Ni hao!
Wow! What an experience these first few days have been! The first day I entered the MTC and entered the classroom my teacher only spoke chinese. And when I say immersion, I meand IMMERSION! To be honest I was so suprised and just overwhelmed that I started laughing out loud. I thought "what in the world is this lady saying?!" I found out a little later that her name is Xiao laoshi. She has turned out to be an amazing teacher. The first day I was able to recall a lot of the chinese that I had learned in High School. I am so thankful that Yang Laoshi was able to teach me chinese during those 3 years. It has proved to be extremely helpful as we have been learning and teaching.
My companion is Elder Lackey from Pocatello, Idaho. He is awesome! We work great together. It turns out that most everyone in my district (8 out of the 11 people) have had previous experience with learning chinese, and same with most everyone in the zone (around 80 people). It has been such a great experience to be here and be able to have and feel the spirit with me during the day. I can truely feel the Lord's hand in the learning process. There is no way that we would be able to learn chinese at the rate that we have been without him. There is an Elder in my district who had absolutely no background with chinese and he is already able to pray in chinese and have basic communication with us. It's truely amazing to see how the Lord blesses his servants. Another example of his help that I have greatly noticed that I am rarely ever tired during the day even though we wake up at 6:30 and are working and studying and learning all day long!
Wow! What an experience these first few days have been! The first day I entered the MTC and entered the classroom my teacher only spoke chinese. And when I say immersion, I meand IMMERSION! To be honest I was so suprised and just overwhelmed that I started laughing out loud. I thought "what in the world is this lady saying?!" I found out a little later that her name is Xiao laoshi. She has turned out to be an amazing teacher. The first day I was able to recall a lot of the chinese that I had learned in High School. I am so thankful that Yang Laoshi was able to teach me chinese during those 3 years. It has proved to be extremely helpful as we have been learning and teaching.
My companion is Elder Lackey from Pocatello, Idaho. He is awesome! We work great together. It turns out that most everyone in my district (8 out of the 11 people) have had previous experience with learning chinese, and same with most everyone in the zone (around 80 people). It has been such a great experience to be here and be able to have and feel the spirit with me during the day. I can truely feel the Lord's hand in the learning process. There is no way that we would be able to learn chinese at the rate that we have been without him. There is an Elder in my district who had absolutely no background with chinese and he is already able to pray in chinese and have basic communication with us. It's truely amazing to see how the Lord blesses his servants. Another example of his help that I have greatly noticed that I am rarely ever tired during the day even though we wake up at 6:30 and are working and studying and learning all day long!
I titled this email the Rollercoaster because life here has been pretty crazy over the first few days. On top of the first day immersion, where i was just swimming in chinese, we later got settled into our rooms around 9:00. I thought that after working so hard the first day that I would be able to fall asleep quickly, but no... I just didn't feel tired at all. I was awake for hours and didnt fall asleep until around 4:30 in the morning, so I only got about 2 hours of sleep. I thought I was going to die the next day as the hours started clicking away that night. But to my amazement I was full of energy the next day. He truely does bless us and help us in his work. Sleep has been much better since then.
Another shock to the system came when we found out the second day that we would be teaching an investigator in chinese the following day. My companion and I were stunned...but we prepared ourselves with the language that we know so we would be able to teach him. Our investigator's name is Zhou Wen. When the opportuninty to teach finally came, I was pretty nervous. I asked my companion if we could say a quick prayer before we started. As we knocked on the classroom door where zhou wen was and sat down to start teaching, the moment I began to speak, i felt a feeling of peace come over me and my nerves went away. i was suprised at how well my companion and I were able to communicate with him. I'm sure that much of what we said was with the wrong grammar be zhou wen understood us and we were able to understand him for the most part. We taught him a God and how he is our loving Heavenly Father. As we continued to teach him we came to learn that him and his parent's do not have a good relationship. As we invited him to pray at the end he prayed that the message we would bring to him would help his family and that he might be able to come to know the truth of it. We had another opportunity to teach him yesterday and we taught him a little more about God and our role in this life, but again as we were talking things started to just naturally drift back to his family. My companion and I noticed that this is what Zhou Wen needs to know. The gospel can help bring his family closer together and bring blessings into there lives. We didnt know in chinsese how to teach much about the role of families in the Father's plan for us so and we finished up our lesson with him we committed him to pray and know if our Heavenly Father is real and to read the Book of Mormon and look for the ways it can help his family. My companion and I have committed ourselves to learn the chinese that will help him learn more about his this gospel and how it can help his family.
I love it here! Anyways, time is about up.
Elder Bastian
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