21 September 2013
So I started off my day by having my aunt, uncle and cousin
drop me off at the MTC. As soon as you arrive you are given a host that helps
you to receive all of your missionary materials and books and shows you around
the campus. Then you head immediately to class.
The teachers only speak Japanese, and won't speak any English.
I'm lucky and have been studying Japanese for a while now so the first day was
a bit of a breeze. All we really did was learn to introduce our selves. However
after our teachers need to give us directions. They didn't really expect anyone
in the class to have experience with Japanese so they were acting out
everything they said in simple motions. I really don't want to be “that kid” in
the class that knows everything so when the rest of the class couldn't guess
what was being said, I would translate. As the sentences got harder and harder
and I continued to translate one of the teachers realized that I spoke more
than the average Japanese. It then turned into look at Davies chouro if the
teachers couldn't be understood.
One of the teachers later took me out and talked to me just
wanting to know what Japanese experience I have. He asked if I was ok staying
for 9 weeks and I said yea it didn't bother me. Begahm (I think) sensei was
actually a missionary in Okinawa when we were living there. He knew Bro. Campbell
(I think, but Kubasaki’s coach) and we talked about how he's such a nice guy.
So the next day was pretty much the same; a lot of
orientation and class stuff. However there was one surprise, I got a language
test to see if I should be moved up. The lady who gave me the test was really
pretty and had the most amazing Japanese I've heard from an American. To say
the least I was really intimidated by her fluency in the language. I ended up
doing really bad. I couldn't think of any words and could hardly form basic
sentences. I'm pretty sure I won't be moving up for an earlier release date
from the MTC.
So MTC likes to throw us right into things. On our third day
we had our first discussion with an investigator in Japanese. The investigator
is actually a teacher but it was still freaky. My companion, Quilter chouro, and
I prepared a lot of questions and answers to things that we thought would come
up. We had a slight background on the investigator so we kinda had an idea of
the things that we should talk about. We ended up using almost none of the
stuff we prepared. And I was only able to communicate with a mix of the really
new words I hardly knew with grammar patterns that I can hardly remember from
school. Despite this, the discussion went better than my language test. And I
thought ended up really well. We had a follow up appointment the next day that
was also a surprise and Quilter Chouro and I only had 20 minutes to prepare
for. It went well, I couldn't remember the word for answer and had to rearrange
all my sentence to avoid that word.
We have 4 people, including me, in my room and that's really
nice because the room is meant for six. My roommates are awesome and we are
super competitive with each other, in a good way, so we are always getting
better at our goals. Cuba (Elder Hernandez) lives right next door. It was super
awesome to see him. I can't wait for next week when we really get down to business.
