MTC stories, please--good, bad and ugly
Akash Jayaprakash
Since things seem a little slow lately, and since I'm eagerly
anticipating my own entrance into "Club MTC," I thought I'd throw out a
cheerful post for once:
Would any of you RM's out there please share any stories you've got
about the MTC? They can be funny, gross, spiritual, condemning, or
praising. I'd just like to hear more about it. So far, all I've heard
is:
1) The Spirit is strong.
2) The food is bad.
3) The food is good.
4) The showers have no doors, curtains, or stalls.
What else 'ya got?
Akash
P.S. Where are the other MTCs in the world besides Provo?
--
I am as frustrated with society as a pyromaniac in a
petrified forest.
--A. Whitney Brown
Akash Jayaprakash
flas...@brown.edu
Jeremiah W. James
In article <589qv7$h...@q.seanet.com>, Akash Jayaprakash <s...@brown.edu> wrote:
>Would any of you RM's out there please share any stories you've got
>about the MTC? They can be funny, gross, spiritual, condemning, or
>praising. I'd just like to hear more about it. So far, all I've heard
>is:
>
>1) The Spirit is strong.
>2) The food is bad.
>3) The food is good.
>4) The showers have no doors, curtains, or stalls.
>
>What else 'ya got?
As a preface to my favorite MTC story, let me tell you that I'm a
baritone. I've never had any kind of voice lessons to help me learn
those neat tricks for extending my range, so most tenor parts are too
high for me (without going into falsetto, anyway, and even then they are
sometimes too high). The hymns aren't too bad; I can usually sing the
bass part just fine, although I sometimes have trouble hitting that low
D and below.
Okay, now for my story. My MTC district included myself, the wannabe
bass, my companion, a pretty good tenor, two guys who could actually
sing the soprano and alto parts (!), a guy with a wonderful bass voice
who had never been taught how to sing his part, and another guy with a
tenor voice in the same boat. The other bass proved to be a quick
study; pretty soon his rich bass voice was completely drowning me out.
The extra tenor always insisted that he really couldn't sing, but we had
him help out on the high parts anyway (and he did well enough, his
protestations to the contrary notwithstanding). We got some really good
4-part harmony going. We used to sing hymns as we were walking about
the MTC campus; it was really fun (although a bit embarrassing when we
attracted a little more attention than we really wanted). But the best
part was those doorless, curtainless, multiple-head shower stalls.
The bathrooms are large, tiled rooms, so you get quite an echo. One
morning, we all happened to be in the shower at the same time (which was
quite unusual, believe it or not). One of us started humming a hymn,
another person hummed along, and pretty soon we were singing our hearts
out. That echo chamber of a bathroom made the harmony reverberate
throughout the floor, and by the time we finished, most of the people on
our floor were standing around in the doorways listening. We would have
been quite flattered had we not all been standing around stark naked in
those doorless, curtainless shower stalls!
Jerry "Full clothed, thank you very much" James
Email: je...@cs.ucsb.edu
WWW: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~jerry/
aepar...@aol.com
One of the hardest transitions I had to make as a sister missionary was
the lack of physical contact with other living creatures -- my family is
very much huggy/kissy, and I'd been lucky enough to have a nephew to
cuddle for two years before going into the MTC. I envied the elders, who
not only engaged in horseplay with each other, but got a lot of attention
including backslapping and (mock) choke-holds from the teachers. For
sisters -- absolutely nothing (even handshakes were extremely rare).
Maybe that's why we had two pet cats in our dorm.
I don't know how long they had been there before I came, or how long
afterwards they stayed, but I sure was happy to have them. It was all
supposed to be hush-hush, of course. In fact, Sis. Mary Ellen Edmunds
(the highest ranking sister officer at the MTC) gave us a very stern
lecture one morning about not allowing animals to come into the dorms.
Then she stepped closer to the mike, and with a wink and a consiratorial
whisper, said something like, "But remember -- the black one likes ham,
and the gray one likes tuna."
