First five days in the MTC!

Hello family and friends!

Here I am the MTC! It already feels like I've been here for three weeks, but it's only been five days! I have had such a good experience so far.

First thing on Wednesday I got my books, which include a full-out Chinese triple combination (um, am I supposed to be able to read that?) and the bag weighed like 15 pounds I swear. We have some really good resources though, and I am definitely learning a lot so far. Our teacher only spoke Chinese for the whole first two hours, it was crazy. But I was really catching on, I'm so glad I took some Chinese before I came!

Pretty much, activities this week have just been going to class, teaching a few lessons, companion and personal study, and eating food. And feeling totally brain-saturated from all the Chinese we have been stuffing into our heads!

My companion is Sister Wawro and I really like her, she's from Dallas and is super nice. We get along really well, and our first two lessons have been pretty good! The first one we essentially jsut read what we had prepared but Sister Wawro bore her testimony with a lot of Spirit, so it was still really good. The second time we hadn't had any study time to prepare so it was a little rougher, but still okay. Tonight we'll be teaching again, hopefully it will go a lot better!

Yesterday, Sunday, was really awesome. I got spotlighted a lot actually, haha. In the morning I said the opening prayer for Relief Society where Sheri Dew was speaking, so that was really neat. Then in sacrament meeting I was called as the Music Coordinator (well not called, just assigned) so I pick the hymns every week. Also in sacrament meeting, there's a tradition that every time a new group comes in someone is called to give a spontaneous testimony, and guess who went up there to give her first official testimony in Chinese! It went pretty well, and I was actually like 90% certain I was going to go up there so I was kind of prepared haha.

Chinese is going really well! My brain feels like it's totally saturated all the time, but in a good way. We are learning so much and it's crazy that I can already pray, teach, and bear testimony in Chinese!

My district is great, they are a great group of people and I already feel like I am friends with all of them. We have a good time together (though on Saturday we probably should have had less of a good time and more of a studying time) and I'm glad that I get to spend the next nine weeks with these people. 

Sunday we also got to listen to a great devotional by Stephen B Allen, the director of the Church missionary department. He brought up the MTC presidents, who are wonderful, and had them tell how they met and where they have served, Five missions together, including mission presidents in Australia. Crazy!

Sunday night is movie night so we got to choose a movie to go to, my companion and I went to see Legacy in Chinese. It was actually pretty fun, and I understood a lot more since we've been learning all this Church vocabulary.

I am so grateful to be here at the MTC and to have the opprotunity to serve the Lord. I feel the Spirit everywhere I go here and it's so wonderful to be having fun, learning good things, and having the opportunity to help people grow closer to Christ. Even if it's an actress pretending to be an investigator, it's crazy how much I feel the Spirit and how much I want to help her. I love it!

Love,

Sister Cardon

in Chinese, Kang Jie Mei