Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Letter from Sister Hall!


I know you are probably distraught right now about not hearing from me yet, pero alas my pday is today (Martes).
Which is a great day to have it we have decided.

So you dropped me off. And the next few minutes was pretty much a whirlwind. I was taken to a room where I spent about three seconds with about ten different people answering questions and receiving lovely gifts, aka necessary papers. Then I dropped my things off in my room and was taken to a computer lab, by this point I was only being spoken to in Tagalog and was reasonably confused as to what I was supposed to be doing. After taking an orientation on the computer. I was dropped off at my classroom. I have four elders and five (including me) sisters in my district. The elders. We have two from Australia, one from Fuji and one from Arizona. They are young. But they are all reasonably fun to be around. Although we occasionally question if Fuji really likes, but we just think that it is his culture and women aren’t really respected there. But he is bound to like us by the end. He is always joking with me, but I can never hear what he is saying because he talks so quietly. So I just laugh anyways. The first day here one of our sister’s didn’t show. So we were in a foursome companionship. It was kind of fun. She turned up the next day, she had been sick.

My companions. I have two. We are a tatlohan (threesome). When we walk we smash the person in the middle and call it a kasama (companion) sandwich. I was assigned to be the senior companion. Which I thought was silly at first and seemingly pointless. But I have had to direct us all of the time. In conversation, learning, walking, almost all decisions I have the final call. I am not a fan of it. At this point I have to kind of set the standard for our companionship. But so far it has been going well. We all get along really well. But it is surprisingly a lot harder to have three people in a companionship. It just brings an extra opinion to the table. Yesterday we had a rough day. None of us were having the same opinions on how we should teach. And one sister was being really stubborn. But we talked it out and are now headed in the right direction. We have three bunks in our room, but luckily there is only five of us. But nonetheless the room was made for four people, so we have had to figure out how to share desks and closets.

We are supposed to be up by 6:30 that would be nice. We are usually up much earlier, either to work out, go to the temple or do our service (cleaning a building). We go from about 5:30 to 10:30 every day. It is nonstop the first few days we had to rush to get dressed, rush to our class, rush to get ready for bed. It has just taken time to get into a system, so we are not feeling as rushed anymore. Although I am super rushed right now because I only have a few minutes left on the computer. I have been able to find sufficient food for my odd eating habits.  Every day is very structured, but at the same time it is not. We have assigned time to do certain studying, but it is completely up to our companionship how we do it. And we have a teacher that comes in for three-hour slots and teaches us Tagalog, the first few days he only spoke Tagalog. An entertaining game of charades. He is a really great teacher. We have already taught an investigator, in Tagalog, three times. We have committed her to pray and to read the BOM. We can understand more than we can speak right now, so it can be frustrating when we know what we want to say to her but we cannot because of the language barrier. Our teacher told us last night that we have learned most of the vocabulary he is going to teach us and now we are just going to focus on grammar.

Easter Sunday was great, we had sacrament as an entire MTC. It was passed to over 3000 people, all of them being worthy to take the sacrament. We then listened to the presiding bishop speak. We have a lot of devotionals here. It is a nice break from the studying that we do. My zone is great they helped us pull a hilarious prank on our Elders yesterday. Um well wish I had more time, until next week.

I have run out of time so I can’t send pictures. Pasensha. Sorry.

But I am doing great!

You should write letters to the elders in my District, they stopped passing out mail in class because they don’t get any.
Same address.
Elder Paz
Elder Vunibola
Elder Masame
Elder Bigalow




Love Sister Lindsay Hall

No comments:

Post a Comment