Ardis Parshall
AEPar...@aol.com
Jonathan Burk
Akash Jayaprakash wrote:
>
> Since things seem a little slow lately, and since I'm eagerly
> anticipating my own entrance into "Club MTC," I thought I'd throw out a
> cheerful post for once:
>
> about the MTC? They can be funny, gross, spiritual, condemning, or
> praising. I'd just like to hear more about it. So far, all I've
There was a district in our building who would block the "shower
room's" opening by hanging up sheets, then turn the hot water on to make
a sauna. We all thought this was a little wierd, so one night someone
turned off the lights in their bathroom and ran off with their clothes.
And of course this was before the Branch President's nightly check up...
Another common prank was to take the "Women only beyond this point"
signs from the sr. missionary's dorms and put them up in the Elder's
dorms when the new missionaries came in. Of course all the real good
stuff happens once you get to the field, but that's a different story...
Steve O'Neil
On 6 Dec 1996 19:08:23 GMT, Akash Jayaprakash <s...@brown.edu> wrote:
>So far, all I've heard
>is:
>
>1) The Spirit is strong.
>2) The food is bad.
Not in the New Zealand MTC
>3) The food is good.
>4) The showers have no doors, curtains, or stalls.
>P.S. Where are the other MTCs in the world besides Provo?
I went to the New Zealand MTC which serves the South Pacific Area.
It is part of the Hamilton church college campus. One tradition there
is for MTC missionaries to have 'greasy runs'. ie, get one of the
local students or someone else to go out to get a whole load of fish &
chips and sneak them into the missionaries' dormitories. The
missionaries then have a nice feast before bed.
Robert Craig Harman
Akash Jayaprakash wrote:
>
> Since things seem a little slow lately, and since I'm eagerly
> anticipating my own entrance into "Club MTC," I thought I'd throw out
> a cheerful post for once:
"Club MTC"? Euwww....definitely not.
> Would any of you RM's out there please share any stories you've got
> about the MTC? They can be funny, gross, spiritual, condemning, or
> praising. I'd just like to hear more about it. So far, all I've
> heard is:
>
> 1) The Spirit is strong.
Well, yes and no. I find it depends very strongly on your own personal
spirituality and that of your district. It is thoroughly possible to
be fully out of sync with the Spirit in the MTC when everyone else has
it, and my recent experiences with translation that there are mission-
aries who are quite out of sync...
> 2) The food is bad.
> 3) The food is good.
Well, probably being the most recent person on this group to eat in
the MTC (another perk of being a translator), I can tell you that the
food is pretty average institutional food. Some of it's not bad - and
it's certainly plentiful ;^) - although I wouldn't recommend eating too
much of it, since the MTC 15 is as easy to acquire as the freshman 15.
While you do have gym time at the MTC, it's not enough to make up for
what is otherwise a very sedentary 3-8 weeks...
> 4) The showers have no doors, curtains, or stalls.
Again, yes and no. In some buildings, the men have shower rooms with
12 showers arranged in sixes around central poles. In others, the
elders have shower stalls. The degree of modesty your comps will
exhibit during the course of your mission seems to be strongly
correlated to which type of showers they had in the MTC...
> P.S. Where are the other MTCs in the world besides Provo?
Well, there are fifteen of them. I'll copy them down when I go to
the Provo MTC this week.
--
Robert Craig Harman En France, appelez 01 39 76 68 84 pour
BYU Chemical Engineering recevoir un Livre de Mormon gratuit...
Master's Candidate
LDS France Paris Mission http://www.et.byu.edu/~harmanr/mission.html
Woody Brison
> 1) The Spirit is strong.
Yesss.... for someone whose objective is to get out there
and teach everyone the gospel and baptize everybody in
sight, it is wonderful. After about 8 weeks you are
ready to leave. I had to stay 14 weeks waiting for my
visa. It was really no challenge to get the discussions
down perfect. The challenge was to not go crazy.
