The Second Week of the MTC

Elder Walker is extremely lucky having 6 family members. If we each write him a letter once a week, well, let's just say that he gets letters. Though this may tapper off as the weeks go by. However, he has sent us a few hand written letters in return.

He starts out writing about his mission and his trip and such and how he's supposed to write us a letter as soon as he arrives at the MTC. So he did, but just hadn't sent it yet. In anycase, this was sealed inside one of his letters:

It's classic Elder Walker. This is the kind of humor he has. If you don't get it, think about it for a little bit. In order for that note to be sent to us in his letter, the envelope wasn't sealed yet. He could have taken the stamps out himself. I guess he really wanted us to write him back.

The next letter we received looked like this:

It's tiny. And every other line you have to use a mirror to read because he wrote it backwards. We're lucky he didn't write it in cursive. He's actually extremely talented in writing backwards. It looks exactly like his forward letters and words. Though it's extremely hard to read. When it's tiny. and backwards every other line. He's funny that way. :)

In Elder Walker's most recent E-mail it seems he's doing fine. In fact, I'm pretty sure he's doing more than fine based on his words. Here are some excerpts:

I can eat ice-cream every day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I found the ice-cream container on the first Sunday I was there ... if I wasn't constantly looking for it I wouldn't have found it.

Apparently the ice cream machine is in the back corner of the MTC cafeteria. He wasn't sure if he was supposed to find it as soon as he did, so he hadn't shown it to his companions as of last week. They've probably all found it by now though.

To my 17 year old brother he wrote:

now for the good news: when you go on a mission it is going to be lots of fun, you will enjoy it a lot.

Then there is Elder Walker's description just of how life is in the MTC:

Every meal is a buffet of good food ... not really a buffet though, just lots of different places where they prepare different plates of food and you can go wherever you want to get whatever variety of anything you want any time. I hope you understood all that ... and I've replaced my love of drinking milk with chocolate milk ... it's much better, and still all you can drink. in the cafeteria, with my card I get a 100% discount on everything. (big surprise there). and a 40% discount on everything in the store (which I have probably 40 dollars in getting a variety of colored pens and stamps and blank white paper and larger envelopes (for the blank printer paper). I am still sure that I made the best decision I could have made in the first 20 years of my life: to go on a mission. 

I have got to tell you about all the food we have gotten. Over the past week we, four people in a room (two companionships), have received 5 different types of cookies with a minimum of 6 for one type and 20 for the max. We have received enough brownies to provide everyone with their full share of desserts if we were to have a party at the Remington's. We have received a Pumpkin cake, cupcakes, frosted cookies, muffins. and lots and lots and lots of candy. all together including everything we already ate and gave away (as we got more today I later found out) we have received 30-50lb of junk food. I took a picture of what is left that we didn't give away as of this morning. 

Then he goes on to thank different people for different things:

I never thanked Uncle Donald for picking Elder Fischer and I from temple square ... would you call him and thank him for me? some friends of mine and Russell's visited us while we were at Uncle Greg and Aunt Debbie's house and Uncle Donald left during that time. Uncle Donald and Aunt Louise gave be a box full of cookies Tues night .. how nice of them. 

So he's really thankful for Uncle Donald, Aunt Louise, Uncle Greg and Aunt Debbie for the things they've done for him. He wants us to make sure they all know that.
And, of course, he thanks the editor if this blog for the absolutely amazing work I'm doing by saying:

Thank you for hosting my mission online for me, you are such a nice sister, I told my friends that you are doing that and that they should look at it to find out about it.
Did I mention that you were very nice to me? I realize that doing all of that online is a lot of work to do, thank you for doing that for me.

He's also really grateful for the DearElder.com site where you can type up a letter and it gets sent to him immediately. For those of you who has never used it you go to the site and create a free account. Then you write to the Elders and Sisters on their missions. It's a lot less expensive and in some cases it's even free (especially at the MTC).  So I'd recommend you use it to write Elder Walker unless you wish to write a handwritten letter.

Until next week everyone! Keep Elder Walker in your prayers along with all the other missionaries in the world!