Sawyer's adventures in Australia

Big week at the MTC. All the Chinese speakers that were here when we showed up left this morning. Off to the field. It's crazy to think we've been here 6 weeks, it's flown by. We start 'English Speaker' schedule on Wednesday, meaning we have 3 weeks left. It'll be sad to leave the MTC, it's such a blast here. My companion Elder Brenchley and I take every opportunity to practice our Chinese. We met two Sisters from Taiwan and began telling them a couple stories. With our limited vocab, our stories were complete nonsense but it had these Sisters crying laughing. Whether they thought the story was funny or our Chinese was funny, I'm not totally sure, but either way it felt good. It's fun being a beginner at this language and picking up more every day.  One day this week I went on an 'English fast'. The whole day I just spoke Chinese and for the most part I was fine. When a conversation about evolution came up, however, I couldn't cont...

The MTC is so fun. This week I heard a story about a 30 year old woman serving a second mission. I'd recommend all of you to go do something similar. It's awesome out here. So apparently our district is pretty stellar. The Church tech people came in and were developing a new app and wanted feedback from a 'good district'. The language committee decided on us. So they all came in and it was an interesting experience. They gave us their phones and had us do this little training on their new app. Then after we gave them feedback. It was all these 30-40 year olds taking criticism from teenagers. They said "Be completely honest. We want great feedback and we want to improve this app. So don't hold back!" They got the honesty they asked for. We TORE THAT THING APART. Some quality comments from us missionaries were "yeah... I didn't really understand what we were supposed to be doing" "It looked like you just did a Google search and c...

So this week we hosted some new missionaries. My companions and I spent most of the morning with our new friend Elder Yang, who is moving into our residence hall. He is from Taiwan and knows little English. It was a great chance for us to continue practicing our Chinese, and quickly realize that we have a lot of work to do. Something really cool was that Elder Yang knew my older brother Spencer who served his mission in Taiwan.  We escaped the MTC with Elder Yang. He had to go to the doctor to get a quick xray so we walked across the street to the BYU health center. He must have been so confused. Since we didn't know how to say 'doctor' or 'X ray', we decided the best thing to do was to tell Elder Yang that we were so grateful for him in Chinese. "You are our opportunity to escape the MTC" "Thank you for helping us go home" "Don't let them see us" "Run!". It took some explaining to reassure Elder Yang that we were not in...

Hey everyone,  I'm fluent in Mandarin now. The way I know is because I taught a lesson to a REAL PERSON in Mandarin with my companions. They bring in volunteers from outside the MTC and we teach these real people. It was a little uncomfortable because I can speak but not understand that well when this native Chinese lady starts speaking rapid mandarin to me.  I ask her "What was a time in your life that you felt the Spirit?" And she starts sharing the really personal experience that I can understand about 10% of. By the end she is basically crying and I'm just like smiling and nodding because I can't really understand what she said. But it was really cool to be able to share some scriptures with her and bear my testimony. I know the language will come. I'm not really worried about it. I'm working hard on learning it and making progress. The Lord is helping me learn it so much faster than I would be able to by myself.  I also bore my testimony in Ch...

Week 2: I am LOVING the MTC. Being on a mission is a gift and a blessing. I have 2 full years to just devote to the Savior and to serving others, and I know that I will come out better for it as well. It's really exciting and rewarding to be working so hard and learning so much and feeling like it's for a good cause. This week I got to play basketball. We are supposed to always SYL (speak your language) so common shouts on the court are 'chuan!' (pass), 'wo kanjian ni' (I see you), and of course 'guan' (dunk). Except we're not allowed to guan at the MTC, otherwise I would by now. Whenever my companions and I play together as a team of 3 we dominate. It's a blast and I love playing against some of the guys here who are pretty good. Basketball is such a great way to relax since the rest of the time my mind is on Chinese. It's pretty cool how much we've learned in just under two weeks. Some missionaries get discouraged thinking...