Sawyer's adventures in Australia

I have been on my mission for 2 months and it's flown by. But when I look back I truly feel changed. I am so excited to keep working hard and change more. I am so grateful for the opportunity to be a missionary and dedicate all this time to the Lord. So this week we had Christmas. Christmas in the MTC is when our travel plans come in. Christmas songs are sung in place of hymns in class (in Chinese of course) and there is joy in the air. Most missionaries are so desperate to get out of here that when the email comes in that says 'Departure Information', you will hear an uproar of excitement. I honestly love the MTC, I'm not in a rush to get out. I feel like I've made the most of my time here and I want to make the most of this last week too. So I personally did not wear my Christmas tie and throw a party when I got my flight information, but I was excited. Imagining myself really going to Australia is a lot easier when I can see the ticket and everything. I have ...

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...