Busy Days, and a Haircut!

 Jambo! (Hello!)

I skipped a week last week because it was so busy. We are so busy everyday. This is an example schedule from tomorrow (Tuesday)

6:30 Wake up and do daily planning, get dressed, eat breakfast, etc.
8:30 personal study
9:30 Lesson with a friend about God's love
10:00 companionship study (where we plan the lessons for the day)
11:30 district council
12:45 Lunch
1:15 Language study
2:30 Making miscelanious calls trying to get people jobs/housing/etc.
2:45 Lesson about the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ
3:15 Lesson about Temples and eternal families
4:00 Lesson about baptism
5:00 Dinner with a Swahili member family!!
6:20 Lesson (in English) about the Restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ
7:00 Lesson discussing Jesus Christ's atonement and the sacrament 
7:35 Lesson about priesthood healing blessings
8:30 Lesson about the Plan of Salvation
9:00 we get home
10:30 go to bed.

So yeah. That's kind of crazy once I lay it all out. I love the busyness of it, though. There's always stuff to do.

Also big news: TRANSFERS

Transfers are basically when missionaries get moved around to different places. One of my companions, Sister Emmanuel is going to Meridian. We'll miss her so much, but she will be so great over there. So it will just be me and my companion, Sister Millard. We are also getting our missionary teaching boundaries changed, so that we won't have an English ward as well as the Swahili ward, it will just be Swahili work, which is definitly going to make our language skills better lol.

Also even bigger news: HAIRCUT!!

I got my haircut today. Here's a picture of my companions and I infront of the haircut place, me with my very long hair before it got chopped off:

And here is me now. I love it so much:

My haircut today was terrifying, but it turned out SO GOOD.  Also, the student doing in was so scared lol. She'd never done a pixie cut before, and so she kept being like "AAAAAH" whenever she cut a large chunk of hair off. Once she was like "oops". A little scary. I would have loved to have it done by a real hairstylist, but one of the service missionaries owns the hair school, and he gives all the missionaries free appointments, which is so cool.

Also I think it's cool how much grilled fish Africans make. Apparently that's a thing. We met this lady just grilling whole fish outside, like everybody does it.

Spiritual Thought:
 I absolutly love being here in the immigrant population areas, because there's so many languages and it just amazes me how worldwide the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is. So many different languages and there are recources and books and confrence translations for everybody in their native language which is SO COOL to me. I love that our church is making such a huge effort for the blessings to be avaliable to everyone regardless of language.

In the land of the potatoes...

 Jambo! (Hello!)

So much stuff happened, but I will strive to be concise.

I got to Boise on Tuesday. I met my district who are all Swahili/French missionaries in Boise. 

I met my incredible new companions. I'm in a trio with Sister Emmanuel and Sister Millard.

I think it's really weird being here though because I think I've only met 1 African American so far. When you see a black person walking about, there's probably a 95 percent chance they're an immigrant. Some have citizenship, but all were not born here except for the kids under 10. I feel so weird whenever my companion shouts "Jambo" at a black person as we're walking, and they reply, saying, "Jambo, habari?!" It's so funny. But it would be so awkward if they were actually African- Americans, but none of them have been so far thankfully 

It's so cool how many immigrants there are. We meet Swahili speaking people when we're just hanging out at the library. We saw three Rwandan bibis (grandmas) sunbathing and chatting in their awesome colorful dresses and headscarves on a lawn. Random kids, running across the street, yelling at each other in Swahili. Last week, we went to Walmart to pick up meds, and we met a Congan refugee in line behind us. She was not interested in the gospel. But she was excited to have someone to talk Swahili with.

Also, african families are SOOO big. There was a guy we found on the street who was like "Nina bize kuongea sasa kwa sababu nina watoto kumi nyumbani" which is "I'm too busy to talk right now because I have 10 kids at home". And that's basically a normal number. So whenever we go to someone's house to teach one person, we end up teaching 2-7 people instead. So the eternal families topic is quite popular. That's the default after "God loves you and He has a plan for us".

This is us yesterday when we were celbrating getting done with door to door knocking on Sunday. Sister Emmanuel likes to balance Book of Mormons on her head when her hands get tired lol.

