We just finished our first week of COMPASS Training at Mission Training International (MTI)!!! Thank you to everyone who has been praying for our family’s safety on the road as we took the long way to MTI.

If you have been following our social media accounts, you have seen pictures from places such as the Badlands, Yellowstone National Park, Boise, Seattle and Pikes Peak. We decided to spend the four weeks before our pre-field training visiting church partners and potential church partners. In doing so, we got to see an area of the country that most of us have never visited.

Prior to attending MTI, we would often get the question, “What will you be doing or learning in your pre-field training?” We really didn’t know how to answer, until now. MTI has been around a long time and has provided training and debriefing to thousands of missionaries. Along with getting to know our facilitators and community (other missionaries and their families), we now know how to answer the above question.

The majority of our first week of training has been centered around linguistics and phonetics. It’s not learning a new language, but learning how to learn a new language. Did you know that we only make 44 sounds in our English language? Did you know that we have the ability to make over a 1000 different sounds?

Yeah, we didn’t either.

Daleska and Emily are going through their own training at MTI called CHIPS. This training follows a lot of what the adults are doing, however, they are learning in an environment with other teens. Both Daleska and Emily have stated this time with other missionary families has already far exceeded their expectations.

We are so thankful to be here, and we’re looking forward to giving you a glimpse of what we’re learning week to week!