The First week is over

How do you describe the first week at the Missionary Training Center?  New, frustrating, fun, thought provoking, supportive, re-learning, busy, skill stretching, stride lengthening, comfortable, course correcting or paradigm shift (which ever applied),and bewildering to mention just a few situations we have experienced here.
It can best be described as a FINISHING SCHOOL for experienced members of the church.  They took us in an 'As Is" condition and polished us up, gave us name tags and send us off to our field of labor.   It is also a finishing school for the young missionaries as well - but they take from 3 to 6 weeks to get through it.
.
I loved the idea that someone planned the menu's, prepared the food, cleaned the dishes, put away the left overs and all I had to do was show up at meal times.

Our day began with fighting off the mattress monster.  Once we had him wrestled to the ground and were pronounced 'winner!' we grabbed our books and writing stuff and set off for the Cafeteria.  Usually it was crowded with the young missionaries and there was lots of noise and plenty of food.  The young elders are a very happy lot of young people - ranging in age from 19 to 20 something.  They seem to appreciate the food and it disappears quickly from their plates.  In other words, these young people eat a lot......but then they are growing......all 2500 of them.
After breakfast we headed for the main assembly room where we were treated to some thought provoking talks and presentations.  After about 45 minutes to an hour, we headed off to our class room where we practiced our people skills, listenng skills and teaching skills, until it was lunchtime.  After lunch, we went to the main assembly room for more instruction before we went back to our class rooms.  Our teachers were in their mid 20's and they are students at BYU and they are newly returned from their missions.
They let us out of our classes in time for dinner.  After dinner we sometimes had about 20 minutes to take a nap before the evening class began.  Our Evening classtime during the first week was a crash course in how to use various programs on the computer in preparation for when we will have to assemble reports on our digitizing of the records out east.  I was very thankful for the class on Microsoft word.  I have never had a formal class in computers so I greatly appreciated the finely honed computer skills of our instructor.  Well, of course she is about 40 years my junior and has been involved in computers etc. since she was born I suspect.  On another evening we had a course in Microsoft Excel and also a basic course in how a computer works and how we could make it do things for us.  I think that if I had to give this particular course a name, it would be  "How to approach a computer without even suffering frustration."
Tuesday night was not a computer night, it was a special treat when one of the Church Leaders came from Salt Lake to address us.  His topic was the historic editions of the Book of Mormon.  Obviously the production of the book has changed since the first hand written edition that Joseph Smith dictated to various scribes.  Now we have the edition with all the footnotes and cross references and it is in New Roman typeset.

They have all things planned to the infinitesimal detail.   The buildings are commodious and totally utilitarian in use and purpose.  The larger ones can be made smaller with the folding screens and chairs set up for small groups or just for a congregation. It is the most ordered community I have ever experienced.  There are language classes, PE periods, gospel study periods, intense language workouts where you cannot speak unless it is in the new language, up to the minute Audio Visual booths that can project images where needed.  There is an army of cooks, bottle washers, window cleaners, vacuum cleaner operators, leaf collectors on the outside pavements, security guards, teachers, administrators for the academics necessary for language learning and retention as well as administrators for spiritual needs.  There is a fully operational travel office, medical office and full medical  facility, a fully operational post office, a counseling office, beauty shop, barber shop, dry cleaner and myriad office girls to keep the whole thing humming along. They even have a massive bookstore that sells everything from erasers to aspirin, from birthday cards to T-shirts and everything in between.  If I had to use one word it would be "slick" to describe the operation of this campus and care of its 2500+ inhabitants.

If something goes wrong, I expect that it would be a double excederin day, but I saw no evidence of excederin use.