One of the families we're teaching is getting baptized soon, and the mom makes these beautiful felted islander flowers (The family is from Micronesia). And all three of them came to sacrament meeting yesterday with them in their hair it was so cool. Anyways, she gave us each one.

 

One of our favorite things to do is to give people banana bread. We've seen so many hearts be softened because of the spiritual power of banana bread. Here is a picture of a pass along card with our number, and some bread that we left for somebody. 

Spiritual thought:
I really love the verse in 2 Nephi 33:6 which is "I glory in plainness; I glory in truth; I glory in my Jesus, for he hath redeemed my soul from hell."

It's just such an uplifting, simple verse, and even though we don't exactly believe in hell, I love the phrase "my Jesus", and it's a happy verse, and I love those.

Farewell Utah... Hello Boise, Idaho!

 Jambo! (Hello!)

    I'm currently at the airport, about to fly to Boise!  Finally! 

The Mission Training Center has been wonderful, but I'm excited to go into the field. There's a lot of things that I learned at the MTC. Here is a list of my top three takeaways:

1. The Book of Mormon is awesome. For the last few years, I've really been focussing on the Bible, which has been wonderful. The Bible has so much facinating stuff in it, but The Book of Mormon is "Another Testament of Jesus Christ" (Kitabu cha Mormoni ni:  "Ushuhuda Mwengine wa Yesu Kristo"). 

      It testifies so strongly of Him and His character, and has so many awesome stories about the faith of Native American individuals. My companion and I studied Mosiah chapter 4 and we both highlighted basically the whole chaper because it's so full of awe inspiring teachings.

(An assignment to share a Book of Mormon verse in Swahili that we did a couple weeks ago.)

     2. I really like dressy clothing.  As many people know, before my mission, my go to outfit was jeans and a t-shirt, or if I was feeling fancy, maybe even a long sleeved shirt!   But being here and having to wear missionary attire everyday has it's benefits. I'm so glad that Sister missionaries are now allowed to wear dress pants. So exciting!

     3. Time is a lot nicer to you if you keep a gratitude journal. I feel like with SOOO many things in the past, if I didn't like the expierence, it would go slowly, and of course when I'm enjoying somethings, it feels so short. But I've done a lot of gratitude journalling over the last 6 weeks, and I've noticed that it's been opposite. 

One of the biggest things I've been grateful for is the awesome people in my Swahili learning group.  They're so happy and positive and it was so much fun to go to class for hours a day. Here's a picture of me and my amazing companion, Sister Bickham:

Currently I'm sitting at the airport with a bag of snack mix and a Bluey coloring set, so I'll be pretty busy.

Spiritual thought: Yesterday, I made a playlist of hymns that I really like for the plane, and I highly recommend people to go listen to "Consider the Lillies" by the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. It's such a pretty song and I love the message.

Quarantined. "Whomp! Whomp!"

 Jambo! (Hello!)

     Last week I mentioned to a few people that I was feeling not good due to allergies. That sickness got worse and worse until I finally went to the MTC health clinic and got checked. I had the flu. (Influenza B)  This is one of my roomates and I at the clinic waiting for our test results. She was sick as well.  We are both clearly very excited:

     We both tested positive, so we packed up our suitcases and moved to the quarantine dorm building until our fevers and aches were gone.

     Most of this last week was spent in quarantine, which was honestly really good, because yes, it prevented me from getting other people sick, which was awesome, but also, I got to sleep whenever I wanted, which was AMAZING. 

Also, the food was always warm, unlike some cafeteria food. It was a little odd though, when they would put your meal bag outside your door in the hallway, and then knock on the door, then you had to put on a mask and quickly open the door, get the bag, and close the door. It often felt like we had leprosy. This is the room:

Luckily, when I got out, my comp and friends came to save me and take me back to our dorm.

    So that was Friday last week through Tuesday morning. We went to a BEAUTIFUL temple this morning. It was probably the prettiest temple I've ever seen. The Provo City Center temple. Here are some pictures of the outside:

And here are some interior images:

Spiritual thought:

During quarentine, I had the opportunity to do a lot of general conference talks. Like, a LOT of them. I mostly listened to the old ones like between 1971-1990. There was a talk that I absolutly loved in April of 1989 by Marvin J Ashton. Basically his talk was on worthiness and how people self judge worthiness, when WE shouldn't be the ones judging, because that's God's job. Like how judging other people unfairly is bad, it's just as bad to judge yourself harshly.

