MTC Pictures!

Well, we finally received some pictures from Dallin (Vanhin Grimm). I will put a few on the website here. The first is his name tag. We are all having a hard time pronouncing the words, so if you can do it, good for you!

The second one is of Dallin and the 4 Finnish missionaries that checked in the same day. Dallin is standing next to his companion, Elder Ranzenberger. The other two are Elder Schoof (one of Dallin's BYU roommates) and Elder Empey. The last one is of all of the Finnish missionaries currently in the MTC (9, 10 including Dallin).

His companion was released from his Swine Flu quarantine. I have attached an excerpt of Dallin's last email where he talks about this:

Elder Ranzenberger is feeling fine ever since he got out of Swine Zone. Elder Schoof and I, however, picked up a cold or some form of the flu at the tailend of last week so we've had sore throats and stuffy noses. When Elder Ranzenberger was isolated, they gave us some "tamiflu" pills to help prevent us from getting the flu too. So we don't know if what we have now is a cold or a watered down form of the flu because of the pills we had. It hasn't been too bad and I started feeling better today. I've still been able to work hard and focus, despite the sickness I think because God knows I have a lot to learn still and I can't waste time with stupid things like sickness. we refuse to get checked out in case they want to quarantine us. elder ranzenberger told us horror stories about that place so we don't want to see if we have the swine or not.

He has been able to see some of his friends and family that are currently in the MTC! He has seen Steven Allred and his cousin Lars a few times. He will have two more cousins at the MTC soon.

The language is going well for him. He continues to send us Finnish grammar lessons. It is a very different language than English! There appears to be a bit of a language issue at the MTC. The following is a pretty funny excerpt regarding this phenomenon:

so here's one thing that drives us (the finnish missionaries) crazy: the spanish speaking missionaries. as you probably know, there are a lot of spanish speaking missionaries because a huge chunk of the world speaks spanish. what bothers us is that they all think that every other soul at the mtc also speaks spanish too. all the time they start talking to one of us in spanish even though our nametags are clearly not in spanish. it's kinda sad because we can understand about half of what they say and none of us have taken a single spanish class; we just don't really know how to respond. so they'll talk, we can't respond, they get a little annoyed. seriously, they do. so we start speaking finnish to them. they then get really confused and will either give up or will start speaking english. it's a funny exchange but i think if i hear "como esta?" one more time i'm going to lose it.

Nice!

A pretty cool thing happened last week. There was a training session at the MTC with new mission presidents. President Monson and several other General Authorities were there for the training. Dallin got to see them, but not meet them directly. Because the G.A.'s were at the MTC, they combined their Sacrament Meeting with all of the branches at the MTC. Dallin sat down next to a couple and said hello. They started talking and come to find out, the couple that he was talking to was Julie Walker's parents (Julie is in our former Ward in Aurora, CO)! It was great to get a call from Julie with a message from Dallin through her parents.

It is hard to believe, but he has been in the MTC for almost 4 weeks already. Today was Fast Sunday so that leaves 23 more to go! :)

That's all for now...