Week Three - MTC

Alright it has officially been three weeks here at the MTC! Things are going well here I'm kind of getting used to the food, it has stopped destroying my body, maybe It's just my body saying it has given up. so this morning Elderes Vosters y Woodford went to the MTC in Spain for the next six weeks. I was surprised at how hard it was to say goodbye to them after only three weeks. They truly did become like my brothers and it happened in such a short time. Woodford traded us all ties of his and we are all wearing them as we speak in his honor. The one I got is pretty sweet it is pink and white and black and I must say I traded up for it. So TRC Training Resource Center happened for the first time this week and I was terrified to have to talk to native speakers in Spanish. Turns out it was awesome, not a ton of volunteers showed up because this week is Finals but the people I did get to talk to were another Elder in our Zone who was upset afterwards because I know more Spanish than him and he has been here about twice as long as me, I told him not to worry I had a solid base, so thank you family for being Venezuelan. The next kid I talked to was an RM who served in Washington D.C. amongst the El Salvadorians so he talked like one but he loved talking to my companion and I even though we aren't great at the language. Elder Holley is improving we still have a lot of work to do but we are definitely taking strides as far as the Spanish is concerned as well as with everything else. Sunday we had my first district council and I got to represent my district as we went over each Elder and spoke of any troubles they may be having. Girlfriends came up a lot with the entire zone and I realized that I had some problems with that in my district. So, during the meeting I conduct with my District we set a goal to try to keep ourselves less distracted from things outside the mission, pre mission, during mission, and especially post mission. Some of the things we need to work on as a District are, singing less Fergalicious and other assorted songs that don''t invite the spirit, quoting movies that don't invite the spirit, and pining for things we have left behind. I haven''t gotten the chance to sit with Elder Holley to talk about the talking bear and all the pictures of Jessie his girlfriend so I am not sure how that is going to go, hopefully he will see my point. The Hermanas have gotten a little better at treating me with respect and not like they are superior to me because of age but we still butt heads at times when i suggest something they don't like. For example, not hitting on Elders at dinner or making dirty jokes. I have been surprised that the Hermanas have been the ones most guilty of that. Except Hermana Ready, she barely speaks and when she does its usually due to anger because we pulled a joke like hide the mail that she doesn't like. I am also more and more surprised at how hardcore some people take four square in gym. Missionaries take their four square seriously. Our room still smells horribly, that is another thing we need to address because we found the cause, and it''s one of the elders closet, I don't think its necessary to use a name but we will need to have the hygiene talk which probably wont be recieved too well. Sorry that this email is all over things are coming to me out of order and I am just writing it all down. Elder Paulsen has some confidence issues I think and we have been doing our best to help build him up. Apparently he had written home and told his family he had been getting picked on so as a District we have cut back on the hassling him. Sometimes I forget that not everyone had friends who liked to give grief like mine did. So during my District leader interviews I got the chance to sit with him and apologize for any problems we may have caused him and also let him know that he can tell us if anything else should arise. We love him and would hate to make his stay here any harder than it already is. Today I will be part of the biggest Earthquake drill in history Whooo!

Elder Ballard came to speak with us this past Sunday and it was amazing! He spoke to us about the importance of having the spirit when we teach and we got to hear about how preach my gospel was developed! We are so blessed here to have at our disposal latter day Modern revelation. I was reminded how sensitive we must be to the spirit to receive guidance from our Heavenly Father. We plan to apply what we learned to our investigators Anderson y Gabriel. They have been slightly more difficult to teach because they love asking questions because they are RM''s and know what to ask to throw us off kilter. One of them even rejected us as we went to teach him in his ""home'', he opened the door and turned us away because he had to go to ''work''. Valuable experience indeed, I was surprised and even though it was just our teacher it was hard to accept no for an answer so we left him a pamphlet and came back to class. Since then the lessons have gone well, we have committed one to baptism and one of them isnt convinced of the Priesthood power yet he feels its too fantastic to be real. We have been using the ZRT or zone resource teachers to help us practice doctrine as well as the language and I believe that will help a lot. We also have been focusing during study more which is super hard.

I love you all so much I'm out of time I will write you again

Elder Bassett

Pics 4/9/12

Week Two - MTC

4/10/12

Alright second P-day and counting! This week has gone by incredibly fast I can hardly remember what has happened!  We committed our first investigator to Baptism only to find out he was going to become our new teacher, His name is Hermano Schofield and he is a nice guy. We knew he was a memeber and wasn''t really a Peruvian because he was white as all get out. So the days following my first P-day were really just normal days, study, eat, study, eat, study, eat, then gym then study then sleep. Typically how the days go here. The oldest district in our zone is leaving tomorrow and its weird to see them leave even though its only been a few weeks. Elderes Oliver and Russell were both very good to us as we struggled to get through our first few weeks blindly because we never got our orientation because of conference. Easter was fantastic, I missed you guys so much but was so blessed to be here. Our Sacrament meeting consisted of every missionary in el CCM which is about 1800 to 2000 of us and so passing the Sacrament was a feat but after our wonderfully spiritual and reverent sacrament we got to hear from Boyd K. Packer and he gave us a wonderful message about Easter and it's importance. As christians we like to focus so much on the suffering and death of Christ sometimes we forget the most important part, that our Savior lives! That he broke the bonds of death and because of him we can follow in that example and have eternal life. That night we had a musical fireside where the BYU mens chorus came and performed! They brought the spirit so strongly through their music. How powerfully music can convey the spirit will never cease to amaze me. Oh by the way there is no music in el CCM entonces no puede usar mi iPod. The past few days we have been focusing a lot on how to begin teaching someone. How important it is to establish a genuine relationship with those that we teach, in our case we now have two investigadores, Anderson de Peru, y Gabriel de Argentina. They are just our white teachers acting as some of the investigators that they taught on their missions, so far we have only taught Gabriel and it was hard cause he didn't have any real knowledge of Christ or his Priesthood or his Atonement or Jose Smith and since my companion cannot speak spanish to save his life I have to try to wing it. That is one of our goals is to help him learn spanish, not that mine is perfect but his is nonexistent. I see the other companionships improving and at times it is disheartening to think that we aren''t making progress. But, then i remember why i''m here on my mission, to serve others and I think that there is a reason I got put with the person having the hardest time with the Spanish. I have been praying a great deal to know how to best help him and have faith that prayer will be answered soon. My roomates have got to be some of the smelliest people alive, our room smells constantly.... Elder Holley definitely contributes his fair share to that and I wish there was more I could do to help rid our room of the odor. 

