Eβδομάδα 2: Please help us not get wrecked in Greek

Greek word of the week: αλληλοεκτιαραθυρρωνόμαστε! Which means “we throw you out the window” hahaha, brother Craig taught us that and said we might get to use it (;

WEEK 2 OF MTC LIFE!

WEDNESDAY 2.20.19

We basically did math with greek letters to make words today, lol, well kinda sorta, that’s how I thought about it anyways and it made it a little easier! Volleyball is super fun with all the missionaries here! We met our last teacher, Brother Craig. He’s awesome! And just got back from his mission in Greece 6 months ago! So his Greek is GOOD. We watched an MTC devotional from Elder Holland and it was fantastic! He emphasized the point to MAKE OUR MISSIONS COUNT!

THURSDAY 2.21.19

Language learning here is like drinking from a fire hydrant. It is insane. My brain is still Spanish wired and it sucks!

FRIDAY 2.22.19

Had so much fun playing fútbol with a few other districts! Even tho I got nailed 2xs in the eye but it was all good, it’s so hard not keeping score! You can definitely tell whose competitive here lol. Even brother Craig played with us, he’s really good and nobody would have wanted to get hit by one of his shots. Sports is probably one of my favorite times in the day because we’re actually outta the class for once! It gets old sitting for hours.

SATURDAY 2.23.19

The cold going around all the missionaries finally got to me. I don’t think I’ve taken so many meds in one day. David Archuleta stopped by! His mission president is our mtc president so he wanted to see them and also give us a devo! It was pretty sweet, he shared a lot of stories from his mission and how it has impacted his life and of course performed for us! We were telling bro Scharff in class how we didn’t have enough time to study our language and how we wanted to during our English workshops or other meetings and he goes “well if there’s one time to not study your language its during sacrament, save that one for Jesus”, we all laughed about that haha. We gave another lesson fully in Greek! With the help of a tiny bit of notes, but we’re improving!

SUNDAY 2.24.19

PLOT TWIST in sacrament today. All of us came prepared with talks to give and random missionaries would get chosen, but our mission president didn’t tell the language learning missionaries that our talk needs to be all in our language…sooo… it wasn’t fun for a few of us who got picked, thankfully the Greeks were off the hook this week! Elder Hawkins gave the closing prayer, in Greek, and said “please help us not get wrecked in Greek” but only 5 of us could understand what he said so that was hilarious. We also had Elder Alan Phillips from the Area 70 come and give a devo today about how the foundation of our testimonies should be Jesus Christ. Also that we should always be looking for the ONE… to lift, to help, and to bless. It was great. Then we watched another mtc devotional and this time it was Elder Bednar from 2009. He shared an amazing message about the Holy Ghost. Some people question whether or not we are being prompted by the spirit or our conscience. His answer was simple. We should QUIT WORRYING ABOUT IT and act on any good instinct we have! He also had some awesome stories to share too! One of them was in Elder Packer’s byui devo called “the 20 mark note”…so good!

MONDAY 2.25.19

All the missionaries got to go finding in Manchester today for a few hours. I had some of the greatest experiences and conversations with people! Sister Edwards was pretty terrified tho haha, but I had no problem starting a convo once we found someone we felt impressed to talk to, I loved it! Of course we got some people who weren’t interested in hearing our message but we also got some people who genuinely were interested in what we had to say!

One of the many stories I had from these few hours was with a girl named Tris! I had a strong feeling to talk to her when I saw her outta the corner of my eye. So, going with that instinct we walked over and I quickly started a convo with her and introduced us. She’s a student in Manchester and is from Vietnam. I asked her if she had ever heard of the Book of Mormon. She asked if it was like the bible and explained she was kinda Christian. I explained to her it was similar in that it testifies of Jesus Christ, but there was also much more to it and proceeded to explain more. She noticed our tags were in Greek so we were able to share more about why that was and told her we were learning Greek so we could share our message with those in Greece and Cyprus and she thought that was so cool! I asked if I could share one of my favorite scriptures from it with her and she said "yes of course!" So I shared Mosiah 2:41. I bore a brief testimony about this and she seemed really interested and then I felt impressed to ask if she’d be interested in learning more about our faith. She said it was funny because she was actually looking into religions and was interested! She accepted the Book of Mormon we offered her but then said she would really like to read it but didn’t know if she could because it was in English and she was more fluent in Vietnamese. So of course we got excited and told her she could! And gave her our pass along card and also got her contact info so other missionaries could bring her another BoM in Vietnamese. It was a really cool experience and its incredible how powerful the Spirit was in that conversation with Tris.

We had another lesson only in Greek but this time NO NOTES! we managed and it was so cool to use the little we knew to have a mini message lesson thing.

Thanks for all the emails, pictures, messages, and all the above!

ΣAΣ ΑΓΑΠΩ!

Love,

Sister Gale

**I cannot begin to describe how being able to see and talk to our Kaylee each week has been. Granted today was only our 2nd morning to chat with her, but it is an absolute JOY!! To see and hear how happy she is. To hear her laugh as she tells us about her week. Her smile is so, so beautiful!! She said next week will be a bit sad and crazy as 28 missionaries will be leaving, and around 90 will be entering. The dryers are still broken, so she they have been hang drying everything in their rooms. She thought she had lost a few socks out the window, but as we were talking with her this morning, she wandered into the laundry room and there they were!! On the ironing board.

**What's your typical day like in the MTC? Wake up, breakfast, 1 hr language/BoM study, 9-11:45 learning new greek Grammer stuff, lunch, serve, exercise, workshop, comp study, dinner, 3 more hrs of greek, then sleep! Sundays are full of devos back to back… like literally all day with 15 min breaks in between.

**How do you teach in Greek? Our BASIC lesson: meet, get to know each other, ask if we can pray, say a prayer, share a scripture, say a few things about it, testimonies, invitation, closing prayer and then WE DONE.

**What was an interesting meal this week? Uhhh they have pesto pasta a lot… the Italian is getting sick of it haha cus its not that great and is getting old. They tried American food like hotdogs n hamburgers but it was wanna be american food and wasn’t that great.

A cool "english" term you picked up on? Well they don’t spell color or favorite right. They have an “ou” instead of an “o”. Drives me nuts even though I’m a terrible speller haha. They throw “rubbish in the bin for the bin man to take out” which is UK language for “throwing garbage in the garbage can for the GARBAGE man to take out.” The don’t believe in the word “mail”… they call it “posts” here… as in they’ll “post things through their letter box”. What in the world?! They don’t use the word silverware but instead “cutlery” which I’ve never even heard the word in my life haha. They say “over the page” instead of “turn the page”.