A temple dedication with 2,000 other missionaries!!

August 25, 2009
So this week was quite fun! We got a new roommate - she is going to Cambodia but speaking Vietnamese. Her name is Sister Harlan and she is quite honestly one of the funnest people I have ever met. We have really hit it off and really enjoy each other, which is good because she is a solo sister so she spends a lot of time with Sister Meyers and I. The bad news of the week is that we are not getting any new Thai sisters - just five elders. We are quite bummed about that one, but we are still really excited - they come in tomorrow! We also got four new English sisters in our branch this last Wednesday. I love being the coordinating sister because I got to go meet them on Wednesday night and give them a tour of the MTC, so we are all really good friends - we went to the Temple together this morning and had a blast. It is sad that they will only be here for three weeks - it is so interesting to watch the merry-go-round of English speakers come and go - while Sister Meyers and I just kind of stay. We have been talking about how some times it feels like we were born here, and we will die here. It is hard to imagine life outside the MTC - but we also feel like we just got here, and we are both a little freaked out by the fact that we are leaving five weeks from tomorrow! CRAZY! As of tomorrow, we will be known as the Phii Thai's. We are so excited.
Another fun event of the week is that we learned the famous Thai "Elephant song". We have heard the Phii Thais sing it before and we loved it, and we finally got to learn it this week. It is a pretty dinky kids song about elephants - its like "have you ever seen an elephant? - They are big and heavy and they have tusks and a trunk and ears and eyes" - But it is set to this really cool tune and we feel really cool when we sing it because it is in Thai. There are also actions. I will let you imagine what those are for yourself. Brother Sakhaa taught it to us and did the actions and we were pretty much rolling on the floor we were laughing so hard!
So we taught our first lesson in Thai on Saturday, and it went pretty well. I really love teaching in Thai because it forces us to rely more on Heavenly Father and the Spirit is just more with us. We had a couple of funny language moments (and some great laughs together) but the rest of the lesson was awesome. I really felt that we had the Spirit with us, which really helped get the message across even when we were speaking Thai so slowly that by the time we finished a sentence, the investigator had probably forgotten the beginning of the sentence. But Brother Duvall gave us lots of compliments afterwards, which he usually just gives us things to work on, so I guess it went pretty well. So, anyways, that was a really encouraging experience. I also feel like my ability to speak has kind of exploded this week - we are holding pretty much all our conversations in Thai and we are able to talk about a lot with out having to switch to English! So, that is pretty awesome.
We had more awesome devotionals this week. We also got a chance to go to the Oquirrh Mountain Temple Dedication - they broadcast it here at 3:00 on Sunday. I thought all of the talks were really awesome! I love Temple Dedications. Doing the Hosanna Shout with 2,000 other missionaries was one of the most awesome experiences ever. I really loved that.