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
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