Week 4: Pressing Forward

Bom dia! (Good morning)

    Another week has past and things are moving along. This week was a full week of studying Portuguese. I did not have a TRC this week because all the appointments were taken! We scheduled one for this next week though. This week we expanded our conversational vocab by learning about weather, basic questions, food, and interests/hobbies. I am still pretty bad at remembering much of what we talk about but I working on memorization in my study outside of class. Classes online are still quite challenging. Staying focused for three hours is no small feat and responding to questions in class is very difficult. Even with these challenges, I am still making it through. My Portuguese is improving and I am becoming less worried about the 15-minute lesson in Portuguese I am doing this week.

    This week most of my family was gone for the yearly youth campout. This meant that my older brother John and I were the only ones home for about half the week. It was nice having some extra calm in the house. We played a lot of board games and altogether it was nice. On Thursday we had the opportunity to stop by a High School swim team dinner to pick up a gift for us Seniors who didn't get to have much of a season (sports events were canceled the day of our first meet!). While there, John and I got to talk to some good friends on the swim team and catch up on things. It was a very pleasant experience and a great opportunity to catch up with some friends. It's one of the blessings of at-home MTC that are easy to forget.

    Another cool experience this week involves my district. We decided to work on creating our own gospel message video. We decided to use chalk to write titles of Jesus Christ in Portuguese using sidewalk chalk and we will later turn it into a video! For my title, I decided to do Senhor dos Senhores which means Lord of Lords. I put all my artistic abilities in and the results are below. At the top middle, I tried to do a drawing of the Jesus Christ statue featured in the LDS church logo. My experience with chalk has been fairly limited but it turned out alright. I'll post or link the finished video once we have completed it!

    Things are moving forward and I have about 2.5 weeks left in the MTC which sometimes feels a bit intimidating. The learning is rigorous and taxing but I know if I work hard with the time I have I will better learn and teach in the field.