Sept 7, 2007 - Training Sister Khorloo; Good Morning, Teacher

Say hey to Sister Khorloo, e’erbody!

This picture was taken just seconds ago as I’m sitting here in the internet café. Sister Khorloo is my new companion, I am her trainer, and I am way excited. There were 24 new missionaries who caya garsan this past transfer, so the new missionary meeting was a big exciting hairy deal. They called the training missionaries up one by one and then called the names of their trainees, catching everyone’s reactions and their first hugs on video.

This is, as you all may have guessed, my first mission, so I don’t know what it’s like in other missions around the world but I think we have a rather different experience here in Mongololia. As the names were called out it was fun to see the 10 American elders and 2 American sisters, fresh off the plane and full of wonder/fear, but I had an entirely different feeling looking at the 14 new Mongolian missionaries. I knew all of them beforehand. I was already good friends with 5 of them, and one of them was a khairtai branch missionary that I got to be good friends with while serving in Sukhbaatar Branch. I was there with about 10 other people when she opened her mission call at our branch president’s house. I had been in Sukhbaatar branch for 3 days when her younger brother passed away and spent an afternoon at her house helping make food for the funeral. She came with us on countless visits to bear her testimony and help teach this gospel to our investigators. We taught one of my favorite investigators, Demchig, at her family’s house for months. Her name was Khorloo. Now it’s Sister Khorloo and I’m so excited to be her companion.
Sister Khorloo in past posts March 30, 2007 and December 29, 2006

Ready for a really bizarre twilight zone moment? I found a Mongolian Haley Mortensen! Of course nothing compares with the original, but as I walked into the classroom at one of my new schools this past week this girl just caught my eye. She was tall, cute as anything (a button, maybe?), really well dressed, and she just freaking talks like Haley (if Haley spoke Mongolian)! I bet if I taught her to say “mahalo” she wouldn’t be able to stop saying it. I told her that she reminded me of a friend from home and she put her hand to her chest and said, “Bayarlaa” just like the Hales does it. It would have been creepy, but for the fact that Haley is anything but creepy.

So, yeah, I made some rash comments a few weeks ago about how people were starting up school again and how I wasn’t a part of that stuff this year and ha ha and the like, but now I must repent of my remarks. I am into the school stuff again, and much more than I was last year here in Mongolia. So far I’ve pretty much always taught English at language centers and weeny little community college type deals. This year’s a little different. I’m teaching six hours a week at this university and another 4 hours a week at a high school. I teach 9th, 10th, and 11th grade English. How weird is that!

I will tell you how weird it is! I walk into the classroom and 30 young Mongols stand up smartly to greet me with a “Good morning, teacher!” The older students don’t wear uniforms, but in the breaks between classes I have to wind my way through masses of little pijacks (suits), skirts, and these ridiculously huge ball/bow-type things that they make all the little girls wear. It’s really hard being a teacher! And, remember how I’m not actually a teacher and how we don’t get a bit of training before they toss us into a classroom full of students on the first day of class and say “Here’s your classroom. Please don’t speak Mongolian. Good luck!”? No worries, though. It’s all good. I just tell them I’m studying animation and then they start having me draw things on the board. I had kind of a competition with this one kid who also likes to draw. He drew a pretty mean dog, but I whooped him with my Donald Duck (kids are suckers for brand names).

The hardest part about teaching English is not the actual teaching, it’s trying to figure out how to get any work done with the little time we have left. We usually do our big planning sessions on Thursdays which takes about three hours. If we combine that with three hours of study and all the English I have to teach that day that means we’re leaving the house at about 7:00 that night to start doing work. It’s okay, though, and if you want to know why go and read Alma chapter 17 and see what the Book of Mormon has to say about doing service among the people you are trying to preach the gospel to.

Here’s a pic from Battsetseg’s baptism last Friday. Her little sister, Batzaya, is getting baptized tonight. Notice how the only people who are really smiling in the picture are me and Elder Hull. It’s not cool to smile in Mongolia, yum shig.