Week 2 At The MTC

The latest news from Alec:

Hey guys,

Thanks for the letters and the updates this week! It's nice to hear about what's going on at home and about the outside world.

The language is starting to get a bit easier. It's still pretty difficult to read, but I've started to learn enough words that I can actually understand what the teachers are saying about 60-70% of the time. But that's probably more from picking up on context clues than actually understanding the language. We have two teachers now. One served a mission in Ukraine (Brother C.), and the other is native Ukraininan (Sister H.). Sister H. just started teaching us last week and she's a lot of fun.

Conference is this weekend, which is pretty exciting to have a break from classes and stuff. I tried to do conference choir, but they could only choose like 400 out of the 1600 or so that applied, so I didn't make it. My companion will be going though, so look out for him.

Sister H. has told us a lot of things about the country and about what life will be like there which kinda got me excited to be there. Sounds like we'll be doing a lot of service and teaching a lot of English classes--that's how our teacher started learning English--which sounds like fun. We actually have 6 hours of classes now--which is rough because that only leaves a few hours for us to study on our own. And almost all of that free study time is spent preparing lessons, so it's pretty difficult to find time to study the language. We're starting TRC tonight, which means we're basically teaching volunteers who know the language that come in to give us practice teaching the lesson. It's gonna be rough cause we really just have no idea what to expect. 

I attached a couple pictures.

This second one is the white board in our classroom. 

That's usually what the board will look like after a full day--some stuff that's relevant to Ukrainian, some stuff that's not relevant at all. You can also see some of the mnemonic devices we use to memorize the words, but you'd probably have to be able to read the Cyrillic alphabet to figure out what they say.

One more story, it was our teacher's (Brother C.) birthday on Sunday, so we got him a card and some candy from the store. The best present we got him, though, was some air freshener--with 13 guys in one tiny room it gets pretty hot and smelly in there. 

Here we are in front of the temple from last Thursday.

By the way, I do have internet access, they don't really restrict anything here, we're just not really supposed to do anything not related to the work. It's very interesting how few actual restrictions there are on anything at all. There's tons of rules, but there's almost no enforcement of the rules--it's all based on obedience and it seems to work out pretty well. There's probably a lesson to be learned there. 

For my plaque at the stake center, I'd go with 2 Nephi 2:25: “Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.”

I have no idea about the departure date for Ukraine. I don't get my travel itinerary until about a week before I leave. It really depends on what flights they can get, so I won't know for sure until much later. 

Ok one more picture with everyone giving peace signs. This was for "Sweater Saturday" if you can't tell.

I love you guys and I hope everything is going well back home!

Alec

First Week At The MTC

Hey guys, 

Yup, it's been a whole week--even though it feels more like a month. The first three or four days just seemed really, really long. Everyone always says just make it to the first Sunday, and after that things would start to speed up. I definitely think that's been true. Even though the days still seem pretty long, the last four days have seemed to go by fairly quickly. 

I definitely appreciate the update on real life. That's the weirdest part about being here, the total seclusion from the outside world. I also heard something from another missionary about some bombings in NYC? 

Ukrainian is pretty difficult. We spend at least nine hours a day working on it, but it's still not making a lot of sense.  The hardest part so far has been the alphabet. So many of the letters are just similar enough to English that it's very difficult to read. We basically have to learn how to read all over again. Once I can read more easily I'm sure things will go better. 

I'm really doing fine I think. Honestly we're just way too busy to be sad about missing home. The schedules are pretty busy, but only 3 of the 9 classroom hours are with an actual teacher, so we have a pretty good time talking and hanging out while we're studying. There's 13 elders and no sisters in my district, which is apparently a pretty big district. We're all kind of crammed into a small room but it's usually pretty fun, just difficult. 

I attached a picture of my MTC nametag. 

Alec's MTC nametag. Translates to "Elder Martschenko. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

It's pronounced "Stareeshena Martschenko." A couple weeks before we leave here we'll get nametags that have our names spelled out with the cyrillic alphabet. Hopefully they spell Martschenko right. 

It's not like we're starving here but parents always send a bunch of food. So unless it's something awesome like mom's cookies or some good candy or something I don't really need it. 

I've also attached a picture of the temple. 

