Elder Gavin Damron's First Missionary Training Center (MTC) Letter

February 7th, 2017

The MTC experience so far has been great! I am really enjoying all class and my district and I get along greatly. I miss you all back home and hope that you are all having fun with life. 

When I got to the MTC back last Wednesday, I was the only one here for about an hour. I even beat all the missionaries from England here. After about an hour an Elder came in, his name is Elder Goodwin. He is from England and he is going to the Athens Greek mission. 

First day was alright, a lot of sitting around waiting to do something. We got to know each other a bit at lunch. Met some really cool people there including a sister from Northern Ireland named Sister Moffett, she is also going to the Alpine German Speaking mission. We had some chips but in the UK they are called crisps. So I decided to turn to her and just say, "these are chips". I told her that because I knew that I would get a reaction out of her just from little that I learned about her. I succeeded in my goal in getting into a playful argument about the name of food. It was quite comical. 

There 11 people in my district:

• 2 Sisters; 
• Sister Soukko, she is from Finland, 
• and Sister Moffett. (mentioned above)
• 9 Elders
• Elder Pickard, he is my companion and he is from Utah, 
• Elder Richardson, he is from Washington State, 
• Elder Benninon, he is from Allen, Texas, 
• Elder Molbek, he is from Denmark and the really cool part about him is his sister is also in the MTC at the same time, 
• Elder Larson, he is from St. Louis, 
• Elder Walton and Elder Gubler, they are both from Utah. 

Our teachers are really cool and really nice. There is Schwester Konietz, she is from Frankfurt, Schwester Schumann, she is from Hamburg, Bruder Robertson, he is from England, and Bruder Murray, he is from Wales. They really like us and want to teach us forever. They say that we are the best district they have in a while. 

We have taught a total of 4 lessons to "investigators", they are really just our teachers pretending to be investigators. The first lesson went horrible, we couldn't understand what she was saying the entire time and our German was horrible and the investigator didn't believe in God. We just had a lesson written down in German from a handy dandy book that gives us the entire lesson in German. So the first lesson went really poorly but at least we didn't do what sisters did and after she said she didn't believe in God say good, good. The second lesson went a whole lot better, we were teaching an easier investigator and we could understand a lot of what she was saying. She was very nice and was really interested. For the 3rd lesson we taught someone new again and it was really good again, and we could understand a bit more, the lesson could have gone better if we were fluent in German or were speaking in English. But we are going to Germany so we need to learn German. The 4th lesson was the best one we have had so far. I understood about 90% of what she said. I am surprised how far we have come in the language. I know that the Gift of Tongues is real because I have seen it my life already. 

The spirit is so strong in here and it is great. I really like it here and the food is really good. There's actually been sunlight in England recently and that's a rarity around this time of year. We went to the Temple today and the Preston Temple is really beautiful. I had some good thoughts today in there. It just shows me that the temple really is the house of God. 

We went to the local town today, Chorley. There are plenty of fun times in here and I love it here, the food is good and I feel at home here. I wish you all the best, there are other things I would like to say but can't due to time restraints. So I'll email next week with pictures and stories and such but I'll attach a picture of my district and companion in here. 

           Mit Liebe,

                  Elder Gavin Damron