The US Govt tried to copy the MTC's language training
program and could not make it work. You get 3 days of
english free, then you must speak your target language
all the time. You must stay with your comp 24 hours a
day. The people the Govt had trying to do this quit in
short order, but the MTC graduates about 99.9% of its
entrants. (Good number, I just pulled it out of the air)
> 2) The food is bad.
> 3) The food is good.
I started my mission at age 27. Most of my district were
19-20 and had only eaten at home. I had already sampled
life quite a bit and recognized that what we had here were
the very best chefs of the BYU Food Service, and in all of
Utah practically, with the added dimension of inspiration.
There would logically be nothing but the best for the Lord's
missionaries. But it was packaged in a plain brown wrapper
so to speak. It was served cafeteria style, on a tray,
serve yourself, wait in line, etc. The food was a little
sparse for me but I do love to eat especially when it's
good. Doing mental work I tend to burn a lot of calories.
But my young colleagues vyed to see who could criticize the
food most creatively. They soon learned, out in the field,
the difference between good and bad food. A guy with a
suitcase full of the right stuff, like candy bars or good
cookies could ge fairly rich.
> 4) The showers have no doors, curtains, or stalls.
Don't remember. But I do remember the mysterious bonk bonk
bonk sound which would occur at odd hours when we were
supposed to be studying. We could never isolate the source
of this sound. But Elder Carter had a barrel chest which he
inflated and hollered at the top of his voice, and it was
/loud: "KNOCK IT OFF!" and the sound stopped.
Elder Mollenhaur liked to drink pop and had made a pyramid
of cans above his closet. This kept falling down, especially
as one of his comps had a superball which they played a
little handball in their room with. When the ball would hit
the pyramid it would clatter down and Moly would start building
it up again. At this time I will confess to knocking it
down once by subterfuge. Seeing their door open about one
foot, and them inside studying intensely for once, I got down
the hall by the corner and threw a superball into their room
and skipped back out of sight around the corner and listened
as the ball went into their room, bounced quietly about 5
times off various surfaces (which they didn't register) then
hit the pyramid, bringing it down with a loud crash as I
noiselessly slipped into my room and appeared to be studying
deeply absorbed. I could hear them in there yelling and
trying to understand what made the pyramid fall down, for
the ball had disappeared under a bed or something, they could
not identify a cause for the crash. It was a perfect deal.
Wood
Akash Jayaprakash
Woody Brison wrote:
>
> > 1) The Spirit is strong.
> Yesss.... for someone whose objective is to get out there
> and teach everyone the gospel and baptize everybody in
> sight, it is wonderful. After about 8 weeks you are
> ready to leave. I had to stay 14 weeks waiting for my
> visa. It was really no challenge to get the discussions
> down perfect. The challenge was to not go crazy.
You had to stay in the MTC for 14 weeks waiting for a visa? That's
weird. My friend Jason is now on his mission. He was called to Brazil
(Sao Paulo), but he couldn't get a visa for awhile. So, they sent him
to Riverside, California for about two months, and then he transferred
to Brazil.
Anyone else have this happen to them?
Akash
c.tol...@ukonline.co.uk
Everyone knows the best MTC is in London
Robert Craig Harman
Akash Jayaprakash wrote:
>
> You had to stay in the MTC for 14 weeks waiting for a visa? That's
> weird. My friend Jason is now on his mission. He was called to
> Brazil (Sao Paulo), but he couldn't get a visa for awhile. So, they
> sent him to Riverside, California for about two months, and then he
> transferred to Brazil.
14 weeks was nothing compared to the visa waiters (also for Brazil)
who were in the MTC when I was. They were in their 18th or 19th
week when I first saw them. I think some stayed over 21 weeks. In any
case, it made me wonder why they hadn't been assigned out...
Robert Craig Harman
Craig Anderson wrote:
>
> At one point, we had our dorms in one building, our classes in a
> different building, and meals in yet a third building - ah yes, the
> good old days when missionaries were _real_ missionaries! <g>
Err, where does this differ from the Provo MTC today?