Every Sunday we walk up to the temple and spend a bit of time there. Our zone brings hymnals up there and sings some hymns. The only problem is that the rest of our zone is Russian-speaking, so all of the hymns are in Russian. It's the same alphabet though, so maybe in a week or so we'll be able to read well enough to sing along.

Here I am standing in front of one of the TV boards they have throughout the MTC. Whenever there's a problem, they put your name up there so you know to go to the front desk. If you don't come during the day, then right before bed time they announce everyone's name over the loudspeaker (people call it "the reaping") that's still on the list and make them walk up to the main building to figure it out. So the reason my name was on the board: After exercise time, everyone has to take a shower and get ready for the next classroom session. Somehow, all six people in the room next to us went to take a shower at the same time, and none of them thought to bring their room key with them. The doors here lock automatically, so all six of them were stuck standing outside their door in nothing but a towel. Sooo, I and a couple other missionaries had to walk all the way across campus to go to the front desk to get them a spare key. I gave the key to them, but when they turned it back in, the people at the front desk put it down under another name, so they thought I never returned it. So I had to make yet another trip across campus at 10:20 pm to straighten that out.

These are a few pictures my companion took. 

This first one is me trying to toast a bagel with an iron. If we're not dressed in a shirt and tie we can't go into the dining hall so we just get sack lunches/breakfasts to go. It didn't really work very well.

The second is me and Elder Christensen, my companion. 

And the third is all of our district (minus Elder Christensen,) sitting in our very small classroom. 

  

We're about to leave to go to the temple. I love you guys and I miss you a lot!

старійшина Martschenko

(Elder Martschenko)

First P-Day (Personal Day)

Hey guys,

So my P-day is gonna be on Thursday, but the first couple of days are different from a normal schedule, so I don't actually get a real P-day until a week from today. They still let us e-mail today though, but only for a couple minutes just so you don't have to go a over a week without hearing from me and start freaking out. Things are going ok, the language is hard but I think I'm starting to get a hang of the alphabet which is huge. Probably should have tried a bit harder on that before I got here. I brought a book back to my room to catch up on stuff last night, but it turns out the book I grabbed was the only one that didn't have any info on the alphabet so I still haven't had a chance to really study it. 

My companion is Elder Christensen, I found out this morning that today is his birthday! There's actually only two other missionaries in my room, Elder Hill and Elder Baxter. So far we've been getting along just fine. As far as I know I'm by far the oldest one. At least the three other missionaries in my room are straight out of high school.

The food is fine, it's really just exactly like the BYU cafeteria so nothing to complain about--I've only had two meals though. They have vending machines around but so far I haven't really been that hungry. We have to eat dinner at like 5:00 though so by the end of the first night I was pretty hungry. 

We do exercise 5 days a week, and I think I have like 4 total t-shirts so I'll probably be ok. 

Love you guys and I'll talk to you next week!

Alec

Arriving At The Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo, UT

Hey guys, 

I made it into the MTC about an hour ago! Dave took a picture. 

Picture taken by Dave Ottesen as he dropped off Alec at the Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo, UT.

They took me pretty quickly and grabbed my luggage and then sent me to pick up some materials. I got a giant package of language and other missionary materials and then I got shown to my room. I seemed to see a bunch of different Ukrainian speaking missionaries that yelled at me as I was walking across the campus. I'll be sharing my room with 5 other missionaries, should be nice and cozy. I dropped my luggage off there and went straight into my classroom. 

There was a teacher speaking only in Ukrainian--not very helpful. After a couple minutes being very confused there they took me to a computer lab to do a quick orientation video, and now I can write home! So far everyone seems pretty friendly. Looks like there's about a dozen missionaries learning Ukrainian with me in my same class, not sure yet which of them are going to L'viv. 

I've got a lot of language learning left to do (cause I haven't started at all), but I'm sure if I study every day it won't be too difficult. I don't know yet what my P-day will be; I don't really know much of anything actually. For some reason the only thing in the orientation is rules for using the gym during my daily exercise time, nothing else. Thank you guys for all of your help getting ready for this. I know it was pretty hectic and I'm very grateful that I had you guys to help me out. 

I love you guys and I'll talk to you again soon!

Elder Martschenko