April 13, 2010

Carissima Famiglia,

'Ci sto' is a fun little phrase we learned. It means “I'm down.” Italian is really fun, and just gets funner every day. Everything is way funnier in Italian, too; you just say one word and everyone laughs hysterically, but if you had said that in English it wouldn't have been funny at all. That's one of the things I like about learning a language; I think it's funnier because it makes you think about things in a new way, things you've known or heard forever but never really thought about as much as you have to when you are reading it in a foreign language. That's why jokes are funnier, but it also is great to do with such a gospel-focused atmosphere. When I read the Book of Mormon in Italian I feel like I catch a lot of details or only the overall gist in a way that is really striking.

Also, the space bar on this keyboard is squeaky, and it is pretty annoying. Or maybe it is my companion's keyboard, I can't tell...

So, as of today, I have officially used up one whole daily planner! Every night we plan as a companionship what we will be doing the next day, every minute, and every week we plan generally for the whole week. Now I have used up a whole one and that is a really weird feeling. Time is flying by - I really can't believe I've been here as long as I have! We haven't very much time left in the MTC at all, which is so exciting but also makes us really nervous.

This past Sunday night our fireside was the BYU men's chorus, who came and sang to us the whole time, intermixed with testimonies and conversion stories of members of the choir. It was really neat. They sang some deep south gospel spirituals and some LDS hymns and some psalms set to music, as well as even this one really cool native American chant thing, including wind and bird whistle noises! It was a really awesome devotional, and it felt great to listen to some music since we can't otherwise!

This past Saturday was a really neat day; we did a lot of things differently from our normal sit-in-a-classroom-all-day, and that was fun. In the morning, with Fratello Tilini, we went outside and did a street-contacting role play thing. My companionship and one other were missionaries first, so we walked around and contacted the teachers and other missionaries in the Italian zone in Italian and tried to teach them a little something and set up a return appointment, all in Italian! We've been learning a lot about how some people have been prepared and are ready and waiting to hear the gospel message, and so it is those people that we are called to find and teach. So the exercise was focused on finding people who are prepared for the message (I think PMG uses the term 'elect'). So it was a really neat activity. Then we switched and we were investigators and a couple of other companionships were missionaries. As a non-elect, we either get to be really rude (because some people will be) or waste the missionaries' time (because some people will). I got to be one of the elect for the little exercise, and it was really really neat. Sometimes it's hard to see our Anziani as missionaries instead of just 19-year-old boys because we are with them all of the time, 24 hours a day (not quite, but sometimes it seems that way). One of the companionships, Anziano Bona and Anziano Dunshee, came and taught me during the exercise. Anziano Bona is a super-goof, super funny and way fun to be with, but sometimes I feel like he's never serious, but not really because I know he is sometimes. And Anziano Dunshee might be the funniest man alive; he's got this three-piece brown suit that he bought at DI, and it's awesome. But he's not at all confident at his Italian skills and I think he really stresses about it and gets discouraged with the language a lot. So they came up to teach me and I thought, oh ok, this'll be interesting, and it turned out to be an amazing experience! It's amazing how even in a fake teaching situation you really can have the spirit and teach with the spirit, and I really felt that when they were teaching me. Even in sometimes very broken Italian (which is what all of us have at this point), I could still feel the spirit and truthfulness of their message and I really wanted to learn more, even though I already know the gospel! I wanted them to just keep talking and keep teaching me. I think they really enjoyed teaching me as well. I loved getting to see them really being missionaries; it felt good. And that's the difference between a 19-year-old boy and a missionary; this truly is God's work on the earth and he helps us all, even the craziest of the 19-year-old boys, and when we accept that help and have the spirit with us and always strive to be better, that's when we become missionaries instead of just people.

In the TRC yesterday we taught the first lesson, in Italian again, to a Buddhist investigator! That was interesting. None of us knew anything about Buddhism, so we got to learn a lot about it from her. It was really different teaching the first lesson to someone with a non-Christian background; we focused a lot more on God and Jesus Christ, that they exist and love us, than we did on the idea that God speaks to us now through living prophets. I enjoyed it.

I don't think I have any funny stories this week to share, sorry, although we did discover this week that we've been using the wrong type of 'reject' when we say that people rejected the prophets in Italian. We've been using 'rigettare' instead of 'rifuttare,' which is more to reject food and throw up than to reject an idea! Glad we figured that one out.

Things are great; I hope they are for y'all as well. Thanks for the letters, I love them!

Love, Sorella Langham