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| Some Pics from the 9/11 Memorial in Malibu |
Another great week at the online MTC! My district has seriously become some of my best friends. We mess around with each other so much in class and it is so fun. Even the teachers like to make fun of us too, and it all just makes the whole class go by fast because we're having so much fun. We focus when we need to though, so we still feel the Spirit a lot and have a lot of spiritual discussions. I have been able to learn so much about being a missionary, and a lot about myself in the last couple of weeks. I've gained a better understanding of what the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Book of Mormon mean to me in my life, and how important it is that we share this message and invite others to come unto Christ!
Hiligaynon is coming along well too. We are continuing to learn different grammar principles, and lots of it has to do with what the focus of the sentence is. In English you can change the focus of a sentence just with tone or slightly reordering things, but in Hiligaynon to change the focus you have to conjugate the verb differently and then order the sentence a new way too. It takes a lot of getting used to because we don't really have something like it in English, but that's what makes it cool I guess. There are lots of moments where I hear a particular word or phrase in Hiligaynon and it just makes me think to myself, "I love Hiligaynon." My teachers say the whole language is about the flow of how everything sounds, so the natives like to change a lot of stuff just so it sounds better. They say we just learn it when we get there haha.
One nice thing about the online MTC is that we get to do some activities that we wouldn't be able to do in the real MTC. Like playing Kahoot! We've played Kahoot twice so far and it seriously makes my day. I'm normally not a very competitive person, but with Kahoot something just comes over me, and I bring the fire. All the questions are like, "What is the correct way to say *some phrase* in Hiligaynon?" and all the answers are very similar so you have to be very careful with what you choose. The first time we played, Brother Cobabe, who is one of our teachers, played with us missionaries and he won. It was super funny, but we made fun of him so much because he missed one question. Elder Rydalch kept saying, "Wow, imagine being fluent in Hiligaynon and missing one question."
Anyway, when we played Kahoot again this week, the stakes were high and things were getting intense. I had just pulled into 3rd place, behind Elder McBride and Brother Cobabe, with only 2 questions left. The first one was worth double points, and I answered correctly, passing Elder McBride and only 200 points behind Brother Cobabe. The next one was also worth double points, so it had all come down to this one question. After answering, the screen went dark, and then, I emerged victorious over Brother Cobabe with a first place finish off the final question. I seriously was so hyped I was jumping around my room yelling "LET'S GOOOO," even though no one on the Zoom call could see me because my camera was off.
So yeah, that was basically the most exciting thing that happened this week.
Pday was fun this week too. Every year for 9/11, Pepperdine University does a cool memorial where they set up an American flag for every person who died in 9/11, so we went down to Malibu to see it. It was actually super cool because there were thousands of flags set up on the fields there. They even had some international flags for people who weren't American that died in 9/11. I found a flag there from the Philippines too. It is a really cool memorial and I'm glad they still did it this year despite coronavirus and stuff. Another cool thing from this week was that the elders in our ward came over one night and they were going to just practice teaching the Restoration to my family, and they had me teach part of the lesson too. It was a really cool experience and it made me excited to be a missionary in the field.
Anyway, that was basically my week. It's crazy to think I only have a week and a half more of online MTC. Then I've got two more weeks between then and starting my reassignment in Orem, Utah. In that time I'll probably just hit up the elders here and see if they have stuff I can help them with, but I am getting excited to be an in-field missionary soon!
Also, quick shoutout to Sister Toilolo, the solo sister in my district, because she is a beast. She can invite the Spirit into a discussion like no one else. She has done the whole online MTC without an actual companion, and she puts up with 5 other elders all day every day. Naturally, she is all the teacher's class favorite, but rightfully so haha. Us elders can get a little rowdy at times. Yes, even on Zoom.
Palangga ta kamo! Nahidlaw sa inyo! Baby hearts!
Elder Snyder
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| Found a Philippines flag |
