Alright, wow... So much has happened this past week it's truly hard to believe. Last Tuesday night the devotional speaker was Elder Neuenschwander, emeritus 70. He was the first General Authority to speak Russian and he has done so much for the Church in Eastern Europe. He gave an awesome talk. That night my companion, Elder Takagi, and I were called to be the new Zone Leaders. Three districts in our zone just left in the last to days to the field. It's kinda complicated how everything works here. There's the ecclesiastical side and then the mission side. There is a MTC Presidency then 2 District Presidencies (like a stake), then there are a lot of branches, I'm not sure how many, but over 50 and each has a Branch Presidency. That's the ecclesiastical side of it. Then on the mission side, each branch is comprised of a zone and each zone has multiple districts. So, we work closely w/ the Branch Presidency (who are awesome, by the way. 2 of them were mission presidents in Russia.) and we're the link between the district leaders and the Branch Presidency. There are a bunch of responsibilities associated with that, but the biggest one is welcome the new missionarys who will be coming in next week and the native Russians the following week. There are 38 new Russian speaking missionaries coming in next Wednesday who will be split between 2 zones. So we will have about half of them and rumor has it that there are more sisters than Elders! That is really strange since the total number of sisters is usually around 10% of all missionaries. So, it was made official on Sunday and the past couple days I've been signing everybody's room checkout sheets, one of them at 4:00 AM. We also need to do the programs up for Sacrament Meeting and Priesthood Meeting and interview the District Leaders as well as go to Branch Council and Branch Presidency Meetings, plus Leadership Training and Zone Leader Training. It's pretty exciting stuff, lots to do. It's nice to stretch.
Now, that was only about half the news really. On Thursday night out of nowhere one of the people higher up in training came into our classroom and announced that there would be some big changes in the way we're learning here. What they did was split our District. A new district was formed called District 10E. Elder Takagi and I were moved to the new one along with Sister Jarman, whose family lives in Moscow and she studied 3 semesters of Russian at BYU, and her companion Sister Uibel, who speaks Arabic and is doing very well with Russian. Then 3 others were brought in from another zone, Elder Windham, who was here last year learning Russian for 8 week and Elder Ortner who is a Jewish convert, born in Israel, and studied 3 years (?) of Russian I think (Who is also our new District Leader, by the way) and Sister Alexeenko who was born in Germany to Ukrainian parents, lived a lot of her life there, then in Louisiana, California, and Utah. So, this is like an Intermediate/Advanced Russian District. As far as all the teachers and training department know it's the first time this has ever happened in the MTC. It's going great so far. We took one of our teachers with us, Bro. Keith Anderson, who is totally the man! I love him so much. He's expecting his first child in a couple weeks. Then, we got a new teacher who is a native Russian, Sister Chenina. She just got back from her mission on Temple Square about 6 months ago. She also super cool. She speaks Japanese too, she was offered free grad school at an Japanese university before her mission because she won an international competition but she chose to go on a mission instead. He parents were totally against her joining the Church, still are. She basically also lost 4 years of University by going on a mission too. She's studying at BYU now. She used to work in the circus and as an actress. She speaks almost exclusively in Russian with us. I really feel we're learning a lot faster. I'm so grateful to be a member of the Living Church where things can change like this according to revelation.
I'm bummed I don't have more time to write because so much is happening here. But, I am so grateful to be here. I still love it. I love being a missionary. I'll try to type faster next time.
Love you all,
Elder Mahoney
P.S. I think there was so confusion in the last message. By address I meant physical address. I can only email family in the MTC. That might change in the field but for now if you want a response please include physical address in your DearElder message.
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