Tuesday, May 4, 2010
O'Hare Airport, Chicago (April 3, 2010)
Rebecca is excited to be enroute to Italy and is looking forward to the real mission (and Italian food) even though she loved the MTC. She says upon arrival they will be allowed to drop off their luggage but will then be taken immediately to a Piazza in Milan to begin contacting Italians and preaching the gospel! It will be quite a change from the sheltered environment of the MTC. Though excited, she is a bit nervous about the impending imersion in missionary work (especially the talking to strangers in Italian in the Piazza), so send a few prayers up for her!
Sunday, May 2, 2010
"i can still recall our first wednesday" (April 27, 2010)
We made up words to that Abba song “I can still recall our last summer,” but for coming here: I can still recall, our first Wednesday. I still see it all....walking in the door, backpacks on the floor..." and then that part for "now you're working in a bank, a family man, a football fan, and your name is Harry" is now "now we like to SYL, we've got one week, and we have had, all the food they offer" (we are all pretty sick of the food here, it's the same stuff over and over, and especially with the promise of real Italian food we just can't wait to get there!). I can't believe it is our last p-day here in the MTC. In fact, this is the last email I will send from the MTC, and I am not sure I will have a chance that first couple of days in the field, so don't be worried if you don't hear from me for two or two-and-a-half weeks instead of just next week, but I will certainly still email as soon as I get the chance. We got our flight plans on Thursday! So now I can tell you it: we report to the travel office here in the MTC at 5 am (ugh) on Tuesday morning, May 4. Our flight leaves the SLC airport at 8 a.m. and goes to Chicago, where we have a 3 ½ hour layover, and then we fly to Frankfurt, have a two hour layover, then fly to Milan and arrive at about 10 a.m. Wednesday morning. So I had better sleep on the plane if I want to make it through that first day!
In Relief Society on Sunday Elder Worthlin's daughter came and spoke to us. Do y'all remember the story he told in conference before he died about his daughter who was going on a blind date, so she left with him, but came back a few minutes later super embarrassed because it turned out that the man was actually there to pick up her sister for babysitting? Well, it was that daughter, and it was hilarious! She told us the story again from her perspective, and that was really cool. She was neat and way fun to listen to.
Last Saturday we had a contacting activity, where we split into missionaries and potential investigators, and some of us were supposed to listen to the message and others weren't, and it was all in Italian. We combined with the other district, so there were 25 of us plus some teachers all practicing contacting in Italian. It was really neat to see how much Italian we've learned; the gift of tongues really is a real thing! Sometimes it's hard to recognize, though, because it is not a gift of sudden fluency, that's not how the Lord works. He teaches us line upon line, as we learn in the scriptures, and that is true with the gift of tongues as well, and conditional upon our diligence. We've tried really hard, our district, to SYL, and our teachers have spoken to us almost only in Italian since day one, especially Fratello Clarke. What's interesting is that sometimes it was really frustrating and hard and we really wanted him to speak in English and we wanted to speak in English, but we stuck with it and now it really is a miracle how amazing we speak Italian for only 8 weeks. Fratello Clarke's last day was on Friday (he went home for the summer), and he talked to us about how proud he was that we really stuck with Italian. He said he's never seen a group of missionaries so prepared to arrive in the field, and said that every one of our trainers will comment on how well we speak. We noticed it especially because the other district who did that exercise with us really just can't speak like we can, and they haven't syl-ed as much and their teachers haven’t pushed them as hard. God really does bless us line upon line, and based on our diligence. But He helps; we don't have to be superstars all by ourselves, we just have to put forth the effort to try.
That being said, sometimes I still fall asleep in class because it's hard to stay awake...woops, but I thought y'all would think it is funny to hear how my comp wakes me up by flicking my nose. So bizarre. Try it, and see how it feels. It is so startling...
Also, I played softball in gym yesterday, and I totally hit the ball when it was my turn to bat! I would have made it all the way to first base too, without getting out, but I was so excited that I hit the ball I forgot to run...hehe...
Ok, I am just about out of time; I had computer troubles so I lost about 5 minutes, so sorry this email is a bit shorter, but know that I love you and I am thinking of you, even when I don't email next week.
Love,
Sorella Langham
In Relief Society on Sunday Elder Worthlin's daughter came and spoke to us. Do y'all remember the story he told in conference before he died about his daughter who was going on a blind date, so she left with him, but came back a few minutes later super embarrassed because it turned out that the man was actually there to pick up her sister for babysitting? Well, it was that daughter, and it was hilarious! She told us the story again from her perspective, and that was really cool. She was neat and way fun to listen to.
