Week 1- May 1, 2012

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Wassup family!

I miss you guys a lot. I hope you doing well! The MTC is crazy. So much as happened in the short time I've been here. To me it feels like I’ve been here forever! The first couple of days at the MTC were a struggle. It’s hard to put everything behind and just do missionary stuff all day long, but I am use to it now and it has been going well. I have 2 companions; it just worked out that way. Elder Relyea is from Farmington, Utah and he is pretty cool. Elder Norris is from Seattle. My district is awesome. It is 4 sisters and us 5 elders. We are all going to Taiwan, Taipei and we are supposed to leave June 26th. That is faster than I expected but that is good because I can’t wait to get into the field.

Learning Chinese has been really hard but it has slowly been getting better. The teacher is from Utah but his parents are from Taiwan so he speaks Chinese fluently. Then there is an assistant lady who is from china. They only talk in Chinese the entire time that we are in class (which is about 6 hours a day!), so it is really hard to understand. Right now I can bear my testimony and say a basic pray in Chinese but is tough because there are different tones on the words that you say. So like you have to either say the word getting higher, getting deeper, high to deep to high, or quickly. We had to teach our first investigator on Saturday. I think he is an actor investigator. It is so hard to teach because we don’t understand barely anything that he says. We write some things we are going to say in Chinese on paper and then go in and say them to him. Half the times we sit there in silence trying to decipher what he says. We have slowly been understanding him more and more with each visit. We have visited him 3 times now.

We are supposed to get up every day at 6:30am. I get up and 6 am and stretch, do yoga, and do push-up and pull-ups. Then we have gym 5 times a week for about an hour. I either do full-court ball handling drills or go upstairs and do sprints and other exercises that I have on my routine that I brought.

The food has been pretty good. I’m missing dad’s barbequing though!

Thanks for the dear elders. When you submit them they put them in the mail for our district each day. I just wrote some responses to your letters so you should get them soon.

I'm going to get on later today to put on some photos and videos if I can.

Also, look up Character of Christ devotional by Elder Bednar. It was excellent. We watched it on Sunday night.

Love, Jordan

P.S. I’m district leader. The branch pres interviewed everyone and then chose me to be the DL of our district which is use 5 elders and 4 sisters going to Taipei on June 26th. There is another district of missionaries going to Taipei the same time that we are.

I basically just conduct meetings, chose hymns and who says prayers, lead our district meeting, interview our district's senior companions and get interviewed by the 2 zone leaders which are 2 elders going to Taiwan in a couple of weeks.