MTC First Week

Apa Khabar (whats up?)

      I have been counting down the days till I get to write! The Mission Training Center (MTC) is pretty tough, we have sixteen hour days. We wake up at 6:30, study till 7:00 and then go to breakfast. After breakfast, we prepare a lesson to our "investigator", Juni. It takes about 2 hours to prepare to teach Juni because we have to do it all in Malay. Then each companionship gets 20 minutes to teach Juni. My companion and I taught Juni that everybody is God's children and that God made a plan for all of us to return to him. We have taught Juni twice after that; it's incredibly hard teaching him in Malay and even harder understanding his responses. After we work with Juni, we have language study for about an hour and a half and then another hour of personal study. We then go to lunch and after lunch we have three hours of classroom study where our Malay teacher comes in and teaches us how to teach the lessons in Malay.  The language is pretty tough to learn, but studying it 5 or 6 hours a day helps. Since they don't have any of the handbooks or scriptures in Malay, it's really tough to learn. They do have handbooks and scriptures in Indonesian, which is really close to Malay; but, I never know if I am learning the right words.

     My companion is from Preston Idaho--his closest neighbor is 42 miles away.  He has 12 brothers and sisters; and, a pet skunk that his dad somehow took out the sack that sprays people. He also has a pet raccoon and like a million pet birds and pretty much everything you can think of. He is a pretty quiet kid so I don't know that much about him. I live with 2 other missionaries too that are both pretty funny and that I talk to a lot.

     I got my flight date to Singapore!  I leave on September 17th. I am already kinda getting sick of the MTC--we do the same exact thing every day--so I am counting down the days till I fly out. I did buy a journal though and I write in it everyday. I think about you guys everyday and love you so much.

Jumpa Lagi,
Elder Madsen