Made it 5 weeks!

It's been another week in the MTC, I feel like writing good emails is hard because every week is basically the same thing. I will try and include everything that was interesting however.

So our Tuesday devotional was really good this week, we had Elder and Sister Teh of the 1st quorum of the 70 come, their talks were both prime. Sister Teh gave this object lesson type thing about a the buses that they have in the Philippines, where they are from. She talked about how the driver will try and fill up the bus to the absolute maximum capacity, including people sitting on the roof, hood, handing of the back, and sitting on the floor in the middle of the bus. Then they will put other supplies and stuff hanging off the sides and on the roof. The point of the lesson was that sometimes when we feel overburdened like the buses do, we need to rely on the lord to help build us up. She said that those buses require lots of love and maintenance to run that way for a long time. We need the same thing through the atonement.

Elder Teh's talk was really good as well he talked a little about Ammon and how we can try to be better missionaries like him. We also sang Did You Think To Pray in the choir which was really good.

Our MTC Zone (I am in the back row)

We got new elders this week in the zone, they are really great. There are 3 Croatian elders and 1 Slovenian Elder. They are all really good guys and it was really fun to help them out with their first day.

Speaking of which, Starszy Little and I were called as Zone Leaders as of this week, so we got to help welcome the new elders and show them around a little bit. We also get a cell phone, so that's pretty weird. It's barely a real cell phone though because it only receives calls from the front desk, but it's weird seeing it in the MTC.

I am super grateful that I was called to Poland because they do not require visas! It was a bummer because the Bulgarian sisters who left on Monday all got reassigned to the Chicago West mission (which has the highest # of Bulgarian speakers outside of Bulgaria) hopefully it is a temporary reassignment. Luckily I do not have to worry about that at all because Poland is amazing and doesn't need any of that.

This week is a bit weird because the people that we came in with who are in 6 week languages are leaving on Monday so they all got their travel plans. Whereas we are still here for another month. As much as I love the MTC, i am extremely anxious to get to Poland and actually start doing missionary work!

Kocham was moja rodzina! (I love you my family)

-Starszy Everett

Week 3!

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

First Week in the MTC!!!!! (Week 1)

The MTC is both one of the best and one the hardest things i have ever done. Dad mentioned that he wanted to get a run-down of my daily schedule... I think Siostra Pierson gave the best summary of our days: we wake up, eat, study, eat, study, eat, study, sleep. That is exactly what we do. But more specifically we wake up at 6:30 then get ready for breakfast at 7:15. We usually eat breakfast with our zone (which is all the missionaries going to Poland, Czech, Slovania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Croatia etc... its all the Adriatic north countries and a lot of eastern Europe) and hang out and talk for the 45 or so minutes we have to eat. After breakfast we head straight for class, we will usually have a teacher and have about 3-4 hours of classroom instruction (all of which is in Polish, our teachers are not allowed to speak English to us except in very rare situations). After our first class we head to lunch, then back to class. The second block is generally Personal, Companionship, then Language study where we prepare our lesson for our "Investigator" that evening (the investigator is just one of the teachers who hasn't started teaching us yet). Then we have a 45 minute gym break then dinner, teach a lesson, more study time, then bed at 10:30.

Everett, Little, Mulder, Garrison, McPherson, Klein, Pierson, Carlson, Allowitz

As you can probably see, the days are super long and busy.

I don't have my camera right now but in a couple hours I will send a picture of my district, everyone is really awesome! My companions name is Starszy (Christian) Little, he is from Sandy Utah and is a huge scouter, he talks about scout camp basically all the time. He has some pretty funny stories but there is not time for me to tell you about them right now.

The other Elders in my district are Starszy Mulder, Garrison, McPherson, and Klein. We all get along really well and help each other with the language all the time.  There are 9 of us, and only 1 Polish district in the MTC at a time. The previous one only had 1 elder and 2 sisters. All the missions in our zone are on 9 week transfers. In Turkey there are only 14 elders allowed at a time, no sisters. (we don't have any Turkish elders yet but 4 are coming next week along with 2 Bulgarian elders). We probably have one of the most diverse districts - as far as language goes - in the MTC. We have like 10 or so languages and some only have 1 person learning it. Can you imagine being alone in a classroom learning a language!

Speaking of the language, learning Polish is the hardest thing I have ever done. I get grammatical concepts pretty easily but I cannot memorize vocab to save my life. I pray every day for help in the language but I still have lots of problems with memorization. Speaking of memorization, not only do I have to memorize how to conjugate verbs, but apparently we also have to learn how to conjugate nouns and adjectives! (not really conjugate, its called declinate and basically makes nouns/adjectives mean different things). We haven't learned too much about that yet but we will soon and I'm not excited for that.

Pray for me to learn this language please!

Elder Evans (Lisa Jacob's dad) gave our Tuesday night devotional this week, it was really amazing. His wife Sister Jacobs told a really cool story about when they were Mission Presidents in Japan. She said that despite not knowing the language so would go out every morning and say good morning to everyone she passed. Eventually she said good morning to this man and he responded with "Good Morning" in English. Long story short he was an inactive member and ended up becoming reactivated and got sealed to his family. Super Cool. This story gave me a lot of hope because it made me realize that despite being terrible at learning polish, as long as I do as much as I can, the Lord will bless me with being an effective missionary. I just have to try my hardest and he will make up the rest.

Anyway, time is really short here so that's probably all I'm going to write for this week.

I love/miss everyone back at home especially my family.

Starszy Everett

P.S. My mailing address is:

Elder William Henry Everett

APR27 POL-WAR

2007 N 900 E Unit 53

Provo UT 84602

Please send me Dear Elders and letters! They mean a ton!