Week 1 - 08/23/17 - Group Email

One week down! It was a long week for sure, especially the first three days but it got better as the day went by. Right as I arrived I was lucky to be hosted by Adam Murdock and Ethan hoj, it made me feel a lot better seeing two familiar faces! Besides those two I've seen tons of other friends here at the MTC which has been fun. The language is definitely tough but it's crazy how much I've learned in just one week. 

I like my comp Elder Orton a lot. We get along well and have similar personalities, he went to school at east. There are 11 of us in our district 9 elders and 2 sisters. It's been hard getting used to studying so much because I never really studied in school but I'm getting used to it. I really like my teacher sister poleman she's the best! We've taught 3 lessons so far all in Nihongo which has been tough. I'm glad I learned the two alphabets hiragana and katakana before I got here. Some of the kids didn't know either of them so they've been focusing on those and I haven't had to worry about it. We never have class in the new building but we've going in there and studied a few times. I heard after tours the Japan missionaries might be moved in there so I'm crossing my fingers. 

The food here hasn't been too bad, I really don't mind it. They have tons of variety so it's easy to find something I like. I feel like we eat soo much and I think I  might gain some weight here haha. Not being able to exercise a lot has been kind of crappy but it makes the hour we get that much better. We'All of the Japanese speaking missionaries are in the MTC for 9 weeks and it's crazy how much more Japanese they can speak than us. I feel like I'm a sophomore in high school again  and the elders who have been here 6+ weeks are seniors. They all seem older but we all literally just started our missions lol. 

We went to temple this morning for pday, it was cool getting to see the Provo temple. Yesterday we had a devotional and Elder Weatherford Clayton from the 70 came and spoke to us. My favorite part was when two missionaries shared their conversions stories, they had really powerful testimonies. 

Love you all! 

Dean 長老

My MTC address:

Elder Jacob Michael Dean
OCT17  JPN-TOKS
2005 N 900 E Unit 331
Provo UT 84602