Email May 7, 2008

first off let me just say that i stinking love mangos. we have been giving so many mangos it is ridiculous! I eat like 4 a day. They are good. They aren't like the mangos we have in the states, they are like perfect. juicy, crunchy, mmmmm...

Hahaha... anyways. Fang Liao is pretty sweet! It is really small and we have to bike like 40 minutes to get to all the other cities around us. All those cities are pretty small too. This week the odometer on my bike reads 414.3 kilometers. So in 1 week we biked about 200 or so km. That is about as much biking as i did in 2 weeks in my last area.

We do a lot of biking. Usually about 4 hours a day of straight biking. We are planning a trip to go down and visit the very southern tip of the island. See if we can do some contacting down there. Anyways that trip is probably going to be about 7 hours of biking. Needless to say i am getting into shape in a hurry. My legs are so tired!!! It is fun though.

Missionary work is a bit different down here. We can't really go contact as much because first everyone speaks Taiyu and we dont and secondly because they have already been contacted by us and won't answer the door. Oh well. So what we try and do is just find a lot of service opportunities that we can help out in the community.

We taught some awesome lessons the other day to this young guy named ricky. He is about 24 and is one of the most amazing architects i have ever seen. He built this house for his grandma that is styled after a traditional japanes house, but is super modern and just amazing. Anyways, we taught a lesson that he just totally understood. He was just absorbing it. We taught him about the Book of Mormon and how it has changed our lives and how it can change his. He seemed to totally understand the period after Christ's death when his disciples died off and there was no one left with God's authority on the earth. We showed him the scripture in the Bible where it talks about christ laying his hands on his disciples heads and setting them apart to do missionary work. And then he turned to us and asked us "Have you been set apart by the laying on of hands?" and we were like "Yes." Everything just seemed to click for him. An awesome guy!

The only bummer with him is that he has to go in to the Army for a year. Over here all the young men have to spend a year in the army. Anyways we are trying to help him develop a really strong testimony of Christ before he goes so that he won't forget all about it when he is in the military.

He is probably our best investigator right now. There is another family that we are teaching they are also doing really well. Their daughter who is 16 wants to get baptized, but the parents are quite sure. So we have been teaching them as a family. The dad is loving it, he loves having us come over and talk about the scriptures. The mom is indonesian and is a little confused sometimes because her chinese isn't the best and neither is ours. Anyways, this Saturday we are going to go help them on their mango farm so that they don't have to work on Sunday and can come to church.

I love this place it is so cool and the people are really nice as long as you don't try and preach to them. Haha kinda makes my job hard.

gotta go love yall

oh ya i have gotten 1 letter so far, so i think you have labeled them all correctly, it takes usually about 10 days for them to get to me. sometimes a little longer especially now because we live in the boonies