Week 3

So I played a lot of indoor volleyball and some sand volleyball with my district and zone and its pretty fun. I've upgraded to the overhand serve now and am blocking at the net quite a bit and spiking too. The best part of volleyball for me is definitely playing at the net. So last week I got sick though and had a pretty nasty cold, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday morningish all kinda weren't the best because of that. Thursday was TRC night, where we "hometeach" volunteer past Malagasian missionaries who volunteer to come in and talk with us. It was pretty fun and they all remember quite a bit, they also understand us well which is good for us but obviously we can still only pick out some things they say when they give lengthy and more complex answers. Mostly just because of the vocab they use. If someone speaks Malagasy here and its not too too ridiculously fast and they use vocab I know or at least like mostly know I can pretty much understand what they are saying. There's a sister missionary from Madagascar here going to the Temple Square mission and she actually knows one of my teachers, he served in her ward for a while. So she comes by sometimes and we talk to her. She can speak ridiculously fast and kinda quiet sometimes when shes telling stories or something so none of us can understand like anything. Besides the teachers. 

We were listening to some talks from general conference translated into Malagasy and some of them were so slurred together it makes it hard to make out anything. That will probably be the hardest, listening to people who slur words together. So we learned about all the types of verbs now, since we have gone over active, passive and circumstantial. The Sunday night devotional was by Sheri Dew, a big LDS author, and it was pretty good. And it was funny since Elder Wootan and I were sitting with my two companions and his, we were like maybe we would see Elder Price since Elder Summers told us he came in last Wednesday but was at the West Campus. Then like 3 minutes after I saw him and he ended up walking up and sitting behind us, right as he got there and we said hello, the prelude music started so it was short lived but maybe next Sunday. Monday our zone was begging us Malagasians to go play kickball with them so we did, and I jammed my thumb fairly badly catching the ball once-so I couldn't really write for the rest of the night since it was my right thumb. Oh also threw up Monday night. Went to the doctor here Tuesday morning and it was pretty much what I expected, he basically said it was a virus/cold thing. So we had to walk to the Student Health Center of BYU so I could buy some medicine there. We were going to go after dinner and before the devotional, before it closed at 6-then of course it was pouring rain then so we got soaked walking there and back. Tuesday night Elder Ballard spoke so that was an awesome experience. I was like 7 rows back this time though. Wednesday our district hosted, I hosted three-one going to Japan, Frankfort Germany and somewhere else I don't remember. And today we are being visited by the Speaker of Parliament from Uganda! She wanted to like visit the church or learn about it and so as part of the tour of the MTC and Church things she wanted to see a classroom. All the people going to those other African countries near Uganda are apparently in the Ghana or South African MTC, so we were the closest thing so she's visiting us. There will be armed guards, President Naly and Elder Hinckley of the 70. It'll only be for about 10 minutes or so and then we get our picture all together outside afterwards. Pretty cool. I guess I'll write about how it goes next week though. Ah and the new MTC president seminar/training things starts this Sat through next week sometime so our main building is going to be off limits and there will be a lot of general authorities here- including the apostles and Prophet. So the rumor is probably next Sunday and Tuesday for our fireside and devotional one of them will be speaking. Hopefully anyways. 

-Elder Miller