This letter came on July 6, 2013 – Officially caught up!
pamilya ko,
Thanks for your letters. yes, I would actually much prefer all the letters to be sent via DearElder. DearElders are delivered twice a day, so I will get them super fast and be able to actually read them thoroughly instead of skimming them. Because email time is kind of intense, an hour really isn’t that much when you have a week’s worth of things to say.
I hope you all had a wonderful araw ng kalayaan! day of freedom, or independence day! Being at the MTC instead of doing the normal traditions was kind of weird. Mostly it just didn’t even feel like a holiday. We still went to class and did all of our normal things, except, due to the national holiday, there was no mail, and so we’d all be like, oh hey, is it mail time yet? and then remember there was no mail. that night, though, we only went to one hour of class instead of three, and then we all went to 19M (the big gym) and watched 17 Miracles. It ended around 10pm, and then we got ice cream and got to stay up and outside and watch the fireworks from the Stadium of Fire. So that was pretty good! haha lots of people were really tired yesterday though from being up so late, since we still had to get up regularly for class.
We learned a tooon of stuff this week. a whole bunch of different verb conjugations. conjugating verbs in tagalog is incredibly different than anything I’ve ever seen before. In spanish and english, it’s generally about changing the endings of verbs, and that’s generally to indicate the tense, or in spanish, who you’re talking to. In tagalog, the verb conjugations determine everything else about the sentence. it indicates where the focus of the sentence is, and then if you mess up the focus indacator (ang or ng) your sentence can change from “pinatay ng mga tao si Jesucristo” or ‘the people killed Jesus Christ’ to ‘pinatay ang mga tao ni Jesucristo’ or ‘Jesus Christ killed the people.” also, if the rumor I heard is correct, dad might kind of find it funny to know that the verb for ‘to go’ (ir) in tagalog is ‘punta.” and a little about the weirdness of the verbs–if I was conjugating ‘punta,’ then the command/past form would be pumunta, the present would be pumupunta, and future would be pupunta. So the conjugations happen by adding things in the middle of the verbs. it’s weird. but pretty cool.
we have two new investigators. one is named Jay. he’s frustrating. he’s angry at God and so it’s hard to teach him. (by the way, our investigators aren’t actual investigators, but still, we treat it that way). we’ve just been trying to get to know him and get him to trust us. our other one is named Aira, and our lesson wasn’t super great the other day and we probably really confused her. we do TRC tonight twice, so we’ll be teaching two people we’ve never met.
I’ve been learning the importance of teaching from the heart. the way you teach will directly influence the way the message is received and the way the principles are implemented into their lives. if you teach by rote presentation, they will apply things that way, like prayer, or scripture study. but if you teach from the heart, they will apply the principles with their hearts. like if you’re teaching how to pray, it’s not all about “1-2-3, amen” in steps, but explaining why prayer is important, why it is important to me, and why it can be important to you. explaining how YOU feel about prayer will help them understand that it means something to you.
I don’t really know what else to write, but I did hear Sis sadie anderson bear her testimony in Mandarin the other day, and that was pretty awesome. 🙂 we have a lot of extra time today because the Provo temple is closed until after we leave, so we have like 3 extra hours today.
Mahal kita!
Sister Carr
p.s. Here are some fun tagalog words for you:
pagpapakumbaba — Humility
pananampalataya — Faith
ngiti — smile
sigi — ok (say when you’re agreeing to something)
ok lang — (when asked how you are, if you want to say, just ok”
nanay — mom
tatay — dad
lola –grandma
lolo –grandpa
there are no words for ‘brother’ and ‘sister.’ they just say ‘sibling.’
Finding Faith in the Philippines 