Last Saturday we had a contacting activity, where we split into missionaries and potential investigators, and some of us were supposed to listen to the message and others weren't, and it was all in Italian. We combined with the other district, so there were 25 of us plus some teachers all practicing contacting in Italian. It was really neat to see how much Italian we've learned; the gift of tongues really is a real thing! Sometimes it's hard to recognize, though, because it is not a gift of sudden fluency, that's not how the Lord works. He teaches us line upon line, as we learn in the scriptures, and that is true with the gift of tongues as well, and conditional upon our diligence. We've tried really hard, our district, to SYL, and our teachers have spoken to us almost only in Italian since day one, especially Fratello Clarke. What's interesting is that sometimes it was really frustrating and hard and we really wanted him to speak in English and we wanted to speak in English, but we stuck with it and now it really is a miracle how amazing we speak Italian for only 8 weeks. Fratello Clarke's last day was on Friday (he went home for the summer), and he talked to us about how proud he was that we really stuck with Italian. He said he's never seen a group of missionaries so prepared to arrive in the field, and said that every one of our trainers will comment on how well we speak. We noticed it especially because the other district who did that exercise with us really just can't speak like we can, and they haven't syl-ed as much and their teachers haven’t pushed them as hard. God really does bless us line upon line, and based on our diligence. But He helps; we don't have to be superstars all by ourselves, we just have to put forth the effort to try.
That being said, sometimes I still fall asleep in class because it's hard to stay awake...woops, but I thought y'all would think it is funny to hear how my comp wakes me up by flicking my nose. So bizarre. Try it, and see how it feels. It is so startling...
Also, I played softball in gym yesterday, and I totally hit the ball when it was my turn to bat! I would have made it all the way to first base too, without getting out, but I was so excited that I hit the ball I forgot to run...hehe...
Ok, I am just about out of time; I had computer troubles so I lost about 5 minutes, so sorry this email is a bit shorter, but know that I love you and I am thinking of you, even when I don't email next week.
Love,
Sorella Langham
April 20, 2010
Ciao mia famiglia,
How are y'all doing this week? The weather here has been absolutely gorgeous. They opened up the missionary field last week, so now we have gym outside instead of inside. It's nice because we are inside all day long in the same classroom all day every day, so it's a good break. Our elders have taken to playing soccer against the Spanish-speaking elders. Anziano Zanni, the one from Argentina, is really awesome, but the rest of our elders are so small and their elders are so big, so far they've won every time! Elders and Sisters can't play soccer together, so we don't play with them (which is a relief to me, since I can't play soccer anyway). Sorella Shuel likes to play softball during gym time, or sometimes sand volleyball. It's a little harder for me to find something to do outside, because I can't play soccer, stink at baseball, and don't like volleyball, so there's not much else that goes on. I enjoy frisbee, so if people play that then I can, but it just depends on what other people are doing. Most often I've ended up walking around the edge of the field and either chatting or studying vocab. It's interesting.
On Sunday all of the Sorella - the five of us going to Milan and the four going to Rome - sang the Primary Song "I know my Heavenly Father Loves Me" in church. Anziano Lesa, our resident opera singer, wrote harmony parts for us to sing, and even constructed a little flute descant that I played. They have instruments you can check out for about an hour at a time here, and it's been fun to play a flute, though strange to play not my own. It turned out really nicely and we sang some of it in Italian. I like looking at the direct translation of hymns and other church songs into Italian, because it's often very different. For example, in the song "today while the sun shines work with a will," I think in English the last line is something like, "prepare for tomorrow by working today," right? Well, in Italian, it's "La vita eterna comincia da qui," which means literally "eternal life begins from here." The Iron Rod has another interesting translation, which I forget right now. We sing I Need thee Every Hour quite often, and the last two lines of that one in Italian are, "Bisogno, ho bisogno, sempre del tuo amore. Se tu mi sei vicino io vengo a te," which is literally, "Need, I need always your love. If you are near me I come to you," approximately, kind of weird in English, I guess. So it's just interesting to see the way they translate it.
My friend Chaela, who lived with me in Brownstone, has been here in the MTC for the past three weeks, living right down the hall as Sister McDonald going to St. Louis Missouri! It's been fun; she comes to our Italian prayer some nights and really enjoys listening to us speak in Italian. Last night was her last night here, right now she is probably on a plane heading to her mission field, so she wrote a little speech and had a friend help her translate it into Italian and read us all something about how awesome she thinks we are in Italian to us all last night. Then she said our prayer, but in English, and it has been a really long time since any of us have heard or said a prayer in English. It was so refreshing, especially with Chaela's sense of reality she brings into everything she does. We love praying in Italian, and it's good practice, but we are somewhat limited in what we can say. It's a good thing God knows our hearts and everything we are trying to say and mean with our broken Italian!
