Sept 3, 2008 Email

Aquariums and Ant Attacks

today we are going to an aquarium. I am so excited, it is supposed to be like the most awesome aquarium. Anyways, because we are going a long ways, we got permission to come email early. so my email is a couple hours early today.

Anyways, Brother Hong who was going to get baptized this Saturday has to wait a little while. He still has some problems with drinking tea and beer and stuff. so he agreed that we delay it a little until he has completely over come this problem. He is such a nice little man. He is a bout 45 unmarried and is a veteranarian. You can just really see his loving spirit from the way he talks about the animals he works with. I learned a new word from him yesterday. CHAOYINBO. which means ultrasonic waves. its the noise that dolphins and whales make. he had a heck of a time trying to explain it to me though. hahaha... he kept trying to make the noise and i didnt know what the heck he was doing. finally he just told me its how dolphins communicate and i knew what he meant. sometimes when people are trying to explain words, if they just used it in a sentence or explained it rather than acting it out, it would be a lot easier.

Hahaha... i remember in my first area there was this member who would try and do like sign language with me. But his sign language was terrible and he expected me to understand. LOL. he was a little different. anyways, i love chinese. that new word chao yin bo. when you break it down it makes so much sense. chao means exceed, yin means sound and bo means broadcast. so it is exceed sound broadcast. Chinese is the most amazing language in the world. every word is composed of 2 or 3 characters and then from those characters you have a meaning. so sometimes in lessons when we use a church word that isn't known to the general public we just write the characters out for them and that is basically like the equivalent of looking it up in the dictionary. almost.

we will be getting our move calls on friday. i hope i get to stay here. there are so many good investigators and i just love this place. the members are awesome and i have made so many good friends here. My chinese has improved so much here too. i love this place! Getting ready for the move call is always an exciting time because you don't know what is going to be your next assignment. you could stay you could go, you could get a new companion, you could train a new missionary. all sorts of exciting things. it always makes me a little nervous. I am safe from being called into the Mission office though, they call in those Elders a week early. wheeww that was a close one. i dont doubt though at sometime i will have to go serve in the office.

this week i felt like such an awesome missionary, just teaching lessons right and left and meeting new people and setting a time to meet with. i used to hesitate a couple months ago, but now i will say without any hesitations that i speak chinese. of course its not perfect but its at a point that i feel comfortable.

anyways, we have a lot of people on our ward list that no one has seen for a long time, so we have been trying to go and visit them, we have met a lot of them and have found out whats been going on in their lives, but there were others that the addresses were just impossible to find. they also dont have phone numbers so there is no way to get a hold of them. i was thinking about this a couple days ago, and i the spirit whispered an idea to me. Send them postcards! we dont think that some of these addresses even exist so we sent out about 10 post cards yesterday with our return address on them. if the cards come back to us then that means that the address doesnt exist and therefore we can cross that address off so future missionaries dont waste time trying to find it. it was a major break through. we told our zone leaders about it and they have been so excited telling everyone how to find out if addresses exist or not. its gonna be a huge time saver in the future.

well the never ending battle against the 8 leged foe continues. everyday i see a new kind of spider i have never seen before. there was a crazy flying spider that i saw yesterday. YIKES! how scary! not to mention the eternal battle between my rice and the platoon of ants that continually persist in their full scale invasion of my rice bag. they breached the hule this week and made it all the way into the heart of my bag. it is a big bag of rice about 10 pounds so i cant just through it away. i decided to bring out the nuclear bomb of my arsenal so i placed the big bag with those little suckers inside the freezer. hahaha who is laughing now ants. i hope they like being turned into little ant popsicles. my rice survived! the ants have been defeated. the only bad thing is that my rice has all this little black dots in it now. dont worry i wash it out and the ants wash away but the rice stays. i hope i get a young companion next move and then i will just tell him that the rice that i buy comes with a little pepper in it for flavor. ;)

well i got to go look at some fish swim around in a glass container. hope you all are doing well and are praying and reading your scriptures EVERY day.

love ya,
Elder Craig Anderson