It's still bright and sunny here in Provo, which is perfect weather for four square. But we'll get to that later.
Studying every day for months starts to get to people sometimes. Some people in our district have hit that point. After 6 full weeks of being in our little classroom, sometimes we start to lose it by the end of the day. Don't get me wrong, we have a ton of fun and we love learning everything that we're learning, but our heads are just dead by 8:00 every night. Here are some examples:
A few days ago, while we were sitting in class, Elder Price pulled a spoon out of his pocket. It had been hours since we had eaten dinner, so he yelled out something along the lines of, "What the ...? Why in the world is there a spoon in my pocket?"
One day when Elder Oliverson was getting a little sick of being inside, he jumped up to our little window and just kind of stared at the sun for a few seconds ... then he made a small raptor noise and rubbed his hands along the window because he wanted to go outside. Poor Elder Oliverson. It normally wouldn't have been that big of a deal, but when we came into our room the next morning, we found out we had failed our cleaning inspection because there were hand prints on the windows from his little episode.
Since our teacher Brother Larimer knows what it's like to be in the MTC, he draws out short courses for us to take around the campus before class starts. He comes in, draws a map with a path on the board, and then lets us go and have a little walk. It's a good thing we have those, or else we'd be getting a bit restless. We just feel like we're in some sort of institution since they give us permission to take walks and since we appreciate the sunlight so much.
Alright, it's really not as bad as it might sound. It really is a fun place to be. I was just stretching a bit for stories from this week. But let's just say that we'd be a lot worse off if we didn't have sisters in our district. They influence us to act more normally.
Well, I suppose I could talk about what we've actually been learning this week. We practiced a lot of street contacting and door contacting with our teachers, and some of the scenarios can get funny. When we were practicing trying to set up appointments with door contacts, one of our teachers didn't want to make it too easy for us, so she gave us a hard time with a lot of them. Sometimes, she would refuse to open the door and would yell through the closed door in French in a Chinese accent to see what we wanted. Since we couldn't get her to open the door, we just talked to her for a few minutes and Elder Barr resorted to shoving a restoration pamphlet under the door. Maybe next time, we'll just slide a Book of Mormon under the door page by page so that it fits.
In some other scenarios, our teacher would answer the door with a stick of chalk in her hands, pretending it was a cigarette. When she put the stick of chalk up to her mouth, she sucked in and blew out a puff of chalk smoke like she had practiced it before. Also, she would sometimes answer the door in Spanish. It's a good thing Elder Wallace learned more Spanish than French in his French class in high school, because we just had him talk to her in Spanish.
Our teacher Brother Larimer told us that he thought it was time for us to have a new practice investigator starting tomorrow, so he told us that our old one, Jean-Michel, got hit by a bus on his way to church. Brother Larimer said it happens quite often to investigators. For some reason, I'm not so inclined to believe him, but it was funny nonetheless.
Alright, so back to four square. Four square is a serious sport here in the MTC. While some people play basketball or volleyball, everyone else plays four square. We thought it was dumb until last week. Since we were all sick, we decided not to run and took to commentating the four square game happening in the middle of the gym. We came up with nicknames for all the players and determined their skill levels and who we thought would win each round. It got to be some serious commentating. In the end, we decided that the best four square player is a native French Elder that we call The Baker. He's The Baker because, well, he looks like a French Baker.
After we felt better and didn't have to just commentate anymore, we decided to try our hand at four square since we already knew the techniques and power plays from watching. We went up to the field to play in the parking lot next to the temple for gym time, set up our court and started playing. That's when we saw someone walking up the path from the MTC towards us. It was late in the afternoon, so the sun was behind him as he came up to join our four square game and we couldn't see his face. When he came up close, we saw that it was none other than The Baker himself. Suddenly, our four square match sort of turned into all of us against him, because he was the best player from the week before. By the end, we were all sweating (that's how intense our four square is) and had conquered The Baker. What a proud moment for District 46E.
Hopefully when I get to France, there will be more stories so I don't have to talk about four square in my weekly emails.
Well, Elder Barr continues to talk in his sleep at night. The funniest thing he said this week was, "No! You can't have it! I already have it! Hehehe. Desole." Not only was his little chuckle at 3 in the morning a bit frightening, but he decided to use the French word for sorry at the end.
Speaking of Elder Barr, apparently his younger sister is a rock star. Her band called Shrink the Giant played with Imagine Dragons and Neon Trees this weekend. The Barr family has some high rollers.
Alright, one more thing. We go and hang out with Elder Ardeche from France because he likes to teach us French and tell us French jokes. We're basically pretty well-acquainted with French humor. He apparently seems to think that trees are made of "hood." It's not even that it's difficult to understand him, but he wrote on the board the word "hood" and tried to correct us and say that pencils are made of hood. We told him that in America, a hood was a place where you don't want to hang out because you might get beat up. He didn't believe us. Silly Elder Ardeche.
Well, that's it for the week! The MTC is a great place to be. Thanks for letters you send; it's fun to hear from everyone!
Elder Wilson
