another great week in Taiwan. We had a little bit of success this week. We challenged a man who has been investigating the church for about 6 months to baptizim and he accepted. We told him everything that he needed to start doing and he has gone a week and obeyed all of his commitments. That is amazing! he reorganized his work schedule so he could come to church, we have a hard enough time getting members to do that. I hope that the awesome spirit that he has will continue with him for the rest of his life.
As with most investigators he was entirely oblivious to Christianic ideas. for example he thought that moses was jesus. we have sorted out most of his doctrinal issues. Unfortunately i am going to be transferred before he gets baptized, but i will here about him from other missionaries.
Apart fromt that success it was kind of a tough week. I am having a really hard time speaking. I can usually understand most of what people are saying, but when i go to speak the words just aren't there. over here too there are some people that have some really bad accents. If you think people slurring and mumbling in spanish is bad, try listening to them in chinese. Basically all the words sound the same. I think i told you all already, but there are only 404 noises that are made in the chinese language. Most of them sound like gong chong zhong jiang zhang chen zhen shen, so confusing sometimes. In english we have a ton of sounds like 10000 or something ridiculous.
I really feel like i should be progressing faster in the language, that is one of my goals this week is just to talk as much stinking chinese as i can even if people don't understand me.
This week we also faced a lot of rejection. People lie to your face a lot here and that really bugs me. Especially old ladies. Some are way nice, but usually they don't want us talking to their family members who are church members so they lie to us and tell us that this isn't where he lives and that they don't know who he is. Of course when we ask them what their last name is it is the same as the person we are looking for. Who would have thought?
yes it is really hot and humid here. and yes i definitely like the cold and dry better. o well though i am here. I here it is going to get a lot hotter too. Like really hot. Like hot hot. Like 100 F degrees somedays. on those days though we aren't supposed to bike to hard. and we need to drink a lot of water.
Ya i do have to pay to use the computer, but is is only like 50 cents for an hour so don't worry about sending a lot of snail mail. And the reason i gave you the mission home address is because thats where all our mail goes first and then they send it out to us. We do that so mail doesn't come to the write address after the missionary has already moved.
I am so excited to see pics of my new little niece. There is so much i want to tell you about, but i am going to be in taiwan for a while so a lot of it can wait. I attached a pic of me chillin at the beach. Of course we can't go in the water, but we went and played frisbee and put our feet in the water and that was kind of fun.
I will try and take some more pics and stuff this week, like of me on my wicked cool bicycle.
Oh ya we went to the retirement home again and did a play this time. It was hilarious, i was a villan and elder schwartz was a hero and elder britt was the damzel in distress and my companion was the narrator. it was so good, we had a sword fight and we chased each other around and fought like right next to the old people. That kind of overdramatic stuff is huge here. the old people laughed and laughed they thought it was great. the plot of the play was lame because we made it up and we don't really know a lot of fairytale vocab, but it was good.
Well i am doing good. Whenever i get down or discouraged i just think about all of you and that helps me remember that right now i am a missionary, but i used to be a real person too hahaha. Seriously though, it is tough somedays you don't even feel like human because people like run away from you and look at you weird and yell at you.
So funny story, we went to dinner with a member and an investigator the other day and the investigator brought her 7 year old daughter. all of the sudden the little girl just started crying and was like trying to hide. She was really scared of white people ha. And then when the investigator started speaking english with us the little girl just got so scared that she started crying. so that was pretty funny. the mom talked her back to her senses and then the little girl liked us and thought we were funny.
there arent very many white people here. i have met 2 so far and they have both been named Joe. Both are super nice, but not necessarily anxious to sit down and talk with us. One i think might, but i haven't run into him in a while to ask. My companion is scared to talk to white people because he forgot how to be normal. He tried the other day and he said hello and how are you like a taiwanese person. So the new rule is that I get to contact all the white people we see.
An even funnier story is that i went up to this white guy the other day and started talking to him. i introduced myself and he got this really confused look on his face. And then i asked him in english if he spoke english and of course he didn't. he was from germany so i quickly told him that i spoke a little german, obviously not enough to convey the gospel message, but i told him that we were from a church and that our church is in germany too. that was about all i could say, we both laughed at the language barrier and i wished him a good day and said goodbye. how terrrible is that? i thought he would have been one of the few people that i could have talked to, but nope. O well, soon i will be able to talk to chinese people, that will be awesome. well i love you all.
peace
elder anderson
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