A quote that I liked from it was "worthiness is a process and perfection is an eternal trek".

Thanks for reading, and I hope you all have a weekend filled with amani and furaha (peace and happiness).

Kwa heri!

Swahili Slang!

 Jambo! (Hello!)

It's less than 3 weeks until I'll be in Idaho, and done with the Missionary Training Center. 

    I've realized this week that the gift of tongues is real. It's wild to me how fast I'm learning Swahili.  We've only been doing language classes for a week, and yesterday we had our first conversation with a native Congan. He immigrated to Iowa ten something years ago, I think he was telling us the story of how, but I couldn't understand any of it unfortunatly.

     BUT we did manage to ask his name, where he's from, how his breakfast was, what he likes to do, how his family is, and we shared our testiminies of God and Christ in Swahili, and ended with a prayer. So I think that's a huge win. He was so sweet. I think he sensed that we were very nervous, so one of the sentances that I did understand was "Don't be anxious, you have God with you." AWWWWWW!

This week was mostly focused academically on Swahili, but also much of it was figuring out ways to use slang. We're not supposed to use slang because it's very unprofessional. But we have a loophole where if we translate the slang words into Swahili, then it's ok, because we're learning.

Here's a list of words and their appropriate usage:

Acha fujo (stop the chaos): this was the first one to be used. One of our teachers said that it was a common phrase used by parents when a kid says a bad word. We like to yell it when someone says a slang word in English.

Acha kupiga kelele (stop making sounds): can be used when people are being too noise or just annoying in general.

Ufunguo wa chini (lowkey or "key of the lower"): as in "ufunguo wa chini, the chocolate pie today was actually so good."

Wewe ni pacha wangu (you are my twin): can be used as a greeting or as a "me also" statement.

Mwongo!! (Liar!!): can be used anytime you feel like it. Very useful phrase. Usually yelled or at least loudly spoken at a person while pointing.

Kweli Saaaaaaaana (sooooooo true): used as a statement instead of "facts" or "for real" etc.

Amina! (Amen!): we were learning how to pray this week, and amina sounds so much more fun than just amen. so now we use it in everyday conversation.

Honorable mention: Ng'ombe. This word is so weird but fun to pronounce. It's translation is cow, but we just randomly say it whenever for just for fun.

Sorry there are not many pictures this week. (I didn't use my camera as much unfortunately.)

Where my companion and I do our morning scriptures study session:

Our morning view every day as we walk to class:

Flowers at the temple:

Spiritual thought:

This week we really worked hard on the "Missionary Purpose", because we memorized all of it in Swahili in just one day. (My brain hurt so bad that day! lol)  But I really like the wording of it and the emphasis on helping others to come unto Christ.

"Invite others to come unto Christ through helping them receive the restored gospel of Jesus Christ and His atonement, repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost and enduring to the end."

Anyways, I hope you have an awesome week!

Sister McMullin

First Full Week at the MTC

 Jambo! (Hello!)

This week has gone by super fast for some reason. Maybe due to the crazy schedule. We wake up at 6:30, do breakfast, our morning class is three hours, then we take a break for lunch and usually a nap, then we go to our afternoon class which is also three hours. Basically the classes this week has been about how to teach church doctrine (in English). It's been a lot of role plays where we teach one of the other people in our class. It's been pretty funny sometimes, but I think it definitely gets us more comfortable sharing. 

Notable things that happened this week:

I found out that Utah has the most beautiful sunsets. Every single day here, I've gotten to see a clear sky with a wildly colored sunset. Here's a picture from Monday evening:

We found out the Swahili phrase for "dryer sheet" in one of our textbooks. Apparently I won't be saying that word EVER 'cause it's too long. 

There was a not so fun instance with my nut allergy. there was a stir fry and it had a nut warning, but I thought it was just peanuts, because that seems normal, and I'm not allergic to peanuts. NO IT WAS CASHEWS! Who on earth puts cashews in stir fry??? Apparently the cafeteria here. So I had a bad allergic reaction, and had to take two Benadryl then I literally fell asleep a couple times in the afternoon class. Thankfully, the teachers here are very kind and understanding.

