MTC Week 1 - Arrived at the MTC

你好你们! (Hey Y'all!)

Since this is my first email, forgive me if its jumbled or lengthy! It's been so crazy here and I'm only on my 6th day.

I'm planning to send emails as frequent as possible- meaning maybe every week...maybe every couple weeks. I can only send emails on my preparation day (P-day) which will be Monday here at the MTC. BUT, I can read any messages or emails you send me any day of the week, so thank you all for the kind messages and pictures you've sent me so far!

I was set apart as a missionary on Saturday morning, drove down to Utah- spent some days seeing friends and family and then entered the Missionary Training Center (MTC) on Wednesday afternoon.

I met my district (group of missionaries I'll be trained with/missionaries serving in the same area as me) that first day- all of us are Mandarin speaking but serving in all different areas. We have 8 Elders (title for male missionaries) and 4 Sisters (female missionaries) total. All of us Sisters are rooming together. My companion, whom I will be serving alongside, is Sister Cummings and she's serving in Canada, Vancouver. She's a really sweet soul.

Adjustments as a missionary:

• I am ALWAYS with my sweet companion
• The schedule for us here is really busy, especially as we needed to take extra time for orientation.
• There are missionaries speaking a lot of different languages here so I get to hear them all around me
• I wear nice clothes most of the day, including some walking shoes that aren't quite broken in
• We call each other exclusively by Sister or Elder
• Elders and Sisters can only handshake with each other-- you have no idea how many awkward almost high-fives I've had to swerve
• There's only 1 other missionary here who is going to New Zealand Mandarin speaking- supposedly there needs to be 4 Sisters and Elders assigned to each mission so maybe I'll be going in as the 4th Sister in the Mission, I'm not sure.

Positives:

• I've only been here for 6 days and I already know how to introduce myself, say a prayer and my purpose as a missionary in Chinese
• Our district is full of missionaries with great testimonies which is really inspiring
• The food here is just like the stuff at BYU, so I'm used to it
• I'm really growing in my testimony while here
• We were able to watch the devotional with Elder Soares last night and I cried! It was so inspiring. I would recommend all of you to watch it if you can.

Not-so-positives:

• Chinese is hard and they set language goals very high here! There's been a couple brief moments of internal sobbing while in class, but I would always be encouraged again when I needed it
• The computer/phone situation is a little frustrating as I really need to mess with settings to get them to work how I want them to. Even in this email you can see some typos I just don't have the time to fix because it deletes text as you type.

I'm still figuring out P-day schedule as it tends to be more free-form, but I'll try my best to communicate to you all as I can.

Photos:

1&2: Sister Cummings and I matched by accident twice! The second time we had Sister Ho and Sister Cho join in

3: We have the opportunity to go to the temple on P-days-- the lighting is horrible but it was a great morning!

See more photos:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/sgY95kdCHMzp7BqHA

Love you all!

-Sister Martinez