I slept fitfully last night. At about four-o-clock I had a dream that my whole apartment hadn’t gotten up and we had a mad scramble to get ready to go. We were still late. It was scary. As it worked out though, we all got up promptly at six-o-clock and were all ready to go. I’m excited for what lies ahead today.
Later… Today has been one of the longest days of my life. This morning we met our teachers for an hour before breakfast. I can’t remember their names right now but I think they will be good. We had our first class after breakfast and the instructor went over how to study the scriptures. He used the exact same outline of principles that Bro Sommerfeldt used. It was a good class but quite frankly I got bored because I had already learned it. Lots of the things that we are doing to “obtain the word” are things that I’ve been doing for a long time. Sometimes I feel that I just want to learn the language and go. I hope I will be able to overcome that attitude so that I can learn what I’m supposed to learn.
I always sort of thought that learning a language would be as simple as just wanting to learn. When we started learning some vocabulary in the morning, it still seemed like it would be easy, however, when we started learning grammar and a bit of sentence structure, it felt like I was getting hit with a cannon! All of it makes sense and I can remember where to put the placers, verbs, objects and everything but memorizing all the words is going to be a real chore. In class today we also learned how to pray in Tagalog. We have to say all of our prayers in the language and add in words as we learn them. It was really strange to say my personal prayers tonight in Tagalog. I guess it will become more and more natural as time goes on.
Well you can certainly see some of my bad attitude that I came into the mission with! Reading this entry, and some of the coming ones, really has shown me some of the weaknesses that I have. I like to think that I’ve gotten a bit better today but I know I still have a long way to go.