Eighth Week in MTC

сайн байна уу!  (Hello!)

This week has been pretty busy, the countdown has officially begun! We have 11 days left here and then we will be taking off! We should be getting our flight plans soon so I am excited to receive those! Also, I finally am finished with the ELC, we received our certificates on Thursday so I am officially an English teacher! All of us are so excited, my whole district is ready to leave the MTC and we all know that this coming week is going to fly by!

I am having mixed emotions about leaving, I am excited, nervous, scared, and pretty much every other feeling you can think of. I am thankful that even though I may not know everything, I know that I have the Lord on my side and that through Him, I can do this. The students said we did great, one of the girls in our class actually came up to us and gave us a hug. We thought it was really fun. On our last day there we actually met with the board members who are creating our curriculum for teaching English in Mongolia and two of the people in there were a married couple who were working in Mongolia and so they had the chance to share with us what we would be doing. They actually changed a lot of the things and how they were going about with teaching English. So when we arrive we will be the first group to try out the new plan. They have changed it so now we don't have to plan our own lessons, the lessons will already be prepared for us and we just have to read it before hand and know what and how we want to teach it that day. We will also have a teaching companion. Instead of it just being me teaching (like they used to do it) they have changed it so that I will have a regular companion that I teach the gospel with who will be either a native Mongolian or someone from the US, and then I will have a teaching companion who will definitely be from the US who has been certified to teach English. They chose to do it this way so that President Benson could have more flexibility with the missionaries and where he can send them. Before he could really only send native Mongolians to the country side but now with this new system set up he can send more to the country side. Since there are two teachers now, when I first get there I will be paired up with a sister who I will teach with and she will train me what to do and then when President Benson thinks I am comfortable he can take the sister and send her somewhere else like to another school or to the country side if he needs to or if she gets sick I can still teach then he will send her back when he wants to. So there will be times when I teach alone and times when we teach together. But with this system there will always be at least one teacher so if he wants to send me to the country side he can because the other sister will be there to teach. Largin эгч was saying how when she was serving in the country side, she would be walking down one of the dirt paths and she would look up and see 50 eagles flying over head. I thought you would find that cool!  I don't know how long I will be teaching there. Largin эгч said that she had to teach 9 hours a day so I think it just depends..... I know that we teach about a total of 12 to 14 hours each week but how that is all scheduled out, I am not sure. I won't find out until I get there. Largin эгч showed us her daily planner and it was full of investigators who were referred to her. I will be kept busy. It will be so cool to see the Lord's work progressing and I am so blessed to be apart of this. 

So TRC Skype is both return missionaries who served in Mongolia, Mongolians who live near by, and also Mongolians who are currently living in Mongolia. This Wednesday for example, Sister B and I had the opportunity to teach a Mongolian member who is currently living in Mongolia. It was so neat to speak with him and for the most part we understood him. He was pretty cool, in fact he was more than cool? Why? Well because the church is so small in Mongolia, there are only about 100 who are still active if even that, and the member we were talking to is serving as Stake Clerk, Bishopric Counselor, and a seminary teacher and he is only 24 years old. They have an accelerated program down there as Boyd ax puts it. That is crazy to have that many callings but he was really awesome!

хаиртай шүү,

кэрбий эгч  (Sister kerby)