MTC:  Week 4

Hello!

Thanks for all the little emails throughout the week, it's so fun to read them :)

Mom, that's super cool that you joined a Facebook group for missionary moms!  Is it for Armenians specifically or no? I wonder if I'm allowed to share first and last names of the missionaries I know... I bet that would help you find their parents, but idk if I'm allowed to..

In that email where you sent a lot of pictures, it looks like I still don't have access to most of them. But I got the more recent ones you shared, thanks so much for sending them! 

I got the package you sent, and I love it so much! It's perfect. I have yet to write back letters to you all, but I hope to do that today! 

Classes are going well.  Armenian is still a struggle, conference talks and Book of Mormon are both a little too hard for me to read well.  But! On gospel library I found a section of like 150 children's stories about the scriptures, and they use very simple language so I can understand a solid 80-90% of the words! So I'm happy about that, baby steps. 

Every week everyone prepares a talk, and a few people are selected at random to give them during sacrament meeting.  But this upcoming Sunday is a special Christmas one apparently, and they asked me to give a short talk on the birth of Christ.  Preparing talks every week is rough, I can't say it's my favorite thing.  But it's good for me, I need all the practice I can get.  

Even though I'm learning Armenian super fast, I still can't imagine being prepared by the time I leave here. We practice teaching Armenian lessons in class all the time but it's about the level of a 5 year old bearing their testimony.  Haha well maybe that's an exaggeration, but not by much.

I'm still having a ton of fun though, this place is awesome.  Most people start to get sick of it by now, and are really looking forward to getting out.  Not me though, I bet by the end of week 10 I'll be sad to leave.  But what I've heard and seen from Walter makes me excited to get into the field as well! 

Elder Bergeson in my district said he has a friend who was serving in Arcadia recently, and while he didn't speak Armenian, he got to live with the Armenian elders for a while.  He said there are 4 of them over there, and they like to play soccer every Saturday. And my teachers taught 3 out of the 4 of them, and said they are "total studs."  Can't wait to meet them.

My companions are awesome.  Last night at the weekly Tuesday devotional, the speaker spoke about companionships and it reminded me of how blessed I am to have the 2 best companions in the world.  We're all really different, but we don't fight about stuff, we're all really open and willing to talk about what we're doing well or not so well.  It's working out great, and I can't imagine being with anyone else.  Elder Clark is the senior companion and he's very good at keeping us organized and on track.  And Elder Schaumann is basically an MTC celebrity at this point.  He's played the piano in about 6 or 7 devotionals by now, and he must've received at least 100 compliments from people.  Lots of senior couples, random people in the elevator, walking by while we're studying or in the cafeteria will just come up to him and thank him for his beautiful music.  And he's really humble about it too, he says he doesn't want to be famous at the MTC for his music, but he honestly deserves to be.

On Monday 2 of the districts in our branch left, the English speakers who arrived the same day we did, and some Japanese speakers who've been here for a while.  So now our branch is down to us and the Koreans, and we're supposed to get 21 more English speakers arriving today.  We're all sad to see the other English district go, we became pretty close to them.  But we're excited to meet all the greenies coming in today :)

In exercise time, the main sports are volleyball, basketball, and 4 square.  I play a lot of 4 square (Or, since the Armenian word 4 is pronounced like "chorse", we sometimes call it chorse square).  My companions are both really good at it too, and occasionally we get the whole district playing, that's always fun.  There's also a track on the 2nd floor, so I sometimes go join Elder Springer and run up there. 

I've been kind of pushing it off, but I'd like to start sending out some group emails every once in a while.  Could you please send me the names of anyone who wants to receive my emails? 

There's so much more I could talk about but I've got to go.  I can't seem to get Duo working on my phone, it's requiring a phone number.  But I will try to figure out something to video call you today.

Thanks for listening, and I'll of course keep you posted on any more cool things that happen! If anyone's wondering about how I'm doing, feel free to share anything from these emails with them.

Love you all,

Elder Clayton


Also, I would like to invite all of you to go to church this Sunday and think about the birth of Jesus Christ.  I know you will be able to feel the spirit, and I will be thinking about all of you as I give my talk this Sunday.

I love you all and can't wait to talk to you next week on Christmas! (Still not sure when my P day will be, but I'm guessing Thursday the day after Christmas.)