Week 1

Hey! How is everyone? The MTC is awesome! I love love love it! I love my companions! There's Sister Reece from Arizona and Sister Okada from Wyoming. We all click instantly and we really balance each other out. Mandarin is both harder and easier than I thought it would be... the tones are crazy hard and me being tone deaf doesn't help at all (maybe I should have continued singing lessons...) but the structure of the sentences are pretty easy... The scariest part of the first day was when I walked into class and the teacher would only speak Mandarin and kept trying to tell me my Chinese name and what to do and I just stared at her for like 5 minutes but my new name is not Sister Bray it's Song Jiemei which means absolutely beautiful... JK it really has no meaning it's just a popular last name from Chinese dynasty haha but I love it! So I'm actually part of a really cool pilot program here at the MTC. There's only 4 districts doing it in the MTC and we are the only Mandarin district so I feel extremely blessed. The main difference is we teach an investigator everyday... let me repeat... we teach an investigator in Mandarin everyday... yep this started on Thursday when I knew maybe 10 words with the wrong tones haha but it is so awesome. His name is Xia Guang We. He is from China and he is here studying medicine. He has a wife and a daughter back in China and he is waiting for them to come here... He is so cool and I can just feel the Lords love for him every time we teach him. I loved that we had to just jump into Mandarin and into teaching. It really helps so much to have someone to focus on and gives me even more motivation to learn the language fast so I can talk to him and get to know him better! Basically I'm loving the mission so much! Yesterday was so spiritual and amazing... I would write more but I'm almost out of time! I love you all!!!!