Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Second Week

Hey family!

Well we got permission from our zone leaders to do our laundry early in the morning here on p day. There are alotted slots for each zone in the MTC to do their laundry, but none of them are this early in the morning, and a lot of missionaries are disobedient and go earlier while it is some other zone's time to do laundry and that way there are barely ever any washers open. There are computers here in the laundry room, so this is most likely the time every week that I will send emails. Anyway, everything else here is going pretty good.

Sometimes I really wish I could have gone English speaking, like yesterday we did an activity in class where we were supposed to teach our companion and act like we just met them, so we were just supposed to get to know them and their beliefs, then set expectations for them and tell them why we were there. Instead of me just teaching Elder Bonzo, our awesome teacher, Bruder Luna, wanted us to both teach him and get to know him while he acted like someone else. We did it in English first, and afterward he told us we did everything really well and that I did a good job keeping it on track because at one point Elder Bonzo said he had a testimony of the Atonement, but the persona that Bruder Luna was acting out never went to church and said he didn't know much of anything about God or what he even is, so when Elder Bonzo said that, Bruder Luna was like, "what is an atonement?" and we were just supposed to be getting to know him basically, so I steered it back toward more basic principles, like we have one God who is our Father in Heaven and who loves us and supports us.

But then we finished and had to do it in German. It was so much harder, because there are so many things I wanted to say that I just couldn't, and it is a lot harder to keep eye contact with a person and make it meaningful while you are struggling in your mind to find out how a sentence is structured and what words are and what article they are (masculine is der, neuter is das, feminine or plural is die, and there is no structure to finding out what article a word is, you just have to learn the article for every noun) (and der, die, and das all mean the, but only when in the nominative case. They change when in the accusative or dative cases). In German, when there is more than one verb in a sentence, the second veb gets pushed to the back, for instance, if I wanted to say, will you pray about the atonement, the verb pray would have to go at the end because "will" is a modal verb. So the sentence would look like this: "Werden Sie über das Sühnopfer beten?" Anyways, the langauge is hard, but it's still really cool learning it and knowing that later on, I will be able to do a lot better.

Well I'm out of time, you will hear more in the letters I send home today.

Love, Daniel

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