Tuesday, August 21, 2018

First full week in the MTC (or CTM as it's called in Brazil)

Family and friends,
I thought football was hard. I thought working 40 hour weeks was hard. I thought waking up at 4:45 for work was hard. The mtc trumps them all. The constant busyness, tons of things to remember and memorize, constant pressure on yourself to keep up and do better and having no free time is killer. Every minute of the day is spent studying the gospel, language, or eating. There's not much else that happens  here. its been a lot to handle but at the same time its great. The people and instructors are incredible. Devotionals are great and church in Portuguese is cool. We have been given so much to do over the past few days. There are around...
120 words
50 phrases
4 scriptures or passages
to memorize in our first ten days. On top of that, we have to be learning the lessons in Portuguese, be having conversations with Brazilians when possible, and setting our own additional goals on top of that. Sunday we were supposed to have completed a survey about how we were handling stress etc. and none of the 20 people in our arrival group had completed it! The leader (from the branch presidency) told us to repent and do better. It was not fun to hear. There is a lot to stay on top of but you have to be able to handle it and stay in control of it all. 
My companion is elder Skinner. He's 20 and did 2 years at byu before coming out. He said he needed to work on his testimony so he waited before leaving. He's done a ton of duo lingo and his vocab is incredible. He can speak and understand better than anyone in our group. We're getting along well. An elder in my district was in a car wreck 2 days before reporting to the mtc and had a concussion but still came. He hadn't been doing well and felt pretty bad so all the elders in the district gave him a blessing which was great and fasted yesterday\today for him. He seems to be doing better.
Reading pmg and the bom a couple times along with going out with the elders helped give me a good head start. Tchau!
-Elder Anderson

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