Also something that ive learned this week is the beautiful scenery on campus here. I love my Lawrence University campus, but here is so pretty!

Spiritual thought for the week: In class as I was discussing why we like the Book of Mormon with my companion, we talked about how the Book of Mormon is very much about individuals and their faith journeys with God/Christ. I really appreciate this because generally (emphasis on generally) the Old Testament is about big groups of people doing stuff, or random weird (but fun) stories, and the New Testament is about the cool stuff Christ did and taught on earth. The Book of Mormon has countless stories about individuals who found faith, which I think is really fun to read about. 

Week 2: I made it to Utah!

Jambo! (Hello!)

Yes, after several flight delays, an exploding shampoo bottle, forgotten pajama pants, and many travel prayers, I am finally here in Provo, Utah!

                             (View from my dorm room: A random mountain.)

There were a few BIG hiccups with travel day yesterday.  I was at the Madison airport at 9:30 AM and I got to my new dorm at 9:30 PM. Originally, I was supposed leave at 6 AM, flying Madison - Chicago - Salt Lake, but that got canceled at midnight because Chicago had a massive hail storm. 

                 (The size of the hail in Illinois that re-routed all the flights - plus 4 tornadoes.)  

So THEN I had to call the missionary travel people and have them rebook a flight,  and they booked the earliest one they could get, going to Dallas Texas, and my mom, brother, and I rushed to the airport. 

                               (Slightly stressed smiles, due to the time crunch!)

I was only 10 minutes early before they started boarding the flight. Crazy times.

It was very rough not being allowed to travel with a phone, it gave me bad travel anxiety. Also it was very annoying being stuck between two teenagers on one of my flights both with phones out the WHOLE TIME, and I just had my Swahili flashcards and a nap. lol.  

 My Dallas connecting flight was delayed 5 hours, so I ate pretzel bites and read the New Testament. The Missionary Training Center did not know why I wasn't showing up on time, and sent stress messages back home to Wisconsin, wondering where I was, which they couldn't answer, because I didn't have a phone! 

I was told I would be issued one when I arrived at the training center and did get one today. Much of my afternoon was spent figuring out how to set up email, facebook messanger and duolingo on it.

It was CRAZY riding in the shuttle from the SLC airport to the Provo training center. It was very dark outside, and I could see all the city lights in the valleys. There were multiple times during the drive where I could see 3 temples AT ONCE out the window. INSANE.

 It's like everyone by Salt Lake has their own neighborhood temples. My family has to drive two hours to Chicago to go to the temple. And I literally saw 9 (yesterday I counted) on the half an hour drive to the MTC. 

Most applicable quote for yesterday goes to Mathew 6:27   "Can anyone of you, by worrying, add a single hour to your life?" 

    I actually read it in the airport and was like "Huh, well, I guess I shouldn't have my heart rate be at 120 like it has been for the past couple hours!"😏

 Anyways, I'll have more info about MTC life next week since I'm pretty new here. My goal this week is to figure out what building I am in currently, and how to get from the dorms to the classrooms and the cafeteria.  Since I came in late, I missed the group orientations, and it was all dark.  

Arial view of MTC campus

The best part of yesterday was arriving and walking into the MTC lobby, and having it look just like a temple lobby. There was the front desk, with the people sitting behind it to welcome you, and the large beautiful art on the walls, and the temple-like peaceful feeling.

 After calling home from the front desk to tell my mom I had arrived, I set up my dorm room (shared with 3 other sister missionaries who are also learning Swahili).

It's been so awesome to meet my group in person! Everyone's way taller than I thought. (We have only met on screen for zoom classes before today.) Here's a picture of my Swahili-learning group and me at a temple this morning.  It was so nice after such a crazy day yesterday!

It's so funny to see everyone's reactions when we say what city in the U.S. we're going to, but then we say "Swahili speaking!" and they're like "WHOAH!" It's so funny every time.😄

It looks like P-days (Preparation Days) are on Thursdays? That is the day we have time scheduled to email friends and call home, so more details next week!