 Sleep is also a luxury that I have lost a lot of. Elder Holley sleeps on the bunk next to mine with his teddy bear that his girlfriend Jessie that I never stop hearing about sent with him. On the first night here I found something out about this bear. It talks....She recorded a message that says, "Elder Holley I love you soooooo much!!! Muaah!" and the first time I heard it I thought we were all gonna get sent home cause there was a girl in our residence! Also this bear wears a tux and shoes, these shoes love to kick metal things and Elder Holley throws himself around at night. Did I mention that he yells in his sleep? No? well he does all the time, and then he complains that i snore. Elder Paulsen is a good guy, I call him sunshine cause he is always happy.  Elder White, his companion, is my sanity. I can talk to him and he and I see eye to eye. Elderes Vosters y Woodford are headed off to Spain next week for the Madrid MTC and i am incredibly jealous. The Hermanas tend to be a bit disruptive especially Hermana Van Dyke who is a tiny brunette. Hermana Richards is pretty cool, she and I can speak and have a conversation that isn't an argument. Hermana Ready however rarely speaks unless you say bad things regarding Eve, then she yells. The Lord has given me plenty of challenges since I''ve been here, staying studious for sixteen hours a day is hard but luckily things like gym break the monatony. I have been riding the stationary bike for twenty minutes or so a day at gym to prepare. Four square is also HUGE in the MTC because we arent allowed to be too competitive so we play four square.

I''m sorry it isnt in spanish, it woulda taken too long,

I love you all so much

Elder Bassett

Week One - MTC

4/3/12  
Hola everyone!!
 Tuesday is my P-day and so I will be doing my emails then. This week has been pretty insane, there is no wade into the MTC, they throw you headfirst into the whole experience. The second they dropped me off i got dragged through the MTC where they processed all of us and gave us our MTC badges as well and our MTC money card things. My companion is named Elder Holley and he is a good guy, he is a bit slow when it comes to waking up and so we will definitely be working on that because punctuality is a must here otherwise you get lost. Because I never received the call about language evaluation I got placed in the Basic spanish class so thusfar all the things have been review. There has been talk of moving me up but I'm not sure if I want that because I've grown to love the people in my district. There are nine of us total, six Elders and tres Hermanas and all of us but two our going to McAllen Texas. The other two Elders, Woodford and Vosters are going to spain. The food here is good but it does not do nice things to your body, and so things have been interesting to say the least. Class time is good at first the hours you spend in your class seemed to crawl by but things have begun to pick up and as a result time flies. There is a huge emphasis on teaching using the spirit and those of us learning a new language get to learn that lesson the most quickly because when teaching an investigator in a language you dont know you hope with all your heart that the spirit will help bring words to you. Our third day was the day we received what is called a progressing investigator and we had to teach the whole half hour lesson in spanish! it went really well actually but i ended up doing almost all the talking because Holley doesnt know a lick of Spanish. The investigator is named Abel y el es de Peru donde fue un taxista de moto. He and his family moved here and he has been since driving a moving van and boxing for fun. His sister is Evangelist and His mother is Catholic but he feels like there is something missing so thats where we come in!! We got him to read the Book of Mormon and taught him to pray and will be teaching him again tomorrow. Conference was amazing even though all 1800 of us were thrown together into a gym sitting in the worst seats in the universe where we all sat for 12 hours and smelled. Missionaries smell in large masses, i can testify to this. The messages though were fantastic and we missionaries got ourselves a few shout outs which made us all happy. I wasn't able to make it into the Choir because we got here too late even though Elder Archuleta got to participate (he got here the same day). But i try not to be bitter because those feelings drive the spirit and because he just like all of us is here to serve his Lord which i respect a great deal.
 The experience so far is not at all what I expected, the rules while strict help us all to better maintain the spirit and mentality we need to become used to having. The tie rules and suit rules are not really inforced because no one cares. We just need to have suits and ties doesnt matter what they look like, one kid has a tie made out of wood and it was frankly impressive.I will write more as more interesting things happen to me here, so far I have just been falling into the routing and its taken some adjusting having a guy follow you to the bathroom and such. Also, I miss my first name but I think that will pass. And having sisters surprised me but we are so blessed to have them, even though they can be a bit obnoxious they bring a special spirit.
 
Guys the church is true and i Know it otherwise i wouldnt be here, the book of mormon changes live and Jose smith fue un profeta de nuestro padre celestial. I wish i had more time to share everything with you but time is short. Just know that when the time comes your testimony will separate you from the rest of the world and you can be counted among the few and the proud. Remember the Lord in all thy doings and love eachother always. Families are the most beautiful gifts one has been given and I hope you always remember that. I miss you all and will talk with you soon
 
-Elder Bassett
 
P.S. so my roomates six year old cousin wrote him...where are my letters hermanas? Emma newby wrote me, so step it up. Also remember to put this on the blog you can copy and paste all the personal family stuff out if you want! Love you if you see the guys tell them I love them too!! Adios compatamos