Missionary Service of Elder Benjamin Moore: MTC Schedule

Hey Everyone!!

I love seeing the pictures you email me...but I can really only look at them for a split second if I want to write any of you back! So here I am on my 2nd P-day. I've gotten a lot of questions in the Dear Elder letters so I'm going to start with those!

It looks like the family vacation was a lot of fun and I wish that I could have been there! Russian is coming along pretty well...we have taught a lesson nearly every day to our "investigators." We got two new ones this week who are actually our teachers acting like someone they actually taught on their missions. Classes are twice a day for 3 hours each. We usually start off learning a new grammar concept and roleplaying with each other to get the sentences down...like "i have 3 sisters" and stuff like that. I have class with the same 9 people every day. They are my District. Everyone in the District is in a companionship which means they go pretty much everywhere with another missionary. Russian conjugation is tricky. You have to conjugate the verbs, which are the most important part of the sentence structure, and then you have to conjugate the nouns, and adjectives and pretty much every single part of speech...so it's pretty tricky! I'm going to try to send pictures.

District leader just means that I go to meetings and get information for my district. If problems arise, I resolve them, and If people are having a rough time and need someone to talk to, I do that too! I also lead one of our classes on Sunday every week and bring them the bulletin from the Branch. Speaking of the Branch, ours just split. There were 2 Russian branches here at the MTC and they both just split to make a 3rd. When I came in there were 20 Russian/Ukranian-speaking missionaries that came in and tomorrow there will be 104 Russian/Ukranian speaking missionaries coming in! CRAZY... I guess I beat the rush. There will be 45 new missionaries in my branch or 4 new districts of about 11 missionaries each. There will also be the first all-Sisters district ever at the MTC. So it's pretty exciting.

My district includes Elders Moore (me), Lewis, Hodgson, Nebeker, Allen, Stucki, Bunn, and Coppinger as well as Sisters Brown and Smith (pretty much the two most generic names you can get I think! haha they are mostly from Utah, Nevada, Arizona.... and they're all going to die when we get to the Siberian winter. And I might too... 'cause I didn't bring my choppers.

Caroline tried to send me some Russian phrases which all looked like this ###93720(##&209783_#9.,.... and I don't think that is Russian, unless we haven't getten into that section yet. I'll keep you posted. :P

This morning we went to the temple for breakfast again before going into our session. The hash browns at the temple are pretty good! I get the omelette with bacon and hash browns. Abbey and Spencer should go sometime.

To Dad...that's pretty neat that you saw a Bear! did you tell Carolin about it??

Sister Brown in our district has been getting SO MUCH FOOD! she gets huge crates of it from her family who lives in...Provo. The weather here is pretty hot it was in the 100's once this week, but the inside of the buildings are generally pretty cool. Could be a little cooler but that's just me complaining.

This Sunday, the 23rd, is the World Wide Missionary broadcast which is titled "Hastening the Work of Salvation" or something like that. But it's being broadcast from the Marriott Center (on BYU's campus) and is going to include the Prophet (President Thomas S. Monson) and First Presidency as well as most of the Twelve and a lot of the Seventy. The MTC is putting together a choir of 1600 missionaries which I'll be in for the broadcast... so look for me on TV! I'll be the one in the white shirt, tie and black suit! :D

So that's the end of answering all your questions I think... besides the one Dad asked about me going to the cafeteria and asking for Borsch and Vodka... I usually just eat hamburgers. :P

The days here are long and the weeks are short. I'm already two weeks in which means only 102 to go! I get released on the 6 of June 2015 or something like that. I should get my flight itinerary for going to Russia a week or two before I fly out (on August 5th).

So here's an average day: It's a little different every day but I just picked a Friday.

6:30: Wake up and get ready for the day

7-8:15: Service project which includes cleaning the residence building.

8:15: on service days we just get sack breakfasts with juice, bagles, cereal and fruit. you can get a combination of any 4 items when you get a sack meal.

9:15-12:15: CLASS

12:15: Personal Study

1:15: Language Study

1:50: Lunch in the cafeteria

2:35-3:35: Portal and assesments which are a bunch of surveys to see how we're doing on different areas of learning.

3:50-6:50: CLASS (learn Russian, etc.)

6:50: Dinner in cafeteria

8:10-9: Personal exercise (most days we will have gym time when we can go play basketball, volleyball, or whatever we want)

9-9:30: Planning for the next day

9:30: Return to the residence and wind down. (write in journal, write letters if there's time)

10:15: Quiet time in the residence

10:30: Lights out and sleep (finally)

So the days are full and exhausting. 8 hours of sleep is never enough. I feel like that guy on "The District" where he was doing his video blog and just complaining about how tired he was. Saturdays are just like normal weekdays, then Sunday comes along and we get a little more lax of a schedule. We get to walk around the temple grounds which is really relaxing and nice just to get away from the campus a little bit. Then we have our church meetings throughout the day. In the evening we have a devotional, usually someone from the Quorum of the Seventy. MTC devotionals are great because they can be as blunt and direct as they want with the missionaries whereas with the general congregation at General Conference, they kinda have to go easy on some things. We also have devotionals on Tuesday night. The Tuesday ones are held at the Marriott Center because there are so many missionaries here. Last week was the first time they ever did that.

Well, I've got 10 minutes left and i'm going to spend it trying to get some pictures uploaded and sent along with this!

The Dear Elder website is working great! Keep using it! (in our Zone there is a record of 21 dear elders on one day to one district)... you can make that record 25 dear elders on one day to one elder... which you should. :)

I miss and love you all!