1st letter from the MTC

Saturday, March 9th, 2013

Hey family,

Sorry, this is gonna be a short letter, I only have 5 minutes to write this. It's not my P-day but they are letting us write home since it is our first week. The language has been very hard, but my teacher says that we are progressing and she says we do have the gift of toungues. We taught our first investagator yesterday, I have no idea what he said... lucky for me I have a companion who is pretty conversational in Chinese. While I'm on the subject I have 2 companions, my original one never made it to the MTC so I got paired with Elder Wootan and Elder Ko. Anywho gotta go.

Love

Elder Bean (i'll write again on tuesday)

 

 

9 hours later (same day)

Hey family

They gave us a little more time so I'm gonn try and explain everything as best as I can. So after you guys dropped me off, I got dragged around the MTC got a bunch of teaching materials, Pinyn versions of the book of mormon, Preach My Gospel, and other stuff. It did not come with a pinyn hymn book though so if you come across one it'd be great if you could send me one, I can get free embroideries when I have that:). I hope I got at least one of your emails right, make sure to send a list of emails of you guys so I actually know who to send it to. When we got to class we found out that we are going to be filmed while our teacher teaches us (she's apparently really good.) We've already learned so much. I'm not that good, I struggle with tones a lot, luckily (like I said in my last short letter) Elder Wootan is very good at conversational Chinese, he knows how to say most words, he only struggles with gospel terms. We seem to never have down time. We are always studying, or walking, or learning, or practicing our Chinese. Dad I definitely agree with the analogy of trying to get a drink from a fire hose, I seem to only grasp so much, but all of the older generations of Mandarin tell us that it gets easier, so I'm looking forward to that day. So on Thursday we met our Branch Presidency, and I got called as District Leader! I was really shocked at first, and I still feel very overwhelmed between the calling, trying to learn Chinese, and trying to allways follow ALL the rules, they have a lot more rules in the MTC, then outside, I think it's thanks to missionaries like Dad(:p) I got to see Elder Jared Larsen on Friday and that was probably one of my highlights, he already had a letter for me when I got here, I was really shocked. I also saw Elder Andrew Thomas, and but I didn't have the picture on me so I have to find him again. I also saw Kallie while she was doing dishes, I was as excited to see her as she was to see me, but I was very cautious not to pull a Elder Thomas and hug her;). Well my times up, sorry its so short, I'll have a full letter on Tuesday, I promise.

Zaijian

Elder Bean

ps mom make sure to put this on the blog, I'm pretty sure Michael is missing me and wants to hear from me.