On My Way To Korea

Before I write this post, I should give you a disclaimer. Although I was a LDS/Mormon missionary in the past I have since removed my name from the church for reasons I talk about in this post called “물몬교의 숨은 역사”. I am not bitter or angry against the church or the members, I simply have come to believe that it isn’t true. I loved my time as a missionary and am very happy that I went. Heck, I wouldn’t know anything about Korea if I didn’t go on my mission. Now that y’all know where I’m coming from, let me give quick overview of what a mission entails.

Just some quick facts about LDS missions, unmarried men 19 to 25 can serve two years while unmarried women 21 to 25 can serve one and a half years. It’s expected that all young men in the church serve a mission (though it’s technically voluntary) while completely voluntary for women. All missionaries around the world pay $400 US dollars each month to cover all expenses. During those entire two or one and a half years missionaries dedicate their entire life to preaching the gospel. The only contact they have with family is through letters once a week and two phone calls a year. There are also a lot of rules that make it so missionaries don’t play around, but we did get time to do what we wanted (not everything) once a week from morning until 6. The rest of the week missionaries either proselyte out on the streets (oh many do I have stories there) or teach in appointments. Okay, let’s look into the MTC. Here I am entering the MTC (no name tag yet, so it actually looks a little weird lol), bright-eyed and eager to learn!:

For missionaries, this is the last time you will see your family for two years regardless of how close you serve to them. They have a little presentation and then the parents go out one side of the room and the missionaries go out of the other, so it’s a very emotional time for many.

As many of you know, missionaries always travel in pairs (called companionships). Well, missionaries even stay in pairs in the MTC. You go back to your new dorm and meet your new companion who you’ll be with 24/7 for your entire MTC stay. For English missionaries, they stay two weeks, Spanish six weeks, and for harder languages like Chinese, Japanese or Korean it’s twelve weeks. That’s all the time you have before you’re thrown into the field to find and teach investigators with nothing more than up to an hour of personal language study every day. For companions who don’t click well, the MTC can be a living hell, but my companion was really fun and not totally uptight. Here’s us trying to escape from the MTC (which missionaries can’t leave):

Everything is organized exactly how it is in the field. Missionaries are always in companionships of two or three people (called threesomes) if there’s an odd number. Those companions are in groups of about four companionships called districts. Districts are part of zones (in the field it’s all geographically based, in the MTC it’s all language based). Teachers teach one district each, so we get a lot of individual attention. Here was my awesome district:

Our group of Korean missionaries actually was quarantined for a few days, you can read that post over here.

If you’ve ever called a phone number from an LDS commercial or from one of the cards the missionaries give out, you’ve probably talked to a missionary. In the MTC we did service by answering phone calls to the church about sending out pamphlets and free books. It also helps us get out of our shell in case we’re super shy or anything like that. Out of all the missionaries there, I always got the long calls for some reason. I guess it prepared me for my mission since I had many ‘interesting’ conversations out in the field. Anyways, here’s me at one of the desks in the call center:

Now to get into the beef of the MTC: study time! Our daily schedule was pretty much the same every day. We would have three study sessions every day that lasted three hours, one session which was personal study. Each session would be about half language and half gospel.

The first thing we learned do to in Korean, after spending a one day on Hangeul, was to pray. We prayed when we woke up, when we started and ended a study session, ate food, before we worked out, at night before going to bed, and numerous other times. We were encouraged to say our prayers in Korean anytime possible to practice. As you can imagine, our prayers were fairly repetitive since we didn’t know much Korean. It was always pretty simple, things like ‘thank you for giving us our families’ and such things. We also did things like sing hymns in Korean, read scriptures in Korean (even though we didn’t understand it, it was mostly pronunciation practice), etc. Most, well pretty much all, of our vocabulary was attained through learning it in the context of teaching about our church.

Instead of using a regular Korean textbook, we had a special book put together by the church which taught how to teach about the gospel in Jesus Christ. It was kind of funny, because we couldn’t talk about a lot of simple topics but we could talk about advanced gospel topics. Not only that, we didn’t even practice middle form. In order to be respectful, we only learned the highest form used in normal conversation (-합니다/-합니까). Korean missionaries are never allowed to use low level language (-해) and are expected to use high form when they teach out in the field.

The teachers in the MTC were returned missionaries who had served in Korean speaking missions so they pretty much knew how to prepare us for the field. The teachers are generally students from Brigham Young University (BYU), the university next door which is also owned by the church. Here’s one of the teachers who was a second generation Korean from Hawaii:

We played some games that helped us have some fun.  We did things like 3-6-9 (funny video of that game here) and some others that I can’t remember the name of.  We also had weekly sessions where we taught fake investigators for 20-30 minutes twice with a scenario and another session where we taught another teacher other than our main teachers.

All in all it was pretty good training for teaching about the gospel and provided a good root for learning Korean.  I cemented my love for studying Korean in the MTC and so was infamous for studying Korean every free minute of the day.  Now that I’m home I’ve found a lot of joy in continuing my studies, hoping to finally get to Korea.  As missionaries we weren’t allowed to watch TV or listen to music, so I’m still filling up on those right now =).