Week 3: MTC Halfway Done!

Oi!

Well we officially passed the halfway mark of our MTC stay this week! The days don't seem any shorter, but looking back, the weeks are going by fast. The rumor here is that once you pass halfway, you're stuck here for the whole 6 weeks, even if your visa comes. No visas have come this week though, so I'm not getting my hopes up.

To answer some of Mom's questions:

Yes, it does seem odd to be in one place so much. Every now and then we'll be up in one of the top floors of a taller building and get a glimpse of the outside world.

The temple is closed for renovations/construction from July 1st to August 11th. So we don't get to go at all. During our alotted temple time, we go and walk around the grounds outside of it. However, my district has been assigned to go and clean the temple next week so we might get a chance to go inside.

This week hasn't been very eventful, so I will scrounge up some things to write about.

Last Sunday I was assigned to be the District Leader for our district. Basically, this means that I conduct our class meetings, attend a bunch of extra meetings on Sunday, and pick up the mail for our district.

Also last Sunday, the Branch President read a portion of my weekly letter to him over the pulpit. When we first got to the MTC he challenged us to read the entire Book of Mormon while we are here. At first, it was challenging to balance that with class studies, teaching people, and learning Portuguese. However its gotten much easier as I've gotten more comfortable here. I was going to include my letter here, but the MTC computers are severely resticted and don't allow copying and pasting (or spell check, as you can probably see). Basically, I expressed my regret for not reading the Book of Mormon very much and that I was thankful for this opportunity to increase my testimony in that book, especially because I'll be teaching it to other people.

 

Portuguese has been coming along quite well. For a while, I felt like I hadn't been progressing and it was kind of discouraging. Then two days ago I was asked to read my summary of lesson 3 to the class. However, I had done it earlier in the week before our teachers had made the rule that we could only speak in Portuguese in the classroom. So I translated my paper on the spot! I was so surprised and it was a nice to see that I had been learning a lot, it just didn't feel like it. Although, we just learned several new tenses yesterday, so now I have a new challenge. Last friday night, we had TRC (Idk what that stands for) where we go from room to room talking to RM's from Brazil or to native Brazilians that live in Provo (there's a lot more than you would expect) about our lessons and just talk with them. It's been awesome and I've been surprised at how much of it I am able to understand. Saying what I'm thinking is a whole different story though. I can convey basic principles fairly well, but it is frustrating to not be able to say what I want to say, how I want to say it. I'm forced to speak in simple sentences that get the meaning across just fine, but lack the ideas and emotions that I am trying to convey. But I guess it's the basic principles that people are going to need to hear, not necessarily my thoughts and emotions.

That's all the news that I have for now, ate mais!

Love, Elder Carr

Week 2: Email

Hey Family and Friends!

It's been another awesome and long week here at the MTC! (missionary training center) Not to get your hopes up, but one of the districts that came in last week had 3 Elders get their visas! That being said, two of them went through the Houston consulate and the other went through San Fran. No one who went through LA has gotten theirs yet.

This week has been a whole lot of the same stuff. Just lots of studying and class, mixed with cannon center food 3 times a day. Portuguese is coming along; we teach a lesson to one of our "investigators" at least once a day, entirely in Portuguese! A couple days ago I only spoke Portuguese for the entire day! However, my vocabulary consists mainly of church related words, so thats about all I can talk about. If I needed someone to pass me a napkin I had to use hand gestures, or look it up in a dictionary.

Heres some cool things I learned about Portuguese.

1) Instead of CTR standing for "Choose The Right" it's "Conserve a Tua Rota" which means "keep your path." Coincidentally, I was reading in Alma 7 the day that I learned that and "Conserve a Tua Rota" was even cooler when I saw verse 19, which says "For I perceive that ye are in the path of righteousness; I perceive that ye are in the path which leads to the kingdom of God; yea, I perceive that ye are making His paths straight." Keep your path!

2) There is no word for "awkward" in Brazilian Portuguese. That means there's no reason to not open my mouth and talk to people about the gospel!

Our "investigator" "Amadeu" that I mentioned last week turned out to be our other teacher, so now I have two class sessions a day, one with Brother Durfee (from Arizona, served in Brasilia), and one with Brother Pinho (from Brasilia, served in Curitiba). I'll take some pictures with them this week so you can put a face to the name.

I've started to wear my glasses sometimes, and my district says that I look like Clark Kent/Superman. And in case that didn't make my head big enough, they also think that I slightly resemble Channing Tatum. I dont really see that one, but this is the 3rd time I've been told that. Apprently my head needed to be deflated, because I had a 'humbling' experience in the gym yesterday.

