Elder Colton

Elder Colton

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Life at the the MTC

Hola mi familia y mis amigos
While it probably seems like yesterday to most of ya´ll when I left, it seems much longer than a week to me. We spend each day studying more than I ever have my entire life, including my semester at college.  Our average day goes something like this...
6.30 to 7.00-Wake up, shower, and get dressed
7.00 to 7.30-Breakfast (either a brown paper bag breakfast or we eat in the cafeteria)
7.30 to 10.30-Classroom time and teaching time.  We spend most of that time in the classroom practicing spanish and teaching with each other.  For somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour of that time we go into another room and teach someone who acts like they aren´t a member of our church (they almost always actually are, but I do know people from BYU who aren´t members of our church who also have gone as volunteers.  And if anyone reads this who knows Chloe, make surey you tell her I am completely referring to her right here).  All of that teaching is in spanish so it´s challenging but very rewarding. 
10.30 to 11.30-Personal study time where we read from the Bible, Book of Mormon, and Preach My Gospel (which is a book that the LDS church uses to teach missionaries).  This is one of my favorite times because all ten of us in our district are quiet and I can study in peace (although you´d be surprised at how quiet a group of 10 nineteen year old missionaries are most of the day considering we spent a tremendous amount of time in a classroom)
11.30 to 12.15-Lunch
12.15 to 3.15-More classroom time.  This is when our teacher (Hermano Sagers-in our church we refer to men and women as Brother ____ or Sister _____ instead of Mr. and Mrs., and Hermano is Brother in spanish) comes in and we spent almost the entire time practicing spanish.  In just a week I went from hardly remembering any of my spanish to comfortably talking with people in spanish (if they talk slow).  I still need to work on a few tenses but overall it has gone very well. 
3.15 to 4.15-Language study.  I spend about half of this time working on grammar and the other half doing our pre-class work for the next day´s classroom lesson from Hermano Sagers
4.30 to 5.25-Dinner.  And dinner is the same food as the BYU cafeteria food, which thankfully I liked, so I enjoy the meals.
5.25 to 6.15-Gym time.  I play volleyball most days (and Jessica Fleck would be proud, I finally learned how to set)
6.50 to 7.50-More personal study time. 
8.00 to 9.00-TALL.  TALL is our computer program that we use to practice spanish.  It´s basically a mormonized version of Rosetta Stone (from what I´ve heard from other people).  Some of the missionaries are obsessed with it because it´s the closest they can get to playing a video game.
9.00 to 9.30-Planning our lessons for the next day
9.30 to 10.00-Personal study time
10.15-Quiet time
10.30-Bedtime
Basically we spend most of the time studying.  I hope all is well with everyone reading this and I´ll be able to write more in the future once the computers I choose stop deciding to break (we have 30 minutes of email time each week.  There are 2,000 missionaries in the MTC so we don´t get a lot of time).
-Elder Colton

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