Elder Josh Holzworth: Week 1- Manila MTC, Philippines

Hey all!

First week in the MTC!

So we landed in Darwin and stopped there for 2ish hours (some of it was spent in the plane). We then flew to Manila landed went through immigration (spelt wrong i think haha) and the went and found our luggage, me and Elder Afoa (the other elder from brissy) found another elder and sister from Syndey. We walked straight through customs...... like they didn't check anything hahaha. Outside it was packed with people!!! like so many people waiting for others so us 4 were petty lost. eventually we found a guy with the church's name and MTC on a card and we went with him as he drove us to our hotel. As you can see the Hotel we stayed at was really nice for one a missionary and two a philippines hotel! We went out got KFC which was really cheap, so we got tons of it. Their KFC isn't that different but they have some very weird sides that i wasn't sure what was in it. Anyway we slept the night there then in the morning we headed off to the MTC which was like 15-20min away. Once there we got haircuts, more needles, some basic training in mission rules before we had an afternoon devotional. On the first day we got assigned out companions, my kasama (companion) is Elder Perkins ( there is a photo of us attached), take a guess who his dad is :P
So he's from Utah, serving in Quezon City North like me, he has a soccer scholarship and is a really cool guy and the only other white guy so it's awesome to have him as my kasama!

Second day we woke up at 6, go out to the carpark area do roll call (make sure everyone is here), then we go get breakfast which is usually something you'd eat for dinner ahahaha. after breakfast we go and get ready for the day for 30ish min (get in white shirt as we're usually in gym clothes for roll call). Then we go to our district room (i'm in Mosiah district) to do our personal study for an hour, then after that it's usually Langauge class for an hour with a teacher, then coaching with our techer (which is where she helps us in preparing lessons, so pretty much assisted compainionship study.). After coaching we have lunch. For lunch and for al meals we have so much rice. Like imagine what we amke for us 5 for dinner, we have half of that on our plate! the it's usually some beef/pork/chicken, vegetables, bread (which is sugary), fruit, milk/water and soup. After lunch w'll have some more language study ofr 1-1.5hrs then after that we have addition study where we can study what ever but we usually have some sort of task we need to study on. after that we have gym from 3-4 then dinner at like 5ish or 4:45pm. After dinner we teach an investigator which at first we throught was just a member that was doing a role play. but anyway we had to teach this guy (Brother Ken) every night for times. On the 2nd day we prepared to teach him the first lesson obviously but mostly in english as most filipino's spek english and we spoke nearly no tagalog. We got to the lesson and he spoke very little english! so we had difficulty teacing him our lesson haha. Second time we taught we prepared some tagalog phrases so he could understand key points in the lesson, but eventually we started using pictures that I drew and some object lessons to help teach.

Thrid day we had someone form the quoroum of the seventy, Elder Meim. He ins the 6th or 7th quroum? and he's in charge of the philippines, him and his wife spoke to us for about 1.5hrs on missionary work and our purpose, he spoke really well and was really interesting! thrid day was the same as the second with all the classes pretty much but yeah.

Thrid day - Sunday. We had our own mtc branch with all the missionaries who are learning tagalog were we did sacrement meeting. For talks they choose randomly out of the audience to speak on 2 topics that they gave us during the day before! so they'll just call you and for i think it's 3min per person you have to speak on your topic, luckily i wasn't chosen :) Sunday didn't feel too much different except some of the study times are replaced with Sacrament meeting.

Monday Tuesday where pretty much the same as above.

Wednesday we ahd an MTC devotional from a member of the quorum of the 12 which we watched live from provo!

Thursday was similar to the rest except we had our last lesson with Brother Ken! After which we went back to our district room then like 20min later we see brother Ken walk into our room with while shirt black pants and a teachers tag on (he usually wore casual clothes to our lesson). He came in and spoke perfect english! So it turned out that he is one of the teachers here i the MTC, but becasue we didn't kno he was a teacher (or spoke english) we treated him like a real investigator (which we did :) we even committed him to Baptism) . But yeah so Brother Ken was actually his investigator when he was actually on his mission.

Oh and the photo's, some of the phot's are from the plane trip over, there is one of me and all of the Elders in my batch (who arrived at the MTC same day as me). There are a couple of a cemertary ofa some US and Filipino Soliders that fought in ww2, they had a cool memorial with Mary i think in this big building!. The photo at night is of Manila when we were at our hotel, there is a shot of our hotel room as well. Some photo's of my name badge too.