Dear Family,
Thank you so much for you little messages that you have been sending me, they make me happy when you send them.
So you may be asking yourself, how is the MTC? Well to be slightly blunt, its pretty darn hard. In fact its probably the hardest thing that I have ever done in my life. The days are long and hard and the food is systematically destroying my insides. Other than that it is pretty fun. We are on a pilot program for the language which means that our classes are significantly harder than all of the other Russian classes. Our teachers only speak a minimal amount of English and we spend about nine hours a day studying and speaking in Russian. Its very challenging but rewarding because we are now able to bear our testimonies in Russian, pray in Russian, sing in Russian and hold very generic and superficial conversations in Russian. This is very cool.
The language is a hard language. I don't know how much you guys know about how languages are constructed, but most of them have some sort of conjugation for verbs to demonstrate different tenses and subjects. Russian is similar, except for that fact that you have conjugate or change not only your verbs to different forms but also the adjectives and the nouns, all of these being dependent on the gender of the words and the different types of sentences that you can construct such as accustive and nominative sentences. Sound confusing? Well it is.
My district is pretty fun. Right now me and my companion are struggling a little because he has a habit of running off on me when I'm not looking and as a senior companion, you can guess that can get a little frustrating. He also doesn't know very good English and enjoys contradiction me in the middle of my lessons to our "progressing investigators." We are going to try to work more on that this week, so we'll see how that goes. The rest of my district is pretty fun. My District Leader is a really cool guy, he played long-snap for Oregon State and has a really big work ethic, so he is always trying to keep us on track when we start getting distracted during personal study and such. I also have two really good friends that I have made, Elder Harris and Elder Porter. I hang out with Elder Harris a lot because me and him have almost the same sense of dark humor. Elder Porter is in a film program at BYU for cinematography so me and him talk about movies all the time. Its nice to have someone with a similar artistic aethestic around, especially since most of the other guys around here mostly enjoy discussing football, smashing things and how hot Taylor Swift is. You can imagine how much I enjoy those conversations!
We also have a very interesting branch. The most interesting part is our President, President Harrison. He honestly terrifies me. He is tall and big and always has this kind of maniac smile on his face. When he speaks he speaks in this low Clint Eastwood- voice that is quite terrifying. As terrifying as he is, when he gives lessons its amazing, but I wouldn't want to get on his bad side, because that would most likely promptly end my young life. However, I have been able to perfect a quite impressive vocal impersonation of him.
Basically I don't know what else to say, the MTC is just a lot of doing the same routine over and over and over and over and over and over and over...... I'm excited to get to Russia so that I can actually teach the people there. The one thing that is great is the spiritual experiences that we have in the MTC. On Sunday we had a great devotional by the Director of Missionary Services and last night Russell M. Nelson came and talked to us. There had been rumors going around that President Monson was going to come and talk to us, so everybody thought that we would be hearing from him. Everybody showed up really early and we started singing prelude hymns, the first one being 249: "Called To Serve". After we got done with that the musical director had us sing "Come Listen to a Prophets Voice" which with all the rumors created quite a stir. It seemed like the whole auditorium started talking at once, and although it wasn't the prophet, we were all so excited to here a member of the Quorum of the Twelve.
I love all of you guys, and all of the people who are supporting me. For those of you who are reading this on my blog, please write me, especially on Dear Elder. I would love to hear from you and I'll make sure to write something back!
As Always,
Zach Brasier
P.S.- I also got to see Gavin Nitta and Cameron Olsen which was awesome as well as Mike Abbott from Hill Cumorah pageant. And if anybody is curious, Elder Collingsworth of BYU basketball fame is in my branch.
Moscow Time