First week of home MTC

To my adoring fans, Well, I survived the first week of the MTC, so that's exciting. It sort of feels like school except that I actually have a good sleep schedule haha. On Monday, I woke up and had a large group meeting from 8 to 9 with all of the incoming missionaries (I think there's over 400 of us), and we just talked about our purpose, gave us an overview of our missionary experience, and got us excited for the work. We had one of these meetings each morning for this first week. My first district class is from 9 to 12, and my second class is from 1:30 to 4:30. There are 4 other Elders in my district, and we were all assigned to different areas of the Philippines. It was during this time when I also met my companions: Elder McClellan and Elder Blauer (with an odd number in our district, my companionship is a trio). They seem like pretty cool guys, and it seems to be going well with us so far. I don't have much to say about the classes; they mainly helped us to get to know each other, introduce different missionary/MTC logistics and principles, etc. We also had a companion study in between classes, but we didn't really know what we were doing, so it was short lived haha. After my classes, I generally have the rest of the day to spend with family and do personal study. Going to sleep at 10:30 was weird at first, but now I'm getting really sleepy at around 9:30, and that's even weirder haha. Tuesday-Friday were more or less the same: wake up, exercise, get ready, group meeting, classes/studies, family time, sleep. The main difference is that we have a devotional every Tuesday evening. I won't bore you with the intricate details of each class, but we began studying some of the lessons we teach as missionaries, how we act/interact with others as missionaries, and by Thursday/Friday, we started to practice teaching different aspects of the lessons to each other. My companionship was also able to teach the Plan of Salvation on Friday night, and for our first time teaching a lesson, I think it went well. I began my Tagalog classes on Tuesday, and let me tell ya....it is quite the language haha. One line of text in English is often twice as long in Tagalog, some words I have to stop and think about whether I said all of the necessary syllables (e.g. faith = pananampalataya; grateful = nagpapasalamat), and there are some grammatical concepts that we don't even have in English. But on the bright side, I'm already able to say a basic prayer, and I've memorized my Missionary Purpose in Tagalog. My first day was probably my roughest day. Didn't think Satan would attack me so quickly and abruptly haha, but he did. There were a lot of doubts in my head as I went through the day, but once I prayed that night and asked Heavenly Father for help and strength, everything became much more manageable, which I am very grateful for. Just goes to show you the power of prayer haha. Anyways, I think I've covered everything. I don't know how long my future emails will be, especially because it seems like each week doing home-MTC will be more or less the same, but there was a lot of stuff I had to introduce in this first week. Although staring at a screen for several hours isn't ideal, I've still been able to feel the Spirit a lot, and I'm grateful for the time I have to spend with my family. Talk to you soon, -Elder Enger P.S. I didn't know where to put this, but I've been temporarily reassigned to San Jose, California. I don't know how long this will last, and I hope I can go to the Philippines at some point in my mission, but I have faith that I'm being sent to where the Lord wants me to be. Thanks for all of your support!