We tried a skittle game that my mother said she played in the MTC to help with SYL (Speak Your Language). It was so much fun! Every time one of us said a word in English, we demanded a skittle from them. It worked really well with just the sisters, but once the anziani joined in it got a little crazy. =) We tried to look up the word for skittle in Italian, and we found it and were using it all morning, until we realized that our dictionary is more British English than American, and apparently a skittle is a bowling pin in British English, so we had been asking each other for bowling pins instead of skittles all day! Che buffo!
We found out that one of our teachers, Fratello Clarke, is leaving this week! Friday is his last day. The semester ended at BYU, so he is going home for the summer a week before we leave the MTC, so we'll have to have a new teacher that we have no relationship with for the last week here in the MTC! How sad. We are getting Fratello Calder, who is the Italian tutor, and we've all met him and he's fun and friendly, so it's not that it will be bad, just different and random for one last week to have someone different. Our other teacher, Fratello Tilini, will still be here. He gets more and more funny every single day; I love his teaching style and really admire how much he teaches to us specifically and can really tailor what he does to help the people in our district so specifically. It's a really good example of how we all need to learn to teach. I hope I can learn to do it!
Sorella Shuel and I have started doing this thing on the whiteboard during our language study time, where I start writing sentences on the board that will focus on a specific grammar principle in Italian, and she will translate it on the other half of the board, and that way she gets in more practice. Well, yesterday we were working on the imperfect tense, which is not really existent in English but which basically is for things in the past that happen over a period of time or something like that, and so I made up this kind of ridiculous story which went something like this: "When I was 16, I worked at a laundromat. One day I was reading the Book of Mormon, when suddenly I found a dead cat! This cat was habitually bitten by a dog. I fell out of my chair while I was looking for it. The next day I told my friends the story while we were eating together. They were laughing when another dead cat fell on our table! It was funny." In almost each of the sentences there would be one verb in the imperfect and another in a different past tense, so it was supposed to help her identify when to use which and then practice conjugating them. Well, she read the sentence, "I fell out of my chair as I was looking for it," not as I intended (I meant "I fell out of my chair while I was looking for it, the cat), but as "I fell out of my chair while I was looking for it, the chair." Isn't that hilarious? I liked that interpretation so much more we translated it that way.
Also, we got two new sorelle this past wednesday! They are going to Milan as well, and they are the only two in their district. One of them is from Russia, and she is the first Russian ever to serve in Italy. Isn't that cool? They're both really nice and seem to be adjusting well, although of course they don't know hardly any Italian yet. It's kind of neat to see how far we've come since we arrived, since sometimes I think we only see how much further we have to go and forget to be pleased with ourselves at how far we've come.
God truly is in this work. He blesses us every day as we learn Italian and the gospel, and guides us in our efforts to teach and to learn. I love being a missionary, truly.
Please write, sorry I don't ask a ton of questions, but just assume I want to know everything, because I do. Do y'all have any questions for me?
Love,
Sorella Langham
How are y'all doing this week? The weather here has been absolutely gorgeous. They opened up the missionary field last week, so now we have gym outside instead of inside. It's nice because we are inside all day long in the same classroom all day every day, so it's a good break. Our elders have taken to playing soccer against the Spanish-speaking elders. Anziano Zanni, the one from Argentina, is really awesome, but the rest of our elders are so small and their elders are so big, so far they've won every time! Elders and Sisters can't play soccer together, so we don't play with them (which is a relief to me, since I can't play soccer anyway). Sorella Shuel likes to play softball during gym time, or sometimes sand volleyball. It's a little harder for me to find something to do outside, because I can't play soccer, stink at baseball, and don't like volleyball, so there's not much else that goes on. I enjoy frisbee, so if people play that then I can, but it just depends on what other people are doing. Most often I've ended up walking around the edge of the field and either chatting or studying vocab. It's interesting.
