It is like a college campus with classrooms and dorms
(this is the view from our room)
with the most unusual student body ever imagined: mostly nineteen and twenty-year-old young men and women with a sprinkling of graying, aging married couples. All of us dressed up in suits and dresses most of the time. The senior couples stay in small hotel-like rooms. Here is what ours looks like.
Our window is the one with the open curtain on the right.
There are two brand-new six-story buildings on the MTC campus.
They will house all the classroom instruction from now on. We got to take a tour of them on Friday. They have magnificent murals like this one.
And, they have photos on all the walls of current missionaries and archival photos of missionaries in the past. As I was walking down one of the halls, I saw this one and recognized my Aunt Thelma on the right!
She was a missionary in the late 1930's in France and Belgium. I had just been asking Steve if I had ever told him that my aunt had been a missionary and I looked to the left and bam, there was the photo. I like to think my dad and his sister, Thelma, were present at that moment prompting me first to remember and then to look.
We have met some great couples this week. And we were delighted to discover our very first day at lunch to see Paul and Nancy Hansen.
They lived in Columbia back in the nineties and they are here training to be visitor center missionaries in Independence, Missouri!
Speaking of lunch - I am in gluten-free heaven. There is a special-diet's room where I can go and find all things gluten-free. It is wonderful and delicious.
Our days here have been busy and full. Classes go from 8:00 to 4:30 Monday through Friday. This week, we have focused on how we can help others come to Christ. Our second week will be learning how to function in our different rolls on our mission. Some couples, like the Hansens, will be working in church visitor centers. Others, who are retired military, will be assigned to military bases and act as support to military personnel since our young missionaries cannot proselyte on post. One couple will be working in Maryland in the archives taking photos of old documents. A few couples are learning how to be of help to the church leadership in their own home towns. They will return from the MTC to live in their own homes and be full-time workers in member and leadership support. It seems like most of us, though, are going to be working in the various mission offices around the world as secretaries and vehicle coordinators (a.k.a. car czars) Steve will be one of those. I will be a secretary.
Here is a photo of our district with couple missionaries going to North Carolina, Guam, Air Force Academy, Independence, Oregon, Mississippi, or back to serve in their home wards... (the youngster on the right was our instructor. His last name is Echo Hawk - yes, he has Native American blood)
We also connected with the Houseman family who we have known for many years in Columbia. They were at the MTC for some immersion language training preparatory to their mission to Brazil. Richard will be a mission president. Mission presidents serve for three years and get to bring their families.
Guess where we are all pointing to????
(Steve, me, Matthew, Allison, Ryan, Lori, Richard)
If we have enough energy after a full day of classes, we can do whatever we like in the evenings and weekends. We joined the Hansens and Craig and Tami Israelson for a visit to the Provo City Center Temple Wednesday night.
On Thursday, we went to Kirsti and Ryan's apartment here in Provo to watch "Moana" again. On Saturday, we drove up to Draper to attend the temple marriage of Steve's niece, Kamrie, to Ryan Wong.
Here are some photos from the reception.....
me, Dale (Dave's wife), Dave (Steve's brother), Steve
Dave, Steve, and Jeff, father of the bride
two nephews of the bride
Just to add a bit of excitement to our Saturday - Kirsti, who is expecting a baby girl on October 1st, called us from the hospital to say she was having a gall bladder attack! They put her in Labor and Delivery to monitor the baby - who was just fine - and to decide what to do about her situation. Today, she was sent home to eat a less fatty diet and hopefully, she will have no more attacks until baby girl arrives. Then, the gall bladder will come out.
