Week 13

Very, very sad to hear about Poppy, wish I could be there with you guys.    I have had only one active grandfather my whole life and if he is how a grandfather is supposed to be I have an awesome role-model.  I’m sure he is standing over me and helping me do a better job here.  Please let Grammy know that she will be in my prayers every day.

 

Typhoon didn’t do any lasting harm.  We got the order from President Day to stay inside all day, so that was fun – not! We got a lot done though because of that down time we got caught up on all our record keeping.  Because of the weather lock-down I have had peanut butter sandwiches for the past like 6 meals, but least we had food.

Our conference was zone-wide which was like 16 people, but that was supposed to be Friday when the typhoon started, so it was canceled and moved, so because of that, my next couple of p-days might get messed up, please don’t freak out if I don’t email on my normal day it’s still coming, and I’m still alive.

I guess the investigators are being frustrated by Satan, we keep meeting great people but they keep standing us up or canceling.  We have lots of baptism dates that we just had to push back because none of them are ready. Honestly probably the hardest week since I've been on my mission.

I've been out here long enough where people expect me to know what I'm doing, but I still really don’t add to our efforts. I really don’t like riding bikes, one place Zhiben, is about a 30-35 minute bike ride one way, with lots of hills, bridges, and rain - not happy times, especially when you get out there and your investigator isn’t home, after they told you they could meet. However despite this, there have been a few miracles. We did just the other night meet one really great man, and he is actually excited to meet with us. He double checked to make sure he had the place and time right, and it was the only time I didn’t feel like my Chinese was absolutely abysmal.  Chinese - oh yeah that's going slower than ever. Like I can get the flow of the conversation sometimes, or pick up the subject and then based on how someone looks tell how they feel about the subject, but outside of that can't do too much. The mission gave us these things called "phases" and there are three of them, so you complete one then move on to two. Phase one is all gospel related things, and very watered down at that, and I'm only half way done but my goal is to be done with that by the end of this transfer (6 weeks), so I can move on to phase 2 which is all vocabulary, but it’s like everything else that isn’t gospel related, so I’d be able to function in public here and not have to rely on other people so we'll see how that goes. Everyone here thinks that because I've been powering through on phase one in a transfer (the normal is to finish it in two transfers), that I'll be training right after completing phase 1  (training is when you get someone fresh from the MTC and become their companion and show them the ropes) so we'll see what happens at the end of November.

Mid-Autumn Festival

Oh also this past week was mid-autumn festival - so much food!  The members feel bad because we don’t have anywhere to celebrate the holiday (it’s a big deal holiday, but for us it’s just like a normal day) so we went to like 3 parties in two days. I ate so much food. Everyone Kao Rou's (BBQ’s) here though not the same as good American BBQ still good though. You go to anyone’s home (and this is all the time) the first thing they say before saying hi or asking your name is  "chi bao le ma?" which essentially translates into have you eaten yet? And yes or no, they give you food to eat. We literally had a meal at some random person’s house, and they didn’t ask our names until after we started eating.

Hope you all had a good week, and found some things to enjoy, see, or do. I miss you and love you all so very much.