Well, for some reason today I am not sure what I want to
write about... I guess I will start out by saying that this week has been
amazing like always, very spiritual, and much learning has been done.
Yesterday we had a really cool lesson in class, our teacher
who normally would have taught had a violin recital in SLC (she is a violin
performance major at BYU) so we had a substitute teacher! His name was Brother
Mills, he is normally a Slovenian teacher so his classroom is right next to
ours, but he came to teach us. It was cool because the lesson was in English
for the most part, he bore really powerful testimony to us about the power of
our calling. Somebody commented something along the lines of "Well, you
know all this stuff way better than we do" talking about lesson 3 I think.
He responded basically telling us that despite him being an rm, that he would
trust us to teach about the gospel over him any day. He reminded us that we
were called by God to go out and teach His children, and to help them return to
Him. It was a really cool reminder to me that the Lord really trusts me right
now and I need to do everything I can to be a great missionary.
Another cool experience we had was our teacher Brat Smalley
showed us some pictures from his mission and told us a couple mission stories.
It was really cool seeing some of the pictures of places like Warsaw and Łódż
because it just made me want to get there and start to really serve the Lord.
He told us about a bunch of cool places in Warsaw that we need to go to (he
served about half his mission in Warsaw). One place that I'm pretty pumped for
is a tie shop that some guy owns who for some reason really likes Mormon
Missionaries so he sells his $70-80 handmade ties to missionaries at wholesale
which is about $10. He said it's a big thing for missionaries to buy tons of
these ties.
Mom, you've asked me about my teachers teaching in Polish a
couple times so I'll kinda explain how class works I guess. We usually show up
to class and since the blocks are 3 hours long the teacher will have our
Rozkład (schedule) split up into 3 different sections. Usually we do about an
hour of TALL (a computer thing that helps us learn vocab), and hour of language
instruction (usually a grammar lesson), then an hour of them teaching a section
out of Preach My Gospel. We don't have set aside Culture classes but the
teachers will sometimes take time to show us pictures on Facebook and tell us
stories. Pretty much everything we do is in Polish, generally we just guess
what they are saying through charades/context clues.The only time they really
say anything in English is to explain hard grammar principles, or to tell
really long mission stories that would take to long for us to translate.
Speaking of hard grammar principles, I really wish that I
would have paid more attention in Junior High English classes. In Polish rather
than word order denoting direct objects, indirect objects, possession, subjects,
and other stuff. Word endings do that (cases), it would be a lot easier to learn
Polish grammar if I could look at a sentence in English and immediately know
what part of the sentence every word is. It was funny because we actually spent
a couple hours one day getting an English grammar lesson because pretty nobody
understands English Grammar.
Thank you so much for the package, it made me so happy to
get the little yellow slip that means you have a package.
I'm running kinda dry on things to say but if I think of
something later I'll send another email!
Love you guys!
-Starszy Everett