Granted, large group meetings, culture classes, and some other
meetings are held in the administration building where the cafeterias
are, but classes are still held in separate classroom buildings (7M,
8M, 9M, 10M, 18M, and I think 11M) and the dorms are separate from
those...
...Craig, MTC tour guide...
Craig Anderson
Woody Brison <william....@ast.lmco.com> wrote in article
<58l2jd$e...@q.seanet.com>...
[Referring to the MTC]
> After about 8 weeks you are
> ready to leave. I had to stay 14 weeks waiting for my
> visa. It was really no challenge to get the discussions
> down perfect. The challenge was to not go crazy.
When I went on my mission, you spent 5 days in the "Missionary Home" across
from SLC headquarters, and then the rest of the 8 weeks in the LTM
(Language Training Mission for you youngsters) in Provo. At one point, we
had our dorms in one building, our classes in a different building, and
meals in yet a third building - ah yes, the good old days when missionaries
were _real_ missionaries! <g>
It sounds as though you may have gone to Brazil - is that right? We
German-learning missionaries shared the dorm with the Brazilian-speakers
and some of those guys had been there for 6 months! Just waiting for a
Visa! Man, I felt sorry for them.
Craig
Blain Nelson
Akash Jayaprakash wrote:
>
> You had to stay in the MTC for 14 weeks waiting for a visa? That's
> weird. My friend Jason is now on his mission. He was called to Brazil
> (Sao Paulo), but he couldn't get a visa for awhile. So, they sent him
> to Riverside, California for about two months, and then he transferred
> to Brazil.
>
> Anyone else have this happen to them?
>
Last night I was chatting with our new Green elder (left the MTC on
Tuesday), and our bishop's wife. They both verified the food being poor
in the MTC (suggested skipping the main-course stuff and going for the
salad bar -- one way to get that "meat sparingly" thing down, huh?).
Her son, my former HT companion, was called to serve in Puebla Mexico,
but is currently over in Boston waiting for his visa to clear. Anybody
in Boston who sees Elder Strebel, tell him I said "hi."
> Akash
Take care,
Blain
Woody Brison
Robert Craig Harman <pa...@byu.edu> wrote:
> 14 weeks was nothing compared to the visa waiters (also for Brazil)
> who were in the MTC when I was. They were in their 18th or 19th
> week when I first saw them. I think some stayed over 21 weeks. In any
> case, it made me wonder why they hadn't been assigned out...
Maybe I can add to the confusion. When we were assigned
out, we went to Texas San Antonio Mission to continue
waiting for our visas. Vaughn J. Featherstone was our
mission president. He had around 200 missionaries in this
mission, about twice the normal number, and it certainly kept
him hopping. I worked there for an additional six weeks
before my visa finally arrived, for a total of twenty weeks.
When I got to my assigned mission, (Guadalajara, Mexico) I
heard a story. To understand the story, a little background
is necessary. Apparently some missionary was very good
so the president asked him to extend his mission by a month
or so. It was a great honor for this missionary, and a boon
for the president, since here he got a good missionary
basically free for a month, already trained, acclimatized,
knew the language, knew the discussions, knew the best
methods of proselyting among this people, etc. etc. So the
elder stays another month or even two. Later, the prez asks
another good one to extend. After a while it's standard
operating procedure and there are a lot of elders staying
from one week extra to ??. Of course if a missionary has
been nothing but problems for two years he's not asked to
extend ;(
>From various other sources I learned that the nation of Mexico
had a revolution a few years back, in which they changed their
laws, apparently there were some abuses of religious power
before that, and under the new laws, foreign churches could no
longer gather money and send it to their home office in
another country. Foreign missionaries could not officially
proselyte and ministers could not walk the streets in their
religious garb. Of course this caused problems for the LDS
missionary program, but the government did not want to lose
their spending and good will, thus an arrangement was worked
out -- we were officially attached to the M.I.A. as cultural
or athletic advisors or some such. We could not wear our
missionary badges at all. We just worked in our suits (some
people mistook us for the CIA) and only so many visas were
granted. I think just 365 visas were granted to the church
on a rotating basis, so when one missionary went home, another
one came into the country. Thus there were quite a lot of
missionaries waiting for their turn in US border missions where
Spanish was spoken in many families.
