I won't get THAI-phoid!

Day 15
June 7, 2017 Tues
Provo, UT

As the header suggests, I started my Typhoid pills this week. I have to take them every other day, and I can't eat until an hour after taking it, but I let my companions go through the cafeteria line. I sit there watching them eat, go through sack line, and have the food just chilling there until around 10:30 when I can eat. It's a small torture.

We got to host new missionaries last week, which was super exciting! The Thai district also got to do the early arrivals, so we hosted an extra missionary each. I loved it so much, because I was literally in their shoes 7 days ago. I had the pleasure of helping out Elders South, Hansen and Osborn. Tragically, since then I've only seen two of them once, but they seemed to have acclimated well. We get to host again tomorrow!

We taught our last lesson to our first investigator, təəy (pronounced doy). We were able to commit her to baptism, which was super cool! My tri-panionship is slowly developing a working grove to how we teach which is helping us to really mend and work together. We really felt the spirit in that lesson. 

Additionally, we have started TRC's (where we teach 20 min lessons to RM's and Thai-speaking volunteers) on Mondays, so yesterday we taught 2 RM's. Since they aren't pretend investigators, we had to prepare differently. We gave ourselves about 10 minutes to ponder, pray and receive revelation then came together and discussed. We all had written down love, so that's what we went for. We found some scriptures and prayed tons. In the lessons, we went slightly different ways with both of them and shared different scriptures and thoughts on God's love. The spirit was super strong (probably because we decided to rely completely on it) and we all enjoyed the discussions and had so much fun!

We got to teach these in the new buildings, which opened up on Monday. From my understanding, they moved all the English classes into the new buildings (T3 and T4), and moved all the languages to T2. Because our district is so big, we were already in the building, so we didn't have to switch and move classrooms (the only ones I believe) and now the rest of our zone is on our floor!

We were introduced to our 2 new investigators, gób and phat, who we are going to start teaching alternatively tomorrow. This past Friday we started script, just learning which letters are defined by which class- we've only gone over the High and Middle class. We are in the process of memorizing them, but it is super fun to write them.

We have started Speak Your Language (SYL), in which you try to speak your language as much as possible. Our two sister teachers, Sis. Peck and Sis Khaawmx(nj)nↄↄy (native Thai), introduced us to it by challenging us to some kind of weird pirate language game.  In the game the pirate tries to speak as much Thai as they can; then everybody tries to guess who the pirate is every few days. If we guess the pirate, they get 2 points, if we guess someone else who was just going ham on Thai, they get a point. The first person to 4 points will get a prize from our teachers. So I am trying to really stick to just Thai now - since I have competition to motivate me. It's actually kind of fun, because I am using a lot more gestures and wayyy simplifying what I'm saying and getting creative with my words to describe things (for example, for storm, I said bad water with fun movements).

Sunday was fast Sunday. I did really good up until about an hour or two before dinner, and I got super hangry. It was bad. I don't know why I reacted so poorly, but I felt a little bad for my companions and I tried to talk as little as possible. Wow I am rough when I am hungry. I eased up after dinner though.  We get to watch a Sunday "film", this week we watched Meet the Mormons 2.  None of us even realized there was a "2", so maybe it was exclusive! It was amazing! I loved it so much and really enjoyed the spirit the came with it.

That's about it for this week! Nothing too exciting going on. I took a few pictures today, because I realized I haven't been, so I took pictures of me with my mission credit card, room, bathroom, closets, laundry room, in the MTC, and computer lab with companions.

Love and best!

Elder Montague