pengyoumen,

Nimen Hao!

As you can tell from the title, my hump-day was on saturday. Now i'm over halfway done with my sentence here at the MTC. Only 4 1/2 more weeks in the state pen!

Not a ton happened this week! It feels like last P-day was yesterday, the weeks just fly by here. (although not fast enough, because you know, I'm still here a month later)

But yeah! I made it to my month mark, less than 23 more months until I come home. That doesn't seem long enough. 2 years isn't enough!

I got to say goodbye to Elder (Zane) Freeman on Monday. It doesn't seem fair to see all my friends come and go  in the MTC. Elder Atkin will get here this week, leave and then I'll still have 2 weeks left! On the bright side, Our father district leaves today and tomorrow, which officially makes us the oldest Chinese district here. I really love those guys, and have gotten close, so I'm gonna be sad when they leave. Wo bu zhidao rugo wo de zhongwen shi hao. (I don't know if my Chinese is good enough to be the example) But I'm excited to be getting out of here in the upcoming future. We should get our new name tags this week or next week that have our Chinese names on them, so that's exciting. Then flight plans come soon after that, and then were in Canada!

Nothing really interesting Tuesday. The speaker was Elder Larry J. Echo Hawk from the 70. He was "native american" (even though he looked pretty white) and apparently used to be the white house's native american correspondent or something like that. He's met with President Obama before and stuff, so it was kind of cool.

Wednesday was the bomb. We got to be "Host Missionaries" basically as missionaries get dropped off at the MTC, we take their bags, go take them to get their name tags, take them to their residence halls, and then to their classrooms. There is a lot of running around and it's been kind of hot here in Provo so I was exhausted by the end of the day. It's really humid here compared to home, but it's only like 30% humidity so everyone thinks I'm crazy when I say it's really humid here, but I'm actually dying. I saw Sister (Kaylie) Minson and Elder (Cole) Fleming who reported on Wednesday. And on the plus side, I leave before Elder Fleming because he's here for 6 weeks!! You don't know how painful it was to host English speaking missionaries because they all leave next week. They only have the language missionaries host because we are here for so long, so I'll probably do it again in the upcoming weeks at least once.

We taught a "less active" member (played by our teacher as usual). It was pretty difficult actually. Progressing Investigators who keep their commitments, read The Book of Mormon and pray, are a lot easier to teach than someone who thinks they don't need the church. It was kind of rough, but we go to see her again on Wednesday, and I'm pretty excited. We should teach our investigator Bi Jie Mie today, and she is getting close to baptism, so that's really exciting.

Nothing happened really on Thursday or Friday.

Our teacher, Ang Lao Shi got married on Friday. He's only been home for 3 months so that's crazy! He'll be gone this week, so we have a bunch of subs. But all of their districts left for their missions, so there are a bunch of teachers with nobody to teach for a while, until we get new missionaries in our branch.

Saturday I didn't get to go do TRC because Elder Claflin was throwing up the night before. It sucked, because I really wanted to do that so I could attempt to put my Chinese to good use.

Sunday was pretty relaxing. The Elder who spoke on Sunday in our branch was trying to say "I love faith" (Wo ai xi wang) but instead said "Wo ai si wang" which is "I Love Death". It was funny, but just reminds me of how difficult Chinese really is! Elder Allan from the 70 spoke again for the devotional. He's good, but his talk is the same every week. He just makes everyone feel bad, and think that they are unworthy to be here. It's kind of funny actually. To get an idea of what his talks are like: the first time he talked, I was convinced I had a law of chastity problem, but I've never even kissed a girl! He's just a special kind of speaker. The movie we watched was by Elder Lund, and it was a talk about how to recognize and teach by the spirit. It was really good. One of the things I really liked that he said was that "We are all enlisted until the conflict is over. The conflict is NOT over, so we all still need to work hard."

That's about it for now. I can't wait until I'm out of here. Hope everyone is doing well!

Wo ai nimen

Wang Zhang Lao

Elder Wallace

 

His District and President and Sister Gilbert

Host Missionary- who wouldn’t want to be greeted  by that face

Elder Claflin and Elder Evans

Elder Graves top and Elder Wilkinson bottom His favorite elders from his “father” district

And one last one, this was his caption:

Samuel Smith (the first missionary) and Elder Wallace (the best and most humble missionary)

I’ll I can say, you gotta love him!!!