Week 1

Hey friends and family!

I hope to hear from you all in the next few months. But here is how my first week went.

Wednesday was such a crazy day after getting dropped off, but everyone was so happy to welcome the new Elders and Sisters. In my Zone there are Albanians, Hungarians, Polish, Germans, and the Turkish. Me and my TWO companions are the only ones learning Turkish. We aren't going to have any German Language Training from the MTC, but with the Germans living on our floor and in our Zone it is pretty easy to pick up on a lot of stuff to build on the German I already know. Our Zone leaders are two Polish Elders (they are called Starsyz (Star-shees) in Poland) and they are super awesome. One is from Leeds England and he is super funny and he is a really good actor-- like he is in the new Wonder Woman (not a big role or anything, but he was in it). I got to know about 15 German Elders-- that are also going to Berlin -- but they just finished their 6 weeks, and they left for Berlin this Monday. One Samoan Elder from Australia  gave up and $300,000 salary as a professional Rugby player to come on a mission -- if that's not dedication to Christ I don't know what is. He is a super funny guy. The first night I was here it was like 10:00 so we were getting ready to go to bed by 10:30 and we here a really loud pounding on the door, and Elder T' ammanipaye (I don't know how to spell his name) is standing there (he's like 6'3 and a huge muscular guy) is standing there with an a face that looked like he wanted to kill us. Then all the German Elders started busting out laughing when they saw our faces and then he gave us all bear hugs. 

A new batch of like 15 Elders and 10 sisters is coming in today and so I am excited to meet them because our floor has been super empty for a few days. There is only one Hungarian Elder -- but 6 sisters -- so he is a Solo, so he just moved in with us 3 Turks and so we split off into companionships of 2 sometimes. We have 2 Turkish teachers Kardesh Jensen and Kardesh Alton, but Brother Jensen is leaving after this week and he get Kardesh Chekir--he is ethnically Turkish but also teaches German which will be good for us as well. 

Turkish really is pretty dang hard, and this week was pretty insane. Our schedule is packed every single day and you barely have time to think about anything else which is good cause it keeps you focused on the work that really matters. Oh ya, I'm also here for 9 weeks instead of 6 -- I guess I just never got that memo haha. But my two companions are awesome and super smart. They are learning the language very fast and we are making great progress in our studies together. Their names are Elder Hunter Mackay, and Elder Mattias Mitchell. But Elder is Turkish is Yasli (See the picture of my name tag to see the Turkish Letters and the name of the church in Turkish)-- its pronunced (Yash-luh).

I can really feel the power that Spirit here at the MTC. So many people are here ready to dedicate two years of their life to speak a language they have never learned to a bunch of strangers in another country. They do all this just to be able to share the Gospel -- the good news-- to (almost) everyone in the whole world. I have the great privledge of being a part of this amazing work. As our modern day prophet Russel M. Nelson has said " The Lord is hastening His work to gather Israel. That gathering is the most important thing taking place on earth today. Nothing else compares in magnitude, nothing else compares in importance, nothing else compares in majesty. And if you choose to, if you want to, you can be a big part of it. You can be a big part of something big, something grand, something majestic!" And all 2,000 of the Missionaries in the Missionary Training Center right now and all 65,000 missionaries in the field are a part of this amazing work. 

 For those of you that don't how what Turkish is like or sounds like, here is a little example. The grammar is completely backwards. 

"Mormon Kitabi'ndan Isa Mesih hakkinda bir ayet paylsaabilir miyiz?" 

Means "May we share a verse about Jesus Christ from the Book of Mormon? 

Mormon Kitabi'ndan= Book of Mormon (from)

Isa Mesih= Jesus Chirst 

hakkinda=about 

bir ayet = a verse 

paylsaabilir= can we share

miyiz= question word 

So it literally translates to "Book of Mormon from Jesus Christ about a verse share can we? 

But it gets easier everyday and it is super amazing language.

I think the best part of it is something called vowel harmony, which means when you are congugating verbs (or really anything), the vowels of suffixes and endings you add on change to sound better with the verb stem. It makes the language flow incredible and it sounds awesome. So far we have been studying "Basic Core", but they have recently changed a lot of the curriculum. So far we have learned to meet someone, how to pray, how to teach someone to pray, how to testify (basically just a really simple testimony), how to share a scripture and how to ask some questions. We know basic sentence structure and are picking up everything pretty quickly. We have about 3-6 hours/ day of Turkish Class, a few hours of teaching workshops or devotionals each day, then we do 2 hours of language studying on our own and then work in in companionship and personal study for an hour each sometime in the day. So some days we are studying Turkish for 8-9 hours a day and when I lay down to bed at night I can't stop thinking about Turkish and random words and phrases keep popping into my head. 

I'm sure I'm tons of stuff that happened this week, but so much happens that it is hard to remember and record everything. I love you all! I look forward to hearing from you, also please ask any questions and I'll get back to you next Wednesday! 

Much Love

 - Yash-luh (Elder) Johnson