Week 4, 1 month down.

So this week has been a good week, plenty good experiences. Both my packages have arrived so thank you for that! 

I hosted for the new senior missionary couples, one of the wives that I met was the sister of the wife of the Poland mission president, so I had a picture with them and she sent it to her sister. Another couple were called the Larsson's, now I don’t know if you remember them but they said they served a mission in Manchester about 10-15 years ago and served in Oldham, Elder Larsson said he served on the bishopric, I don’t remember but he said that knows the Ashworths and Mayalls. We just greet them as they arrive, take their bags and show them to their rooms, little tour and then move on to the next couple. 

Inside you're not allowed to play football or American football. Only outside but it’s too cold at the moment. I play volleyball most of the time.  Gym time is usually after the second block of class at 3.20, so right before tea. on a Tuesday it’s right after service at 9.20am. On Pday you can choose when you want to use gym time and you’re not limited to the 1 hour. breakfast in 7.15 till 7.45, we then have personal, companionship and language study till 11.35. Lunch is 11;35 till 12.20, we have classroom instruction from 12.30 to 3.20, we have a teacher for that block. Gym for an hour and then we go back get changed ready for tea at 4;50, that goes till 5.35, we then have classroom instruction to half 8 and then a final hour of personal study until we have to back to res for 9.30.

I don’t mind the food, it's really nice most of the time. I see Jonah from time to time, he has a different schedule so we're in class and eating at different times in the day. My favourite meal has to be when they do jacket potatoes at the salads bar, they also do good fried chicken salads. Most of the time I stock up on the leftovers, they have a leftovers bit where usually it’s just white rice so I enjoy that. they don’t’ do weetabix, so maybe you could send me a big 72 box of them.

Sister Yochim is really ill at the moment and so she's been rushed to the hospital a few times. She has stomach ulcers and a kidney problem. On Saturday night I had the opportunity to give her a blessing, my first one at that, it's an experience I'll never forget. All the sisters in my district were present, I had the zone leaders accompany me, there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. I didn't feel as though I was doing anything out of the norm, but the sisters were all so grateful for us elders being worthy of the priesthood. I had a chat with Brother Redding of the branch presidency the following day and he said that as he was doing his 2 weekly interviews with the missionaries, all the sisters had mentioned how that my blessing and the spirit felt that night had really helped. The Branch Presidency also thanked me. That was the highlight of the week for me. 

So tomorrow we have a big devotional with an Apostle, then it's the service project, we're making 320,000 meals for the needy across Utah. Thanksgiving activity thing is an all day thing, we have a different schedule which will be good, it's nice to have a change of the schedule. 

Photo bomb

Studying hard

The new Provo City Centre Temple

Temple walk

Zone Name Tags

The Polish is coming good, learning more and more grammar each day, being taught how to case sentences at the moment. There are 6 cases, and they change how the word looks depending on what they are in the sentence. I can't really explain it to you properly, you'll have to look it up.

There's a bunch of new elders on our floor back at the res, 2 of them are from Uganda and you'll never guess who they know...yep Elder Briwe (I don’t know how you spell his name), but it shows how small the world is when it comes to the church, they were good friends with the king of Uganda.

So after the Tuesday night devotional, we have a review and a little testimony meeting on what we got out of the talk. We had another Seventy come and visit last night. After that we were going to have some training from President Wiseman on teaching and how to teach properly, we're being visited over the next few weeks by the man that’s over all the branch Presidencies. Now president Wiseman had to go to the hospital to see sister Yochim, so he asked me to give this leadership teaching training lesson to the district leaders and teachers. I was teaching people how to teach basically, another good experience. 

I'm being taken out of my comfort zone a lot, but I enjoy when that happens because I know that I can grow because of it. I love teaching people.   Just being here and being around other missionaries is probably the best bit. 4 weeks has flown by.