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