Finnishing What We've Started

Rakas ystäviä!

Consecration week has ended and we have 4 full days left! That doesn't include the rest of today (Wednesday). My mom also wanted me to tell you a little about how we learn the language here, so that will probably be the mass of this email. Not too much is different when you've been in the MTC for 8 weeks.

So the secret for learning Finnish is that you pray really hard. That's pretty much it. In all reality, we learn all the grammar principles one at a time in class, then are pretty much responsible for learning vocabulary on our own. Our teachers were good about baby-ing us a little more at the beginning, then made sure that we speak more and more Finnish as time went by. The process here pretty much just involves SYL: speak your language as much as possible, even if you suck at it. We started teaching lessons in Finnish on our third day in the MTC, and have been teaching almost exclusively in Finnish since we got here, so that gives us a lot of SYL experience in the gospel lessons.  Now I can talk a lot about the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith and the Plan of Salvation etc etc etc, and really that's the important stuff. Everything else will come with time. There is a fun little detail that will shake things up a little, though. There are basically two versions of Finnish: spoken and written. We are learning written Finnish, and spoken Finnish is pretty much a shortened version of written Finnish. So how in the world I'm going to know what people are saying is beyond me. I am hoping beyond hope for an experienced trainer. And thank heavens the Finns are so nice. Then to cap it all off, we had Consecration Week, which among other things meant we were supposed to speak only Finnish as much as possible for the entire week. I tried really hard for the first few days, but I admit I started falling through starting Sunday. I don't think we spoke a lick of Finnish on Sunday...

As for this week, not much has happened other than Consecration Week. Sisar Owen, Feil Nover and I had prepared a musical number, Consider the Lilies, and auditioned to perform in a devotional [pretty much in front of all the missionaries in the MTC]. We auditioned in front of Sister Nally, the MTC President's wife/MTC Relief Society President and her counselor Sister Roach, both of whom are two of the nicest people I've ever met. We made it onto the "yes" list, but we won't get to perform because there is a special devotional this Sunday and we leave the day after. We did get to sing in Sacrament Meeting, though, so that was cool. Speaking of the special devotional, President Holland from UVU (Elder Jeffrey R. Holland's son) is coming to speak to us about Joseph Smith and it's going to be super rad. There have also been rumors floating that Elder Holland himself is going to be there because it's Sister Holland's birthday and she might come to listen to her son speak....So long story short, we are very lucky to be here on Sunday.

That's about it for now. The rest of my week will be packing and getting ready to go to Finlaaaaannddd!!! I'm so excited to get out into the real world and to serve real people in God's really true church! I love you all and I love the Lord. He is so good!

Rakaudella, 

Sisar Hillebrant