Tuesday, June 11, 2013

First Letter - 5-31-2013

Hola familia!

I am pleased to tell you that my P-day is on Friday! and make sure you use dearElder.com rather than email to communicate since I can get the dearElder letter every day. So where to start.......................

Day one of the MTC looked like this, got out of the car, was taken to the main building - I think where I got my nametag and little packet of important information.... Also it seems just from observing my different things in the packet that my report home date may be June 2, 2015, even though that is a while in the future. So after I got my package of information I went out and followed the Elder that was my host to my residence hall. I live on the top floor of pretty much the farthest residence hall in the back, that is a lot of walking, but not really. In my room are 5 other Elders in a room meant for 4 people so it is a little stuffy. the Elders names are Elder Pickard (Tucson, Arizona), Elder Killpack (Draper, Utah I think), Elder Harris (Yuma, Arizona.....the place in Mike’s mission that was really close to the border), Elder Diede (somewhere in Utah), and Elder Reed (somewhere in like Washington maybe). They were all at BYU this past year. Elder Pickard is my companion.  He has a pretty positive attitude. Over the past 2 days we have gotten along pretty well and I think over the next 9 weeks we will get along very well.

The rest of the first day we were in class and had little orientation type things here and there. Our teacher, Brother Sung, only spoke Korean the first day and pretty much all other days. It was crazy. No one understands anything really yet. But we are already moving fast, we learned the alphabet and are working on sentences and such already. We have to teach our first investigator today only in Korean so me and Elder Pickard have been working on a plan and need to work on memorizing stuff that we need to say. We have a phrase book and that is super helpful for this since we don’t know vocab and can’t really form our own sentences yet. There are so many missionaries here, the MTC president said over 700 came in yesterday.....and 67 of them are in our Korean branch making our branch a total size of about 105 or something like that. (The other 40 were already here.) New missionaries for Korean missions come in every 3 weeks they said, so it’ll be 3 weeks till I really won’t feel new anymore because I’ll know more than the new missionaries.

The food is just like the Cannon Center.....which is both a good and bad thing. I really don’t eat as much as at BYU but I still feel soooo full after every meal so I need to eat a little bit less. On Thursday we were still in an orientation type phase but not really. We had workshops and stuff here and there throughout the day and personal study time here and there throughout the day. Class was for like 4 hours and then we had individual language study and other such study times adding up to 6 or so hours just for that. We are always busy here. Really no time to relax except when we sleep at night.  I like getting up at 5:50 the past two days so I don’t have to wait for a shower. Since there’s 6 missionaries and only 4 closets we drew qtips rather than straws to see which companionship got their own lockers and which 2 had to share. I had much luck that first day because I got the short one for me and my companion, therefore getting us our own closets!!!  Compared to others it seems like I have the least stuff of everything. I haven’t been good with pictures but I have taken 2 so far. Sorry. it’s just inconvenient to carry your camera everywhere because you leave your book bag in the classroom at the beginning of the day then take it home at the end and only carry what you need to workshops and such because they don’t allow book bags.

We have exercise time 5 days a week for 50 minutes, luckily my companion likes to run so we probably will run a lot on the indoor track and use the weight machines up there. Who knows we might go do other stuff too, I’ll just have to wait and see.

It’s so weird the missionaries here, either everyone looks really old or everyone looks really young, both for Elders and Sisters. It’s amazing to see how strong and sincere the sisters can be when answering questions and bearing testimony. Talking about sisters I guess I’ll tell you about my district. My district is the people in my class; my district includes all the Elders from my room plus 2 others. Their names are Elder Luke and Elder Stapley. We have 4 sisters in our district and they are Sister Bussio, Sister Segovia, Sister pope, and Sister Jackson. They are all super nice. About half of my district is going to Seoul and the other half to Busan. It’s surprising to find out that Busan is one of the "rarer" missions to be called to. Maybe 1/5 of the missionaries that entered Wednesday are going to Busan. I feel extra special going to Busan.

It is so amazing being here in the MTC, I am constantly surrounded by an overwhelming spirit as well so many happy people. It has been an awesome experience so far and it’s only been 47 hours.

Every P-day we will have the opportunity to go to the temple so I get to go to the temple later! That will be such a great experience. I love serving the lord and can’t wait to serve his children in Korea.

Until next week,
Love and miss you guys,
Elder Frampton


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