Story from gym time yesterday: None of the guys in my district like to go to the gym at gym time, so I went on splits with an elder from the other district in our zone that came in at the same time as us. He is built exactly like Cameron, and is apparently an awesome gymnist. I, having not run for months, ran some stairs with him after our workout. Not to be outdone, I pushed myself to keep up with him. Unfortunately, gym time was right after dinner, and I had eaten 2 plates of BBQ wings and fries. Fortunately, I made it to the garbage can, and didn't make a mess. Needless to say, I'm going to start running to try to get in better shape.

The blessing behind this story is that I was able to lift and run at all.

For those who don't know, last summer I dislocated my shoulder in a tubing incident, and I spent months rehabilitating it back to the point where I could lift weights again. Then in February, I attempted an unintelligent stunt (a backflip over a pylon and off a 10 ft wall into a sparsely filled foam pit) and I "taco-ed" and hurt my back really bad. Rarely a night went by that i didn't go to sleep with a sore and aching back. Lifting and running only made it worse. However, when I was set apart as a missionary my Stake President blessed me that my body would be strong and able and later, when my Dad gave me a father's blessing, he blessed me with the same thing. A couple days into my stay here at the MTC, I realized that my back didnt hurt as the day went on. I spent the next couple days testing it out, and it has yet to give me a single problem, even after handstand pushups! It has truely been a blessing for me.

Thank you for your letters and DearElders! And thanks Mom for the package! :) The poptarts have been my midnight snack (and by midnight I mean 10 o clock. but it sure feels like midnight by that time!) Oh, and thank you to the Riley family and their DearElder they sent me, we all had a good laugh at those missionary jokes.

Love, Elder Carr

P.S. You know that you're a missionary when you quote the movie "The Testaments" (which we watched on Sunday) as often as Remember the Titans is quoted in the Carr household!

Week 2:MTC

Week 1: MTC

Hey Family and Friends!

Oi! Como vai!? Thats about all the Portuguese I know... haha

I sent you a letter on my second day here, but if you didn't get that here's the scoop:

I will be here for 6 weeks, and if my visa hasn't come by then I'll be reassigned somewhere stateside. My appoximate departure date (for whereever I'm going) is August 12th. So far, only one Elder in the last 2 districts to leave has gotten his visa before being reassigned. The people being reassigned are going all over the place in the US, so I have no idea where I'll be.

Sorry I haven't email for 9 or 10 days, our P-day is on friday, but the first friday that I was here (I got in on wednesday, July 3rd) we didn't get our P-day because we didn't really have any laundry to do and the was "not a need to prepare or recover from anything." I would disagree, because the first couple days were crazy! After a flight delay and then having to borrow a stranger's phone to find my cousin, I arrived at the Missionary Training Center where I got my badge and schedule and put in a room with the 900 other missionaries that arrived that day, the biggest arrival group in MTC history (this week was about 700 and traditionally they were more like 400). After that we went to our classroom to meet our district and our teacher. If I can figure out how to attach pictures before my time is up, you'll be able to see all of them. On the 4th of july we watched the movie 17 miracles at night and then got ice cream and watch the fireworks at the stadium of fire (from the MTC). Other than that, the days have all been pretty typical.

My companion is Elder Andersen from Blackfoot, Idaho. He's a great guy, fresh out of high school with an enthusiasm for missionary work. We've been able to work well together. Surprisingly, it hasn't been that weird or hard adjusting to having someone with me 24/7. My district hase 6 elders, including myself, and we are all squeezed into a room that was built for 4 people. That means that I have 1 drawer and half a closet for all my clothes, so I store most everything I have in my suitcases under my bed.

A typical day at the MTC is wake up, shower and get ready (no time to exercise because the line for the showers is too long), go to breakfast, then go to our classroom for personal study, then we do more studying, teach our "investigator," "Amadeu" (in portuguese!) then lunch. Then we come back to the classroom for more studying, then dinner, then our teacher teachers us for a couple hours (Brother Durfee, who served in Brasilia 2 years ago. He's awesome), then more studying, then we go back to our dorm and iron our shirts and read our scriptures and go to sleep. So basically we live in our classroom on the 3rd floor of 18M for more than 8 hours every day. But time flies when we're studying, and there's more to learn than we have time for. For the first couple days we didn't get any gym time but recently we have, so its nice to be able to get out of the classroom.

My time is running short and I have yet to add pictures, so if you have anymore questions, send them to me through Dear Elder (that is the best way to contact me for the next 5 weeks, I get them the day of and I can write letters at night, sooo yeah, I'd like to hear from anyone and everyone!) (I'll reply to everyone's individual emails by letter, since I'm out of time!)

Overall, I really do like it here, but I'm just anxious to be out in the mission field!

Tchau!

Elder Carr

"Perfection. Let's Go To Work!"