Week 4 - Malagasy Squad Turn Up

Manahoana! Salama ve ianareo? Vao vao? Salama aho tsara be!! Is it Pday again already?!?! Wow the weeks seem to be flying by. My time here in the MTC is over halfway done already! I cannot believe that! I leave for Madagascar two weeks from Monday! We should get our flight plans a week from today! That is just crazy!! This week was a great week. I will try to remember everything. First off, last Saturday was amazing. We had a goodbye devotional for the Tongan, Samoan, and Fijian districts as they left for the field early this week. The goodbye devotional was one of the most spiritual moments I have had here in the MTC. We sang 8 different hymns in 8 different languages and they all were hymns about missionary work someway or another. I have never felt a spirit so strong as we sang these hymns that I could not even understand the words to. It was as if the Army of Helaman was there singing with us as we sent these missionaries out into the field of battle. That will be a devotional and feeling I will never forget and I will soon be able to experience being the missionaries being sent off into battle. Then after that we were walking back to our rooms and two of the Elders going to Samoa started doing a haka! I caught the end of it on video as I will attach but not sure if it will be able to be posted on the blog. After the two Elders going to Samoa did their haka, one of the districts going to Tonga did a haka. I got that whole thing on film and will attach also. These hakas were so sick! Made me feel like I was about to go out and play one last game at Bingham. Then Sunday was amazing too! I love the devotionals and this one was the best yet! A band named Nashville Tribute Band came and sang some songs for us! It was the closest thing to a country concert I have had in about a month! Their songs invited the spirit and I felt it so strongly. My favorite song they sang was "Hardest Thing I've Ever Loved To Do" You all should go look them up on Youtube and listen to that song especially! It is about missionary work and it made me so pumped to get out in the field and get to work! It was an amazing devotional. Tuesdays devotional was good too! Elder Uceda came and spoke to us. He is from the Quorum of the Seventy. He spoke a lot about missionary work from perspective of an investigator as he is a convert to the church. It was a really good talk! Hmm what else...we are still teaching a ton of lessons with no notes! It can be difficult at times since we still do not understand all the rules of sentence structure but we are able to speak as I would imagine a little 3 year old Malagasy kid would speak. Funny story for the week! This one might actually make some of you laugh. An Elder in our district was teaching his lesson about the First Vision and he was trying to say "Joseph Smith was confused about religion" but the words for religion and breastfeeding are very similar and so instead he said "Joseph Smith was confused about breastfeeding." That is one of those classic mistakes you always hear about and it gave me a pretty good laugh. The language is coming along. I can understand much more than I can speak. It is crazy to me that we will be leaving in just over two weeks to get to the field and I feel like my knowledge of the language is no where near where it needs to be to be in the field teaching. Hopefully I can make some strides these next two weeks to get there though. I was feeling pretty worried about the language the other day and felt like I needed to improve a ton more than I have. Our teacher then said we had to come up to the front of the class and share a scripture and explain why we like that scripture all in Malagasy. I thought mine was going to be really bad but after I finished she told me that she was not able to do that until she had been in the field for one month. That made me feel good and gave me a little boost of confidence that the Lord knew I needed. Well I sort of had a motto for this week and I will share that with you guys as I don't know what else to talk about. We read D&C 111:11 and what I took from that is that we receive blessings when the Lord feels that we are ready. He has blessings in store for us but we do not get those until we show him we are ready for them. It made me think of a movie I had seen and in the movie a man talks about two farmers. The farmers both were in a drought and they desperately needed rain. They both prayed to God that he would send them some rain so all of their crops didn't die. Then one farmer got up and went and prepared his fields for the rain and the other just went about his day. Which farmer do you think God sent the rain to? I love this little story as it demonstrates the quote, "Get on your knees and pray then get on your feet and work." I want to say that quote is by Gordon B. Hinckley, but I am not sure. Well that is all I have for this week!! I hope you all have a great week! Thank you for the packages and dear elders and letters! They make my day! You are all in my thoughts and prayers each day! I will attach a lot of pictures. Mostly selfies haha. Some of our district with our teachers! The pictures with our teacher from the Congo are sick. She said do one picture looking "proud' and one picture looking "gangster" so we threw up our "M's" for Malagasy squad. She is so cool. I forgot to add that I was released as a District Leader this last week. Some of you may not know what a District Leader is exactly. So the District is all of the Elders going to Madagascar which is 13 of us. So basically in the MTC as District Leader, I got everyone's mail, interviewed senior companions once a week, and went to meetings on Sunday with the Branch Presidency. Really not a whole lot done as District Leader in the MTC. I am now just a regular old joe missionary haha. I am the senior companion out of me and Elder Allen which doesn't mean a whole lot besides I will be interviewed by our new District Leader! Have a great week everyone! Tiako ianareo! Veloma!​