From Russia With Love...

a.k.a. Letters from Sis. Lynes in Russia

Letter #4: From the MTC (Missionary Training Center)

Subject: #4
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 07:57:07 +0600
From: Shirley Lynes <gma@jacklynes.com>
To: Jack@jacklynes.com

Hi, everyone!
I didn't realize it had been over a week since I wrote! My, how time flies! We are kept so busy that one day runs right into the next, and a week is gone before I know it. Our two teachers from Ukraine have been taken from us and are now teaching Ukrainian. We are without a teacher for the morning class, but we stay busy studying and working with the TALL program in the computer lab. TALL stands for Technology Assisted Language Learning. We can do that without a live teacher! And we do our gospel study during the morning class, and practice for our Friday night native speaker practice. That is where someone who speaks Russian comes in and we get to practice holding a conversation with them. We are always glad when it is over. The speakers are always kind to us! Last week, after bragging about the weather here, it snowed on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and rained on Saturday. The snow was beautiful. On Thursday it was big, beautiful flakes, and it stayed on the ground till the next day. But this week it has been real spring weather. Last week at our devotional, we had Elder Richard G. Scott speak to us. And when it was over, he shook hands with everyone. His talk was so good. Last night we had Elder Robert Oaks of the Seventy and Elder Earl Tingey of the Presidency of the Seventy. Elder Oaks was a 4 Star general in the air force before he retired. He said "I hope your hearts are full of excitement for the privelege of serving the Lord." He also said to "suck it up and stand up tall." And "Go convince them that they are anxious to be taught the truth". Elder Tingey said that "the strength of the church is not in temporal things, but in the faith of its members." And said that President Hinckley says that the symbol of our church is the testimonies and faith that is in the hearts of every member. The MTC choir sang "Consider the Lillies of the Field". All in all, quite a good meeting! I wish all the seniors could understand what a great thing this is to be a missionary! Yesterday we had 72 new seniors come in! Isn't that wonderful? The seniors come in on Tuesday, here at the SMTC and the regular missionaries come in on Wednesday (over at the main MTC). I saw Chad Bohman Sunday. He looks so good and so happy! I found out from him that our accompanist for the choir is Dave Johnson's mother. We went over and met her. She has such a talent!!! And after finding out that she is Dave's mother, I could see the resemblance. I got a letter from Bishop Graham, with news of the ward. Sounds like things are going pretty well. I really appreciated the news. We are over half done with our training. The time is going so fast, and we feel that we don't know enough yet. I hope we can get this language thing better before we have to go. It is beginning to come together, and we can recognize some words when we are reading the Book of Mormon (Knega Mormona) in Russian. We read it, not knowing, most of the time what the words mean. In Russian, every letter is sounded, and each letter only has one sound (except O sometimes sounds AH). So we can sound out the words and read, even though we don't know what they mean. Sentence structure is different from English. Each word has gender and can have different endings that mean different things. It's interesting, to say the least. It's almost dinner time again. All we do is get up, eat, go to class, eat, go to class, eat, go to class, go to bed, and then do it all over the next day! It doesn't sound very exciting, but we are excited to be here, and to be learning, and preparing to serve Heavenly Father and His children. We have experiences that let us know that the Spirit is with us. Keep the mail coming--it is so good to hear from all of you! I want to stay in touch with you and your lives. I love all of you so much and pray for you all the time.

Love,
Mom, Grandma, and Greatgrandma