Monday, January 2, 2017

March 15, 2016

Apa khabar setiap orang!

I apologize for missing my weekly last week; we were short on time and
frankly nothing too exciting occured. This week went by really fast
and I'm loving my time here in the MTC! This week I hosted an Elder
from Kirabati (an island near Fiji) who is serving in Fiji. He hardly
spoke any English and being international, needed to have an extensive
medical check up. So I got to go on a little field trip! A small group
of missionaries and myself got to take a shuttle to the BYU health
clinic for the missionaries to get an x-ray.

What else happened? Our "lessons" to investigators have been
progressing. We now usually teach two lessons a day and I'm slowly
getting more comfortable with teaching in Bahasa. Today my comp and I
aren't speaking English the entire day. It's been way hard so far but
it is so much fun! The Mongolians in our District are leaving this
week so it will only be us Malays and the Thai missionaries who
compose our District. We should be getting our flight plans this week!
I can't believe we only have two more weeks here before we get to the
field. I am beyond stoked to start teaching the people in Singapora
and Malaysia. Our teachers share stories and pictures with us and it
gets me so pumped. That's about all I got for this week. Hope you all
have a great week.

Sayang,

Elder Van Gils

March 1, 2016

Hello everyone!

This has been quite an eventful and exciting week. The most notable
being a visit from Umar Hadi, His Honorable Consul General (that's his
actual title) from Indonesia. He's pretty much in charge of visas for
Indonesia so impressing him meant he would be able to expedite that
process for our missionaries going there. We were told he was taking a
tour of the MTC and wanted to see how our missionaries were taught, so
my companion and I, and a sister headed to Indonesia, were selected to
demonstrate to him our ability at speaking Bahasa and answer any
questions he might have. So last Thursday, the Consul General, two
other ambassadors, our MTC President, Elder Don R. Clark from the
Quorum of the Seventy, some lady, and a bunch of security guards came
and visited our class. We spent roughly a half an hour demonstrating
learned grammar structures, telling him why we decided to serve
missions and asking him for advice before entering his country and
Malaysia. It was definitely a cool experience.

Another topic of interest that we've been talking about recently is
also about Indonesia. One Elder in our District headed to Thailand is
from Australia and has a little brother serving in Indonesia. We heard
from him that two Elders there have been having their pictures taken
by radical Muslims who have been posting them and warning everyone to
stay away from the "devil worshipers, cult members, etc..". Supposedly
there's been tons of threats towards them, so for the next week or so
those missionaries aren't allowed to leave their apartment. That's
pretty scary!

Well the language is slowing progressing. We're able to have actual
conversations with our teachers but my comprehension is still pretty
bad. Elder Benson left a few days ago which kind of sucks. He's a
homie and is going to kill it out in Sweden. My district is way cool.
We have an incredibly diverse group, featuring missionaries from
Australia, New Zealand, Nepal and Thailand. Since we spend a lot of
time with the missionaries going to Thailand I've been picking up a
bit of Thai! Well that's all I got this week.

Love,

Elder Van Gils





02 25 2016 Indonesia Consul General.jpg