Week 3: Elder Ridd Learns to Read. 7/25/17

Elders Todd, Ference, Ellsworth, and McDonald

All of the Cambodian missionaries, leaving the MTC

Elder Tuft, leaving the MTC

Hello Everybody!!

I hope you all are having a great week!

This week has been pretty much the same as the past few. I've taught many lessons to many new "investigators" and have studied for about nine hours a day, every day! Something interesting this week is that the older Thai district, as well as the Cambodian district who were in our zone, left! The Thais left yesterday at about five in the morning, and the Cambodians left today at about 1:50 PM. 

The Cambodian district had 4 sisters and 1 elder in it, so the elder was a companion to one of the Thai missionaries who left on Monday. Since I am in a threesome, I was selected to be the companion of the Cambodian elder, Elder Tuft, for the past two days. He's a really cool guy. It was weird to be in a normal companionship for two days, but now I'm back to normal. 

We learned the Thai alphabet last week and have begun to learn how to actually read it now. I can slowly read, but the hard part is that in Thai, all the words are put together - so you can only know when the word ends by recognizing the word itself. Which is also difficult because half of the 46 consonants have different ending sounds than the sounds they usually make. 

So Thai is still really hard, but it's getting better. Elder Jorgensen and Elder Byers were selected to be our new zone leaders since the older Thai missionaries have shipped out.

I hope you're all doing great! Sorry about the short email, but not too much has been going on - haha!

I miss and love you all!

Elder Ridd

The Pringles tower of Elder Ference