Letter Week 1... Continued

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Dear Everyone,

My computer ran out of minutes, so I’m going to finish my letter by hand and you’ll probably just get it this week sometime. Sorry if my email was jumbled, there’s just so much I wanted to talk about. I brought a list of like three pages with bullet points!

We went to the temple this morning, so it’s been a good day. And yeah, I have been on time to almost everything with my companion, but we just always seem to lag behind everyone, which anyone who knows how much I love to be included and in the middle of everything would know how much that frustrates me, but it’s okay. I’m praying for patience every day. I’m trying to build a friendship! It’s tough though, I love her and she’s super sweet; but we’re such opposites! I mean that’s just how life is, I’m not saying anything’s wrong with her, but it’s just life that not everyone clicks immediately. One of my teachers, Grossen Testver made a comment about there being two different kinds of companions that he had on his mission, once that he absolutely loved and was best friends with and ones that he learned a lot from. I feel like that is so true! I love all 11 kicsi noverek though and the 3 osi noverek. Between the three districts there are 14 sisters. There are 18 sisters in the country, but a few of them are leaving in the next two transfers, so I just found out that we’re completely doubling the number of sister missionaries in Hungary. So cool! It’s going to be so sad when our osi leave though, because then we’ll have a few weeks with just our two districts before our kisci come. However, so far only 1 person has been called to leave in the March group, one sister. But the April group that Stephen Godderidge is coming in with is supposedly huge! Exciting stuff!

We’re expected to leave for Hungary on the 25^th ish of March and my expected release date is July 1, 2014, so expect sometime around then!

I’m so glad to hear that Morgan’s okay! That’s scary! Send her a message or text telling her I’m thinking about her!

Yes, a copy of my farewell talk would be nice! Every Sunday we have a Sacrament meeting with our whole branch, but no talks are assigned. We’re all told at the beginning of the week what the topic is for Sunday and all missionaries are expected to prepare a 5 min talk on that and then they announce 2 or 3 missionaries on Sunday who will be speaking. After breakfast, we watch Music and the Spoken Word as sisters. That was so spiritual this Sunday! Then have a Relief Society with all the sisters in the MTC. Sister Burton came and spoke to us this Sunday. At night we have a fireside. Apparently 2 weeks before we came, Elder Holland spoke at a Tuesday devotional. So bummed I missed that! Anyway, we have study times and some other District meetings and stuff throughout the day on Sunday.

Yes, I do write in my journal every night, even if it is just a couple sentences I’ve never had such a long streak in my life before where I haven’t missed a day for a whole week. Sad!

Thanks Dad, but nem, I’m not the most beautiful and definitely not the most confident sister here. But, thanks, haha. Also, thanks Mom for the update on Nathan’s underwear shopping… Hahaha! I hope you know I read that letter during gym time and laughed out loud. Then read it to the other girls on the bikes with me. Everyone thought it was funny that you told me that. Haha. Also, thanks for Pres. Uchtdorf’s book excerpts. They’re so helpful and I've shared the quotes with other sisters having struggles too. We go to the temple on Wednesdays. And yes we can do our own names, but we just do one endowment session a week.

You sent me a message or post or something that someone had written to me on FB about like my inner power and loving college with me, but you didn't say who it was from?!

Nem, the elders didn’t have skirt hangers for us, so mine are draped on normal ones. At the moment, we’re all using MTC sheets because we can take them off and they’ll wash them for us whenever and we just grab new ones; so that’s nice.

Gym time is super nice on Mon. and Fri. when we have it right before bed and have extra time to shower and get ready while the residence is empty. It is a nice break though on every day, just being able to get out of the classroom and clear your mind. It helps us focus better when we get back into the class. I’ve never learned so much in such a short time. I’m sure I have over a hundred words memorized and phrases and things. It’s amazing what you can do with God’s help and the Gift of Tongues.

Hungarian is so hard though! Apparently the joke is Hungary is that our missionaries could learn Spanish on our P-days. Hahaha, that made us laugh. Obviously it’s not true; it’s hard to learn any language but Hungarian is just so rough and doesn’t sound like any other language at all. The grammar is slightly similar to Finnish, but that’s it. Hungarian doesn’t have any defined sentence structure, it’s just however they feel like saying things pretty much, but you have to add on the correct word endings to specify subject, verb and what kind of object (definite, indefinite, direct, indirect) and to make things plural or add a preposition, you just add things to the end of the words, so words get sooo long.

Also, the suitcase strap doesn’t work to strap them together, it was broken, so that’ll be interesting on transfers…

This week I had such a cool moment in class. We were practicing grammar and sentences and questions and our teacher, Moody Nővér asked Hancey Elder in Hungarian: “A missionary are you?” And before he answered it just like hit me so hard and in my head I was just like WOAH! Where am I? What am I doing?! I’m a missionary?! What! And I had to look down and check my name tag. It was a crazy A-HA moment!

I  feel like I have so much to say, but I’ve already written so much and I need to go grab lunch, put in laundry and plan a lesson for tomorrow morning with Zsofi.

You asked lots of questions about my companion. I’ll get back to you on that later this week or next week when I have more positive things to say! Not that it’s a negative experience; it’s just rough for anyone to constantly be with someone, no matter who 24/7 and always get along/want to do the same things and adjust to someone else’s schedule. It just takes some getting used to. We haven’t argued or not gotten along though, so it’s all good. I have become GREAT friends with a few sisters in my district and the ZL’s.  Hahah. I don’t know how many times I can say that, but I just love them and meal times are my favorite; when I can just eat and joke around with all the elders. Poor Elders are way outnumbered in our district. Two of the ZL’s go to BYU and the third to the U, so we’ve all talked about hanging out when we get back! It’ll be AWESOME! It’s just weird to not be able to hug any of them, cause that’s my first instinct when I see someone I love and feel super comfortable with. Oh, well.

Talon Hicken comes into the MTC today! I’m sooo stoked to see him! I hope he loves it!

Haha funny thing, our room is kinda messy. BUT surprisingly, it’s not my mess! Shocking right? Haha.

Anyway, keep the letters coming and if anyone has any very useful tactics on getting rid of a crush on someone, let me know, because I’ve been praying hard for it and I feel like it’s such a sin to be interested in someone in the MTC/on your mission. Haha, I guess that shouldn’t surprise any of my friends/roommates that that’s what I’m struggling with. So dumb, I wish I could just flip a switch, haha. But seriously, give me advice here.

I’ll write you all as soon as I can! Stay positive and have charity! (That’s our district goal this week!) I’ll pray for you all (in Hungarian, of course, because all of our prayers in class have to be in as much Hungarian as possible.)

Love you!

Sok Szeretettel,

Butterfield Nővér