I to learn Jesus Christ about want

안녕하세요 열으분!

Hello everyone! (my spelling might not be correct, but most of you won't know the difference)

 As of today, I am on day 15 of about 63 in the MTC, and day 15 of about 730 on the mission. As far as updates go, Korean is still very much a difficult language. Korean is actually considered the most logical language in the world, but it's tough for my American brain. If you want to say "I want to learn about Jesus Christ," the sentence structure in Korean would be "I to learn Jesus Christ about want." Our teacher promises that we'll be able to make sentences in our head without thinking eventually, but that day seems to be in the very distant future. On the bright side, my vocabulary is up to about 150 words and I have taught about 5 more lessons in Korean. We also have memorized the missionary purpose in Korean, and are now working on the First Vision.

The MTC serves about 50 different meals, so if you are here longer than two weeks you get to try them all several times.The two things that I'm currently missing about home are my mom's cooking and an iron that isn't 50 years old. Oh, and private bathrooms and showers.

The funniest thing to me about the MTC is the culture that develops among the language speakers, especially the ones that are here for 9 weeks. The English speakers are only here for two weeks, so they come and go pretty quickly, but you can almost tell somebody's language without looking at their tag. I feel like the Korean speakers are a lot closer than the other languages which sounds very biased but we all eat together and play kickball twice a week. The Cambodian speakers definitely believe that their language is by far the hardest in the world on account of their 100+ character alphabet, and they will not hesitate to let you know. The Mandarin and Cantonese speakers have the same mentality as the Cambodian speakers, but they're more quiet about it. And just like in the real world, the Koreans do not like the Japanese. We share everything with them (p-day, gym time, class building, bathroom) so we tend to blame them for all of our problems and the overpopulation (Japanese speakers come in by the boatloads). But the one thing that all the Asian languages agree on, is that nobody besides the Russian speakers likes the Russian speakers. These mini-cultures keep me entertained in MTC.

Remember how I mentioned the Korean sickness and how I thought I might be getting it? I got it in every sense of the word. I have been sick consecutively for the last 8 days, with some days being worse than others. I've had to stay in bed several times during this past week, but for the most part I've been able to make it to class. This week, I wondered a lot why Heavenly Father would allow me to get this sick for so long if I was at the MTC serving him. I got my answer a few days ago during a lesson from our teacher. He was using the story of Alma 14 to talk about the faith required to learn a language. But that day, it had a double meaning for me. As the story goes, Alma and Amulek are cast into prison for trying to teach the gospel. They are questioned and beaten by lots of people, then receive strength from God to break the prison walls. However, In verse 25, it says that they did not receive the strength from God until after the last person had beaten them. Every day, I kind of feel beat up by my sickness. But I know that if I keep up the faith, that God will help me recover. So instead of worrying about when this sickness will end, I now wait faithfullly for the last day of this sickness to "smite me" so that when it ends, I can receive strength from God to do his work.

사랑합니다 그리고 감사합니다

I love you all and thank you for all of your prayers!

Until next week,

Bigelow 정로