Now for the story. Along comes the area supervisor for a
stake conference or something. He drops into the mission
office, the prez is out of town at the moment, but he meets
the president's assistants who take care of his business. In
conversation he learns that one of these assistants is on
about his 28th month of his two-year mission. He instructs
this missionary to get his stuff and report to the airport
forthwith. The missionary tries to protest, he's been asked
to extend (makes no difference), the president is out of town,
he doesn't have permission to leave (he does now!), he hasn't
had his exit interview (will be leaving without one!) -- he
was on the next plane home and the waiting list moved up by
one.
Woody
Thomas Richard Dibble
Robert Craig Harman <pa...@byu.edu> writes:
> 14 weeks was nothing compared to the visa waiters (also for Brazil)
> who were in the MTC when I was. They were in their 18th or 19th
> week when I first saw them. I think some stayed over 21 weeks. In any
> case, it made me wonder why they hadn't been assigned out...
Well, in talking with members of the bishopric and missionaries and such (I
forget exactly which), I was told that "most" mission presidents for some
reason don't like to have "visa-waiters" amongst their crew (probably
because they will be leaving relatively soon). Since our MP *does* ask for
visa-waiters, we now (well, last I checked) have 26 full-time missionaries
in our ward alone. I think probably half of those, if not more, are
waiting for visas. Most to Brazil, btw.
---- Tom Dibble
--
/"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""\
| Tired of lying in the sunshine, \ / tom...@wpi.wpi.edu |
| staying home to watch the rain. / \ the happiest man alive |
\.........................................................................../
Steve O'Neil
On 10 Dec 1996 19:55:04 GMT, Robert Craig Harman <pa...@byu.edu>
wrote:
>Well, yes and no. I find it depends very strongly on your own personal
>spirituality and that of your district. It is thoroughly possible to
>be fully out of sync with the Spirit in the MTC when everyone else has
>it, and my recent experiences with translation that there are mission-
>aries who are quite out of sync...
Wow!!!!!
This guy obviously is in sync with the spirit if he's experienced
translation. Didn't that happen to Elijah too?
;-)
Jason Roberts
In article <58sl9m$s...@q.seanet.com>, Linda Stocks
<li...@wheel.dcn.davis.ca.us> wrote:
> On 11 Dec 1996, Akash Jayaprakash wrote:
> > You had to stay in the MTC for 14 weeks waiting for a visa? That's
> > weird. My friend Jason is now on his mission. He was called to Brazil
> > (Sao Paulo), but he couldn't get a visa for awhile. So, they sent him
> > to Riverside, California for about two months, and then he transferred
> > to Brazil.
> > Anyone else have this happen to them?
> My son spent an extra month in the MTC (he was also called to Brasil...)
> and then a month in the Riverside mission. Visa's come slowly for
> Brasil... especially during Mardi Gras...
I too was a visa waiter. (Go ahead, I've heard the puns before...)
I was due to go to the Belgium Antwerp mission, newly divided from the
Netherlands Amsterdam Mission (and now re-attached). Well to make a
loooong story short, I too spent an extra month in the MTC, even being
reassigned twice (once to New Hampshire, and once to Florida) and told at
the last minute both times we would wait it out at the MTC. Finally we
just flew into Amsterdam, where our US passports were sufficient, took
advantage of Holland's liberal residency laws and declared our selves
residents of the Netherlands, and crossed the border to Belgium. I never
did get that Belgian visa....
Maybe some of my attitute about the MTC comes from being there an extra
_month_ (two of my 3 months we had no instructors). (My brother who
recently left for Taiwan talked about how hard his extra few _days_ were.