On Sunday all of the Sorella - the five of us going to Milan and the four going to Rome - sang the Primary Song "I know my Heavenly Father Loves Me" in church. Anziano Lesa, our resident opera singer, wrote harmony parts for us to sing, and even constructed a little flute descant that I played. They have instruments you can check out for about an hour at a time here, and it's been fun to play a flute, though strange to play not my own. It turned out really nicely and we sang some of it in Italian. I like looking at the direct translation of hymns and other church songs into Italian, because it's often very different. For example, in the song "today while the sun shines work with a will," I think in English the last line is something like, "prepare for tomorrow by working today," right? Well, in Italian, it's "La vita eterna comincia da qui," which means literally "eternal life begins from here." The Iron Rod has another interesting translation, which I forget right now. We sing I Need thee Every Hour quite often, and the last two lines of that one in Italian are, "Bisogno, ho bisogno, sempre del tuo amore. Se tu mi sei vicino io vengo a te," which is literally, "Need, I need always your love. If you are near me I come to you," approximately, kind of weird in English, I guess. So it's just interesting to see the way they translate it.
My friend Chaela, who lived with me in Brownstone, has been here in the MTC for the past three weeks, living right down the hall as Sister McDonald going to St. Louis Missouri! It's been fun; she comes to our Italian prayer some nights and really enjoys listening to us speak in Italian. Last night was her last night here, right now she is probably on a plane heading to her mission field, so she wrote a little speech and had a friend help her translate it into Italian and read us all something about how awesome she thinks we are in Italian to us all last night. Then she said our prayer, but in English, and it has been a really long time since any of us have heard or said a prayer in English. It was so refreshing, especially with Chaela's sense of reality she brings into everything she does. We love praying in Italian, and it's good practice, but we are somewhat limited in what we can say. It's a good thing God knows our hearts and everything we are trying to say and mean with our broken Italian!
We tried a skittle game that my mother said she played in the MTC to help with SYL (Speak Your Language). It was so much fun! Every time one of us said a word in English, we demanded a skittle from them. It worked really well with just the sisters, but once the anziani joined in it got a little crazy. =) We tried to look up the word for skittle in Italian, and we found it and were using it all morning, until we realized that our dictionary is more British English than American, and apparently a skittle is a bowling pin in British English, so we had been asking each other for bowling pins instead of skittles all day! Che buffo!
We found out that one of our teachers, Fratello Clarke, is leaving this week! Friday is his last day. The semester ended at BYU, so he is going home for the summer a week before we leave the MTC, so we'll have to have a new teacher that we have no relationship with for the last week here in the MTC! How sad. We are getting Fratello Calder, who is the Italian tutor, and we've all met him and he's fun and friendly, so it's not that it will be bad, just different and random for one last week to have someone different. Our other teacher, Fratello Tilini, will still be here. He gets more and more funny every single day; I love his teaching style and really admire how much he teaches to us specifically and can really tailor what he does to help the people in our district so specifically. It's a really good example of how we all need to learn to teach. I hope I can learn to do it!
Sorella Shuel and I have started doing this thing on the whiteboard during our language study time, where I start writing sentences on the board that will focus on a specific grammar principle in Italian, and she will translate it on the other half of the board, and that way she gets in more practice. Well, yesterday we were working on the imperfect tense, which is not really existent in English but which basically is for things in the past that happen over a period of time or something like that, and so I made up this kind of ridiculous story which went something like this: "When I was 16, I worked at a laundromat. One day I was reading the Book of Mormon, when suddenly I found a dead cat! This cat was habitually bitten by a dog. I fell out of my chair while I was looking for it. The next day I told my friends the story while we were eating together. They were laughing when another dead cat fell on our table! It was funny." In almost each of the sentences there would be one verb in the imperfect and another in a different past tense, so it was supposed to help her identify when to use which and then practice conjugating them. Well, she read the sentence, "I fell out of my chair as I was looking for it," not as I intended (I meant "I fell out of my chair while I was looking for it, the cat), but as "I fell out of my chair while I was looking for it, the chair." Isn't that hilarious? I liked that interpretation so much more we translated it that way.
Also, we got two new sorelle this past wednesday! They are going to Milan as well, and they are the only two in their district. One of them is from Russia, and she is the first Russian ever to serve in Italy. Isn't that cool? They're both really nice and seem to be adjusting well, although of course they don't know hardly any Italian yet. It's kind of neat to see how far we've come since we arrived, since sometimes I think we only see how much further we have to go and forget to be pleased with ourselves at how far we've come.
God truly is in this work. He blesses us every day as we learn Italian and the gospel, and guides us in our efforts to teach and to learn. I love being a missionary, truly.
Please write, sorry I don't ask a ton of questions, but just assume I want to know everything, because I do. Do y'all have any questions for me?
Love,
Sorella Langham
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