January 15, 2013

The most useful thing I learned in High school was to sign a yearbook

Bonjour a tous,

 

Alright, so rather than submitting myself to the narrow, linear theory of time, I'm going to sort of be jumping around in this email. Keep up!

 

I'll start with my travel plans. I have travel plans! Cool, huh? Got 'em on Thursday. Well anyway, it's a three part flight. I'll start out by waking up sometime before my 4am report time at the travel office, at which point we will get bussed to SLC. First leg of the journey takes us to Los Angeles, which, for those of you who skipped that day in geography class, is sort of in the wrong direction. But hey, that means that I get to be in the Pacific time zone for a little while before leaving for a couple years! I'll take it. I think that plane lands at 9am? Anyway, I have a layover there for one hour, which would be a good opportunity to talk to some family members, if anyone would be interested to do so. Then, we keep on moving, and I get to fly all the way to Miami. Two hour layover there, but I don't really remember when. And from there, I'm heading straight to Trinidad, where I will get to meet my mission president for the first time! Pretty excited for that.

So I'm going to let you in on a big secret-I don't actually have my travel plans in front of me right now. Sorry. But, the good news is that I will have the chance to send another email (a short one) on Saturday evening, so look for that for more details. I'm going to be in the field in a week! I'm kinda freaking out, but what's new?

Now let's skip back to Wednesday. I got to host again, which was cold, and surprisingly it was a larger group, but I only hosted two this time. Another fun fact-out of the five people who I have hosted so far, five of them have been Sisters. Crazy, right? But anyway, after that I was heading back to my classroom, and decided to drop in and talk to the teacher of our new district in the french zone. We're chatting, and he shows me the pictures of his new missionaries. Well, who should be one of the newest members of our zone but Emily Anhderson! It's fun, because we now have three missionaries in the french zone, all from Sammamish, Wa. We're making you proud!

Friday was something called "In-field orientation", which means that we spend all day doing workshops with some of the special teachers in the MTC. Good stuff. But the really cool part happened on Sunday, when we had our "farewell devotional"-basically, all the missionaries leaving that week-and me-get to go have a special devotional with the MTC presidency. Which would be cool enough as is, but then the meeting starts and President Uchtdorf walks in. For the record, I was like in the fifth row of chairs. I'm going to say that he was probably within 30 feet of me the entire time he was talking. Which, incidentally, wasn't long-he was on his way to a CES fireside broadcast, and just happened to be in the neighborhood when the MTC president invited him to come say "hi". CRAZY, right? That brings me to a running total of three apostles in the same room as me at the MTC.

Sunday evening was pretty sad, because we had a bunch of missionaries from our zone leaving Monday morning-one group at 4, and another at 6. So we had a little goodbye party, we sang, we hugged, and we wrote in each other's address books. Which is incidentally where this week's title comes from. It was pretty emotional, and that night as I was writing in my journal that the nature of a mission is to get to know someone very well, very quickly, and then to leave. I'm not great at goodbye right now, but I'm pretty sure that I'll get a good amount of practice while I'm out here. Something to look forward to...

Then comes the big day, for people not named Elder Santos! Elders Martin, Anderson, and Salmon all got dropped off at the travel office at 1pm, I gave them hugs, and then we went our separate ways. So that was fun. I got reassigned to a new companion for the next week: Elder Clark.

 

MAIN CHARACTERS:

Elder Clark is one of my favorite people I've met at the MTC so far. For informational purposes, he is in the Tahitian district with Elder Millett, and so is still here. But I am actually his fifth (count 'em) companion in the MTC; he started out in a tri-panionship, and then has also been temporary companions with two other elders in the same position as me (the first of whom is also a West Indies french-speaker). I think I decided that the reason that he was put in a tripanionship was so that he would have this opportunity to be companions with so many elders. And Elder Clark is the one to be put in that situation because he is one of the only people who could handle it. He is simply the most personable, genuinly likeable person I have met. He never let's people in small groups walk by us without saying hi to them, giving them a smile and letting them know that he appreciates them. So my goal is to not wear out my welcome!

 

So yeah, that's who I've been iwth so far. Of course, since I'm learning a different language from him, we're not in the same class during classtime-rather, I just wander the halls and look for opportunities to learn and teach. Which leads me to one of my favorite head-expanding moments of the week-you remember frere blosil, one of pono's teachers? He's teaching a new district right now, and I got to hang out with them last night. He was incidentally also being observed by a new teacher, who, when frere blosil and I were chatting, asked if I was a teacher at the MTC. I told him  that I'm still a missionary, and then he asked me if I was from France! Awsome, right? Just what my ego needed. But hey, it was fun!

 

Then, last night, my favorite part was after class, when Elder Millett asked me if I wanted to sing with them-meaning his district. I of course said yes, and we went downstairs to sing to a missionary from Tahiti who they had become friends with, and who was leaving today. We ended up singing for somewhere between 20 minutes and a half hour. Best part was seeing one of the big poly elders in their district (it's the international one, so they're from all over) absolutely sobbing as he was listening to us sing. It was really just one of the most fun moments that I have had at the MTC. Music is powerful guys! I know I'm not going to be teaching the gospel entirely in song, but I'll be danged if I don't do my best at that!

 

SPIRITUAL THOUGHT:

My great achievement for this week was that I got to finish the Book of Mormon, cover to cover, in french. I'm low on time, so this will be short, but I would challenge each of you to seek and expect spiritual experiences every single day. We have been told that we require constant nourishment to body and spirit, so that's your new rule of thumb. As frequently as you nourish your body, that's how often you should be seeking to nourish your spirit. Do that, and I PROMISE you that you will be filled. When we teach commandments, we say that God has blessings which he des[arately wants to give us, but that they are the natural consequence of obedience. He cannot break His own law, and he cannot force us to be obedeint, but if we choose to be so, then blessings WILL come. Expect that, and watch for the miracles that come.

 

Out of time, but I'll send a quick email saturday about travel plans!

A plus!

 

Elder Santos