The main LDS Missionary Training Center is located in Provo, Utah just north of the Brigham Young University Campus. There are several other training centers around the world located in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Bogota, Columbia; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Preston, England; Acra, Ghana; Guatemala City, Guatemala; Mexico City, Mexico; Aukland, New Zealand; Lima, Peru; Manila, Philippines; Johannesburg, South Africa; and Madrid, Spain. Around 3,000 missionaries are in training at these centers at any one time. The training is anywhere from one week to nine weeks. For instance, missionaries that will be working in mission offices or in their hometown areas attend one week of training. Missionaries (like Nina and me) going to Visitor’s Centers receive ten days of training. Most missionaries that are native speakers of the language where they’ll be serving receive two weeks of training. Missionaries learning a language will have six to nine weeks of training depending on the language.
The Provo, Utah MTC is a small campus area all quite self contained:
All of the buildings in the center are numbered and named. Many are dormitories in addition to having a number of classrooms. There is also overflow housing about fifteen minutes away for senior missionaries (senior missionaries are usually husbands and wives or single women over the age of 40. Single senior men aren’t eligible to be missionaries). This week there are 95 senior missionaries at the center, the largest group in several years.
Our days begin at 8 am and concludes around 4:30 pm with generous breaks during the day. The training is conducted in “large group meetings” where all the senior missionaries are in attendance and “small group meetings” where six to eight senior missionaries work with an instructor. All of the instructors are young, returned missionaries who are students at BYU and highly recommended by their mission president. We have a young man instructor in our “small group” in the morning and a young woman in the afternoon. They are delightful, knowledgeable, and very passionate about their teaching responsibilities. The instructors are paid positions and highly coveted. It’s a great way for these return missionaries to pay for their education while doing something that they dearly love. For a closeup look at our training activities, take a look at Nina’s blog at http://seashellsandseaglass.wordpress.com/.
We’re having a great time!