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| P day. Making good use of our sandals |
So the thing with Cebuano is, the alphabet is all phonetic, so it's pronounced the way it's written, except b's and v's, and p's and f's are kind of nebulous . Though I hesitate saying this because Dad'll just mispronounce things with a surety now.
But things are going really good now! It's really warming up here, the snows all melting and there's robins and blue jays around, and the world feels alive. Where was this last year? I've really gotten a hold of the schedule and all, I just can't believe it's already p-day again! The time is really starting to fly by.
So apparently earlier this week they were doing a big training for a bunch of new MTC presidents, for the international MTCs. So a good number of apostles were here, as far as the word goes. But At the Tuesday Devotional, we had Elder Bednar speak! I was really an incredible talk. Apparently he was just here on Christmas day, and during the devotional they passed out phones to missionaries that they could just text questions in to him, and Elder Bednar would just answer them on the spot. So this week, he and his wife had prepared some stuff for some of the questions they didn't get to, and it was great because they were the kind of questions that would be helpful to have for investigators. but overall, it was really an incredible talk. And I was able to sing in the choir, we sang Nearer, My God, To Thee. The chorister guy is super cool, he always gives all this backstory to the author and about the song itself. Oh, and we also have Sunday Devotionals, and last week the MTC Administrator spoke, President Stevenson, who is a Cache Valley/Aggie man.
All of our teachers (/investigators, we're teaching our teachers lessons. It can be really fun when they act like a full-cebuano who you just walked into their house. We're making progress.) went to our mission, or Tacloban. Apparently Cebu City's living the high life compared to Tacloban, they always kind of joke about that, and that Cebu City is basically like an American city, by comparison at least. They have lanes in the streets there, that's how they really could tell they have it good. And they've said the water's all good and safe, there's not really too much you need to worry about. However, in our bag full of language supplies, they gave us a water bottle with a built in filter, so there's that. It'll probably still be nice to have the filter. But they have all these stories about chasing spiders with ladles, and showering with lizards, and eating rotten balut. But they also have stories about walking on to buses and just shouting out to people about the gospel, or going out in the country (bukid) and having the people just love them. It's just so exciting, and it really makes me want to get out there and start serving these people.
The other day through study I came upon Ephesians chapter 4. The entire chapter is incredible, it truly testifies of Jesus Christ's church, and that we're on the right track. Also our teacher asked us to read Moroni 7:48. It's the last verse of that chapter, and I found I just couldn't read it by itself. It serves as such a powerful close to this perfect definition of the pure love of Christ, that if we pray to be filled with this love, we can truly come closer to our father in Heaven.
Nasayud ko nga sa tinuod niini ebanghelyo. Nagpasalamat ko para ni Jesukristo ug sa Iyang pag-ula. Nagtabang ko ang simbahan, magtabang siya mo ug inyong pamilya. Naa ang buhing propeta sa kalibutan. Naa ang Dios sa Langit, ug kita mao ang iyang Anak. Naggugma jud siya nato, ug ganahan siya magtabang kita sa siya magbalik. Nasayud niina sa tinuod.
I know this is where I belong, and that I have been called by our Heavenly Father to serve the people of Cebu.
Elder Dunford
PS. This is what I told Nathan concerning Cebuano:
It's actually kind of simple, the grammar is basically throw stuff together, if you don't know a word in cebuano, just say it in english, and people will understand you. And there's a ton of random spanish words. "Puede ko mag-bathroom" is a perfect sentence, and it has the spanish puede "can" and turning bathroom into a verb.
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