One Last Post Today

I was negligent in getting the other 2 posts up.  So today you get 3 posts.  This last post is the letter he emailed us today.  Enjoy!

Hello!

     Just so everyone (mom)  knows, I'm going to be fine. I just had a few x-rays done on my back to make sure everything was alright. During volleyball I may have re-injured it a bit, but the doctor said everything for the most part looks alright. He sent the x-rays into the radiologist to make sure, but he says that it only looks like a few of the vertebrae wedged a little. It was a re-injury from this winter break. Mom already knows about it. My assignment will still be the same. 

Anyways, life here as usual is going the same. We got new Greek elders on Tuesday. They're all foreign because Greece is very unfriendly towards the US right now. They all looked a little jet-lagged and shell shocked but I think they're going to be really cool.

    This week I saw Jimmy Grossman. He is a teacher here now helping out the Senior Missionaries learn Spanish I think. It was cool to see him. He's grown up quite a bit after his mission.

     So, I blame the amount of time I've been in the MTC for this next story... So this week I ran out of shampoo which left me with an empty bottle. I thought to myself, it would be quite a waste if I threw this away. So naturally I washed it out and filled it with water. I hid behind my door and waited for Elder Maughan to come out of the shower. When he finally came out, I jumped out and squirted him for a solid 5 seconds as he just stood there, shocked.

Shampoo bottles make great squirt guns. Just make sure whomever you are squirting, doesn't like taking revenge. A few minutes later, Elder Maughan busts out a Dasani water bottle and pours it all over me. I was already dressed at that time...

     The room we use for our Priesthood meetings this Sunday was filled with computers for some reason. So all of the Elders sat in seats with wheels on them (bad idea) and rolled around the room the entire meeting.

     One cool thing that happened: We were preparing to go in and teach our investigator Harach (Brother Stutz), and before hand we said a prayer to have our tounges loosed and that we would be able to comprehend well. Brother Stutz is notorious for fast he speaks Armenian, however when we went in to teach him, I was able to understand almost everything he said and was able to respond in an intelligible manner. It was truly quite amazing. As soon as I got out of the meeting though, my comprehension went down drastically. So I'm confident that even if I don't know the language well, the spirit will help me out when I need it. It was shocking, really, to see the difference.

     Sigh, just over 3 weeks left and I still feel like I'm struggling with the language. I just take confidence in the fact that our teachers are fluent, and they were in the same situation that I'm in right now. So hopefully someday I'll be alright at Armenian.

     Anyways, I love you all. Stay safe and stay happy. Only a little bit longer and I'll be heading out to Armenia. It's such a crazy thought. I got a few letters from my friend at BYU who is currently serving in Ghana. He's already baptized a whole bunch of people and he left two or three weeks after me. Those English speakers..... We have our jokes about them at the MTC. :p

     One Elder came up to me and started speaking Spanish (he couldn't see my tag), then I said, "I don't understand," and he said "Oh you must be an English speaking elder then..."

     Most of the people here are learning Spanish, then the next highest population in English, then a ton of Russians. No one has even heard of Armenian. It's kind of cool to be speaking a language that only a small portion of the world speaks.

Alright, well I'll talk to you next week. Love you!

Yeretz Hammer