9.7.09

Hey Everyone,

2 weeks in counting!!! I'm so excited/nervous. The time here has flown by and I'm pretty sure I've quadrupled my knowledge in the past couple couple months. Holy cow. We get our flight plans this Thursday. We are pumped.

Yesterday, they split our branch in 2 I'm not surprised since we were over 100 elders and sisters, and we were the biggest branch in the MTC. It was a sacrament of mixed emotions. One of the Branch Presidency, Gary Stott, that I was very close to got called as the Branch President of the new Branch, so that was sad but I'm happy for him and I know he will do an amazing job.

We also had Mission Conference yesterday, one elder from my branch named Elder Simmons is a music major and he is an amazing violinist. He played Abide with Me Tis Eventide. It was beautiful! It ALMOST made me wish I could play something. Oh well it was really neat and our whole district was front and center, we were so proud of him.

Our learning is mainly focused on verbs now and conjugations. They have kind of a set of root words then you conjugate them to say what you want to say. For example, to go is Punta, to say I went somewhere it is Pumunta or Pinunta, then Present tense is Pumupunta or pinapunta, and future tense is pupuntahin or Pupunta, all the words are like that it gets fun.

We have to make our lesson plans very simple. It is hard for me because there is so much I have to say about the gospel and it is hard to condense it into small simple sentences but it'll be what they understand. Its a struggle but its fun.

Oh, I haven't ever told you but my district is pretty sure that one of our teachers one of the 3 Nephites he is a stud and always has the spirit with him when he teaches. It is awesome. He has some great spiels and we love to hear them. Then we just got a new teacher this past week, a native Philippino named Sister Rather, She married an American and has been in the US 4 months and is now teaching us Tagalog. Preach my gospel says there is nothing better than speaking with a native and we get to learn from one every day so we are very fortunate to have her and she is very very nice!

On a worldly note, How bout the BYU game. 14-13 with 3 minutes left!! One of the teachers here was getting updates, so we were too. That was awesome. Then we heard about it from our branch presidents too. It was really funny.

Well I gotta run, hope everyone is doing great. Love you all.
Love
Elder Chase