The 9 week grind of learning Hungarian has begun

Sept. 6, 2017

Sziastok,

              The 9 week grind of learning Hungarian here at the Provo MTC has begun. When I arrived at the MTC they gave me my name tag which reads Udy Elder. Since in Hungarian a person's title comes after their name, I get a lot of people that ask me if my last name is Elder or if the MTC misprinted my name haha. Since there are only two of us elders here at the MTC going to Hungary, we got to have a room to ourselves which is nice since I don’t have to share a closet or a desk. Each day I wake up at 6:30 and go grab sack breakfast, which I like because we get more time in the morning and don't have to wait in the long lines. The lines in the cafeteria are extremely long, but I realize the summer is the busiest time here at the MTC and by October it wont be nearly as busy. Then I do my personal study and go to exercise time and usually play either basketball or 4 square. There's an elder in my zone who played basketball at Lone Peak who is really good. We have two 3 hour class sessions, one during the day and one at night. There are only 6 of us in our district, 2 elders and 4 sisters, so we all will get really close with each other during the 9 weeks. Our classroom is in one of the newly built buildings which is really nice. There are beautiful murals and huge glass windows everywhere.  The last group that left to Hungary was a lot bigger with, I think 19, missionaries, and two districts. Almost all of class is spoken in Hungarian so it consists of me saying "nem tudom" a lot which means I don't know. But we are slowly learning and I realize learning the language will eventually come. The food here at the cafeteria is very reminiscent of BYU's Canon Center but maybe just a little bit better. 

                 The missionaries in the zone like to pull tricks on the newcomers. Our zone consists of missionaries going to Hungary, Germany, Albania, Turkey, and for some reason ASL(American Sign Language). The first day one of the missionaries pretended to be deaf so he even told us to scream in his ear so we would be convinced. And next door to us there are two missionaries going to Germany, one from Russia and one from the Czech Republic, and the one from the Czech pretended to not know English and the one from Russia would translate for him. This went on for 3 days until the missionary started to bear his testimony during our nightly zone devotional haha. 

      It's crazy to see all the people I know here from BYU. Just from my dorm hall alone I have seen 6 other people here at the MTC. I have even had 3 people come up to me who knew my name and knew who I was and I had no idea who they were. It was kind of akward but I guess I must of been pretty popular around that BYU campus haha. I also ran into another Elder Udy which was cool.

     I've been singing in the MTC choir and On Tuesday, we got to sing in front of and hear from Elder Dallin H Oaks who came and spoke to us and it was broadcast to all the other 15 MTCs worldwide. He talked about 3 challenges new missionaries face. First is change, like a change of schedule and bad habits. Second is achieving skills, such as language skills and learning the Gospel. And third is we must become a missionary and like Christ by having a mighty change of heart. We must put off the natural man and not be selfish and look inward but rather look outward and serve others.

I'll try and send some pictures next week. 

   

 -Udy Elder