Dear Family,
Sorry there wasn't any post this last Tuesday. We only get thirty minutes on the computer and I was typing my email when it logged me off with one minute left! So I logged back in and I still only had that one minute, but the the entire email was gone. So I have to write it all by hand, send it home and ask my poor father to type it up.
So this last week, Heavenly Father decided to show me what a great sense of humor He has. Last time, I told you that I was staying healthy. Well, the next day I woke up with a very bad sore throat. This sore throat has been harrassing me for the entire week. I wake up every day to a different situation with it. Recently, it's moved up into my tonsils and has hung out there for a few days. It hurts really badly to yawn. I went to the clinic about it and the nurse there said that I didn't have swine flu, but she felt like she should see if there was something else wrong. So she checked my temperature and my ears and a few other things. Then she checked by throat. Whe she looked at it, she said, "Wow, that's an impressively red throat!" Not like I couldn't feel it. Anyway, she gave me some salt and cups to clean my throat out with. It's actually been helping. I nearly lost my voice completely a few times this week though.
Anyway, another fun little thing that's happened this week is that we taught in the TRC in Czech. First, I need to tell you that we always have this one native Czech woman names Kajě come in. She's from Brno which is in Eastern Czech Republic, otherwise called Moravia; Western Czech is called Bohemia. People in Bohemia generally speak slower and people in Moravia speak faster. So by the transitive property, Kajě speaks fast and it is very true. Now back to the story. We had planned out our lesson, had divided up the lesson so that Starší Jones wouldn't end up speaking because Starší Horvath and I are too uncomfortable with the language and would just stay quiet. Anyway, we began the lesson and it was going well and then it came to my part of the lesson. So I began and while I was talking about prophets, Kajě asked a question. It basically flew right over my head, so I said, "Prosin?" ("Excuse me?") She said the question a little slower. This happened again and again about five times until I understood the question. I kept getting tripped up over the word, "všechno" in one of its forms meaning "all/everything." Gah! So I finally got it and answered her question. Her question was, "Can all of us return to be in the presense of God?" Simple enough question, but not when you don't understand the vocabulary. So I got out of my portion of the lesson with minor bumps and scrapes. Kajě was nice enough to correct my case endings about every ten seconds. She also decided to throw about two more questions at me, but they went much better.
Not much else happened this week. Just teaching our teachers a lot in czech. Yesterday, we had a lesson (lekce, if you want to know it in Czech) or schůzka (the Czech word for appointment) to Brother Cardon, and my brain had just about turned out for the night or something because my Czech was terrible. Anyway, I guess I have room for improvement.
I hope you have a wonderful (úžasný) Thanksgiving. Pray for all the missionaries because they don't get to have a day off for Thanksgiving. However, I know that every one of them is extremely thankful to be serving the Lord at this time in "their" section of the world.
I love you all very much and wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving.
Starší Monk