One Month Down, One More To Go - 8/8/17

Hey Everyone!

This week has been pretty much like all the past ones. I'm finally halfway through the MTC though, so that's good. An Australian sister in the other group may have the finalized travel plans, but it may not be for my district as well. She got them early because of something to do with her visa application from Australia. All of us looked through it and we're all super pumped to leave, haha.

Thai is going pretty well. I can understand pretty much everything that our teachers say, so that's better than before. 

Definitely the coolest thing this week was that Elder Bednar came and had a surprise question-and-answer session on Sunday night. He said a lot of great stuff, but one of the things I liked most is when he talked about how prayer is an ongoing process and how it is a combined process of consecrated communication and holy works.

I got to go to the temple today, so that's always nice. There's not too much to do in the MTC for p-day, so the majority of it is us hanging around, writing emails, and taking naps- haha. 

Funny story this week; we were teaching one of our investigators, Phii Omm, and at the start - when we were asking if we could start with a prayer - we accidentally said "prayer" in English. Somehow, she took that to be us saying "roong plang" which is the Thai word for sing. Sooooo in short, we are now committed to sing for her in Thai at the start of our next lesson. I've already memorized the first verse for Families Can Be Together Forever in Thai though, so that shouldn't be terrible. 

In the next few weeks we lose a lot of our Thai teachers. Brother Torrell, who is a hilarious, 6'7" teacher who's worked at the MTC for like 4 years, has to switch to teaching Laos for awhile, because they usually like to get new teachers often. We'll still see him a bunch though. Sister Kaowmanois (that's probably not how you spell it, but I'm not sure how to) has to go back to Thailand because of some visa stuff. We still have Brother Sugihara though, and he's amazing. 

This week we got about 13 new Elders in our zone. They are all going to missions in the US speaking Hmong. Apparently it used to be spoken in southeast-ish China, but is pretty much only spoken in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California now. They don't have any sisters speaking Hmong, because apparently women teaching is disrespectful in their culture. 

Tomorrow we are getting 2 Laos missionaries going to California. Brother Torrell has been learning Laos the past month or so in order to teach them (he's a beast). Next week we get a big shipment of about 30 new missionaries into our zone. Most of them are going to Cambodia, but I think some are going to Thailand. 

That's about all I can think of to write this week!

I love and miss you all! Have a good week!

Elder Ridd <3

From left to right: Elder Oxborro, Elder Thornock, and Elder Bennion.

Brother Torrell.
Fun fact: He's the third tallest guy who's been in Thailand
in the past 5 years - in allll of Thailand