Haitian-ing the Work: September 8, 2015

Sa k Pase?!? (What's Happening?)

Bonjou fanmi m' e zanmi m' yo! (Hello my family and my Friends!)

The MTC is AMAZING! I am the district leader over all the Haitian Creole speaking missionaries in the whole MTC (all 4 of them)! We are in the French Zone and we have Tahitian speaking missionaries too. In our zone we have one Elder, Elder Bentley and two sisters from England, their accents are awesome! We also have Elder Batezzato from Italy who is a super cool guy, he also has a cool accent, Elder Jackson who is 7'2" and there is an Elder Bytheway in my Zone, so cool. Anyway, my comps name is Elder Petry (like the dish) and we get along great. He's from Denver, CO and loves to bike. The other 2 Elders in our district are Elder Maurino, from Rexberg, and Elder Rackham from Kaysville UT. We all get along so well it's amazing, sometimes we get along a little too well. We joke around a little which is good because it is hard to focus on studying for 12 hours a day.

The gift of tongues is for real! Our whole district bore our testimonies on Sunday completely in Creole! Yesterday was our 3rd lesson with our investigator and we taught without any notes but he threw us a curve ball and we had to change our lesson and had to wing the entire thing! But we did great, we speak fantastically well for only being in the MTC for 5 days! Also our district rule is every time we say "dude" or "you guys" we have to do 5 push ups and I have done so many, my arms are so sore! Our district jokes around all the time about my "bee wrangling" days and they try to wrangle bees at the temple. It's pretty funny.

Oh, I forgot, the food here is less than sub par. I was correct in my worries about eating cafeteria food for 6 weeks, but all is well. We ball it up at gym every night and my ability to make free-throws has come in handy when choosing teams. I've seen sooo many people I know here it is ridiculous, I've seen Elder Andrew, Wilson, Chugg, Coon, Capell, and more. It's crazy to see so many familiar faces. So on sunday I had branch council with the branch presidency, President Dowling is awesome and so so so funny! At the end of the meeting he gave us an update on BYU football, which was cool but it wasn't a Bronco update. BTW Good they won, sounds like they have a few things to work on. My District/Zone is obsessed with our sister Trainer leaders, it's pretty funny but they are awesome and so are our Zone Leaders Elder Di Reda and Seelos. Our whole zone and district get along great. On Sunday we had a mission conference where the whole mission got together and the mission presidency spoke it was amazing! Later we had a devotional by the Provo temple president and his wife which was less amazing... I fell asleep haha.... whoops! My zone laughed at me because my comp was sticking a pen up my nose while I was sleeping. But then I was wide awake for the movie that night where we watched the Character of Christ by Elder Bednar where he taught that to be like Christ we must turn out by show love and compassion for others when the natural man would turn in and be selfish. It was an awesome talk. Anywho, we are killing it in the language, it's pretty sweet. We went to the temple this morning and it was very cool, it was good to get outside the MTC.

I miss you all and I'll send some pictures later today

-- M' renmen tout nou - (I love you all)

Elder Hansen

Florida, Fort Lauderdale Mission