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| Hike with my brother Matthew...peep the LA Rams training facility in the back |
Kamusta kamo??
Hope everyone has been having a great week. It's crazy to think I'm pretty much halfway done with online MTC.
We had to say goodbye to one of our teachers this week, Brother Mariano, which was pretty sad honestly. He has been teaching Hiligaynon at the MTC for a long time, and he even taught some of my other teachers when they were in the MTC. He was actually born in the Philippines and grew up speaking Cebuano, then his family joined the church and moved to Florida when he was 10. A few years later, he got his mission call to the Philippines speaking Hiligaynon! He has an amazing testimony and was a super funny and awesome teacher. We all learned so much from him. Nagahidlaw gid kami sa iya (we miss him very much)!
But since Brother Mariano left, now we have 2 new teachers! Sister Zollinger and Sister Ventura are both awesome teachers and I'm excited to work with them in the coming weeks. Now we have 5 teachers and there are only 6 of us missionaries, but I think that's pretty cool.
Anyway, we started learning some new grammar principles in Hiligaynon. It's interesting because Hiligaynon isn't formatted like English like at all, so some of the different grammar principles we practice don't directly translate into English. I honestly think it's super cool, but it will take some getting used to. Hiligaynon is such a cool language though, and the more I learn it, the more I like it. It's only spoken on two little islands in the whole world and I feel honored to get to be a part of it someday. We got to practice teaching the first lesson in Hiligaynon to some other missionaries this week too. They all spoke Hiligaynon because they were in all Bacolod for a while before coming home to be reassigned. It was really cool, they just joined our Zoom call and we gave them a mini lesson and shared a scripture with them too. Afterward we just got to talk to them about how being reassigned has been and how they keep up their language skills while they are reassigned. The coolest thing was that I had some random connection to all of them. Either I knew someone who is going to their reassigned mission, or I knew someone serving in their hometown, or I knew someone that was in the MTC with them.
So on Brother Mariano's last day he shared some cool stories from his mission and he showed us some pictures from his mission. In one of the pictures, he and his companion were standing with a family they were teaching, and Brother Mariano was the tallest in the picture. Brother Mariano is 5'6", which he said is a pretty average height in the Philippines. It made me realize how much taller I will be than most people in the Philippines. So even if the people in the Philippines don't want to talk to the missionaries, they'll still always look up to me! Hahaha, joke lang (that's how the Filipinos say "just kidding"). But I hear the Filipinos really like basketball, so I guess I will just have to disappoint them all when they ask me if I play haha.
Anyway, this week has been amazing and I am continuing to love the online MTC. My district and my teachers and I continue to joke around with each other all the time and it makes being on Zoom for almost 7 hours a day fun. I know that everything going on in the world right now is part of God's plan, and that serving a mission right now is part of His plan for me. I am continually grateful for the hope that the Lord's plan can provide for us, and it makes me so happy to have the opportunity to share this with people for the next 2 years. I would like to invite you all to read one of the best conference talks ever (in my opinion). "Sunday Will Come," by Joseph B. Wirthlin, from the October 2006 General Conference, offers such a glorious message of hope and always comforts me when I start worrying about things in the world. Sunday always comes!
Palangga GID ta kamo!!
Elder Snyder
