August 5th Email Update

Hey oh!

What a great week! (Especially the rain!) Things are flying by and more than anything it's crazy that we've reached the 9+ week stage of our MTC experience and in a few short weeks we'll be leaving! Elder L. Lionel Kendrick was here on Tuesday and gave the missionaries a great point that we should wake up in the morning and wonder "how in the world am I going to get everything done?" And I'm happy to say that it's been a very busy week!

(picture of Ryan and Elder Wilson courtesy of the Malaysian missionaries!)

So the EIL training that we are doing right now is going good- we've taught two lessons so far to a class of international missionaries and we have a 30 minute lesson to prepare for tonight. When I left high school I was stoked that I'd never be worrying about English grammar again!!! Now I'm teaching it.... I continue to see new ways the Lord needs me to grow and learning to teach English has given me a cool perspective on learning Mongolian. I wrote last week and said that the class was going to be a 3 week version of a BYU class, but we found out that the Mongolian government won't move the visa's forward until they have our EIL certification in hand.... so now it's a 1 week, most of the day class! That means that we'll have our certification by the end of this week though and hopefully get the wheels turning again on our visa applications. The forecast at this time is anywhere from 3-6ish weeks on those visa's? I'm guesstimating but that's going off of some of the previous missionaries experiences. Exciting! In a few short weeks I could be sitting in a chapel.... no one speaks a lick of English.... in Ulaanbaatar! I love it and it pushes us to work harder to prepare to teach the Gospel to the Mongolian people.

Because of class this week we've switched our Preparation Day to Saturday, so I'll write all my letters then- they'll be a bit late though. I got all of your's yesterday- thank you for the great letters! I love hearing about everything and all of your growth! I'm feeling incredibly excited for the field but I love having this time to prepare and grow, so this next few weeks will be interesting to see what happens! I love you guys and hope you have a great week!

Elder Jolley

At the TRC (Teaching Resource Center) with Brayden and Kevin Olsen • July 22, 2010
Brayden and Kevin volunteer every Thursday at the TRC and have had a couple of opportunities to see and visit with Ryan and his companion.

Ryan and Brayden at the TRC • July 22, 2010