Missionary Training Center Week 1

The MTC experience has been rewarding:  excellent speakers and teachers, extremely well organized, good lodging and food, and one makes friends here quickly.  We have more free time than the young missionaries and are free to leave campus when we want.  Upon our discovering that, Peter loaned us one of their cars to use while here.  The training schedule is a little tiring, especially the first half of the week.  Connie caught a cold yesterday from lack of sleep due to too many 8 am classes, but slept in today (Saturday), which is a free day and is feeling somewhat better now.  The first week is devoted to training as typical missionaries.  Next week's training is for specific assignments, of which there is quite a variety.  We've found missionaries going to do records preservation at the National Archives, facilities maintenance at Winter Quarters, Military Relations in Tokyo, seminary supervision in North Dakota, and Perpetual Education Fund administration in Portugal and Spain.

Our departure date was moved up from June 25 to June 21, to give us a bit more time to get settled in England before the new mission president arrives around July 1.

Note to self: the short-sleeved white shirts I bought at Missionary Mall wrinkle badly--better not to shop there again.  Fortunately England's short-sleeve season is pretty short.