Fooey!!!!)
--
--
Jason "voorzichtig op de baan" Roberts
Currently reading: Soebatten, Sarongs, en Sinjo's: Indische woorden in het Nederlands
-Joop Van Den Berg
Robert Craig Harman
Thomas Richard Dibble wrote:
>
> Well, in talking with members of the bishopric and missionaries and
> such (I forget exactly which), I was told that "most" mission
> presidents for some reason don't like to have "visa-waiters" amongst
> their crew (probably because they will be leaving relatively soon).
> Since our MP *does* ask for visa-waiters, we now (well, last I
> checked) have 26 full-time missionaries in our ward alone. I think
> probably half of those, if not more, are waiting for visas. Most to
> Brazil, btw.
26! (astonishment, not factorial)
Goodness, where do you put them all to work? After all, Worcester's
not *that* big. (OK, so it's the second largest city in New England
at 200,000, but still...)
I can remember how hard it was just to coordinate 12 missionaries in
a town of 150,000 (Le Mans, France).
Are you in a student ward there, perchance?
...Craig, whose brother is training a Brazil visa-waiter right now in
Casper, Wyoming in the Montana Billings mission, soon to be
transferred to the South Dakota Rapid City mission...
Robert Craig Harman
Craig Anderson wrote:
> Robert Craig Harman <pa...@byu.edu> wrote in article:
> > Granted, large group meetings, culture classes, and some other
> > meetings are held in the administration building where the
> > cafeterias are, but classes are still held in separate classroom
> > buildings (7M, 8M, 9M, 10M, 18M, and I think 11M) and the dorms
> > are separate from those...
>
> separate dorms that were not part of a complex, some a pretty fair
> distance from the others (such as the building for meals).
That's fair, but what you lacked in proximity, you probably made up
for in fewness of numbers.
The time to get between different activities - particularly if those
activities are in the administration building (like meals) or in the
gym (firesides, devotionals, etc.) - is horrendously long, because
every single missionary (or I suppose, correctly, every companionship)
seems to be heading in a different direction. When you have 1,000
missionaries crowding a hallway or standing in line for a meal, you
don't get *anywhere* very fast.
Even as a translator, without the encumbrance of a companion, it still
takes me forever to traverse the main building - so much so, that if
I know it's mealtime, I'll go outside and walk around the building,
because I know I'll get where I'm going faster.
ObLDSDiaspora: does anyone have a good translation for "devotional"
in French? I've been at a loss to think of a good term for it -
and I can't use "coin de feu", because the missionaries also have
firesides...
Craig Anderson
> > At one point, we had our dorms in one building, our classes in a
> > different building, and meals in yet a third building - ah yes, the
> > good old days when missionaries were _real_ missionaries! <g>
>
> Err, where does this differ from the Provo MTC today?
>
> Granted, large group meetings, culture classes, and some other
> meetings are held in the administration building where the cafeterias
> are, but classes are still held in separate classroom buildings (7M,
> 8M, 9M, 10M, 18M, and I think 11M) and the dorms are separate from
> those...
But still, it's all pretty much one big complex now. We were in separate
dorms that were not part of a complex, some a pretty fair distance from the
others (such as the building for meals).
Craig
Jim Harris
I attended the old LTM down on about 600 north and 100 east in Provo.
This would've been about 20 or so years ago. The building the
missionaries were housed in was separated from a young women's apartment
complex by the width of a sidewalk 8 or 10 feet wide. One dark winter
morning I looked out my window and there 10 feet away was a stunning
young woman, wearing not a stitch, who had neglected to completely close
her curtains. To say the least, not your typical MTC (LTM) experience.
I imagine that this experience could be characterized as either good or
bad, depending on your perspective. Ugly, it definitely was not!
Jason Roberts
Great story!!!
But, this story would have been a lot better if you came back from your
mission and married the girl!
--
--
Jason Roberts