sorry for not emailing you all last week.
Chinese Lesson 02
There once was a frog who lived in an old well that nobody used. One day he was sitting on the top of the well enjoying a nice breeze when he saw a turtle walking by. He waved to the turtle and the two started talking. The sea turtle asked the frog where his home was. The frog started talking rapidly about the beautiful well. He said “My well is the best! When it is hot outside I can go to the bottom and hide in the shade, and then when it is cool, I can come bask in the sun. If I want I can swim and play in the mud, or else I can sit on the wall and sleep. I have the best home in the world! Nobodies home is better than mine! Mr. Turtle why don’t you come take a look.” The turtle agreed and proceeded to enter into the well.
After putting his left foot into the well he realized he was too big and wasn’t going to fit. He tried with all his might to get himself into the well, but no matter what he did he still could not get in. The frog started talking saying “That is too bad, this well is the best place in the whole world. You don’t know what you are missing.”
Finally the turtle had had enough. He looked at the frog and said, “Actually my friend, if we take your well and the ocean that I live in and compare the two, your well is quite inferior. 10 years ago, it rained and rained and rained and all the land was flooded. It was flooded for years and years, until finally the big drought came. During the drought all the land dried up and every living thing died. All land became a barren waste land, nothing could take the heat. And do you know what happened to the ocean during that time Mr. Frog?”
“No,” the frog replied.
“Nothing,” said the turtle. “Absolutely nothing.”
“During the floods I was swimming around enjoying life, eating the plants I wanted and enjoying the nice cool under currents. During the droughts do you know what I was doing Mr. Frog?”
“No,” the frog repeated again.
“I was eating the plants I wanted and enjoying the nice cool under currents.”
The turtle politely said goodbye to Mr. Frog and headed on his way back to the open sea.
There is a phrase in Chinese that derives from this story. It is jing di zhi wa, which translates to the frog at the bottom of the well. Or in normal words, somebody that can’t see what is really going on outside of their own little world. My friends, don’t be frogs!! Go explore somebody else’s ocean!
Well there is good news! It could be my last week in the office! The bad news is that it is possibly not my last week in office. I should know on Monday. I hope that you all liked the Chinese idiom. I have been reading a lot of Chinese idiom books lately. Some of them I don’t really get because they use a lot of ancient Chinese characters which I don’t know yet. But they are fun and they have a lot of meaning.
In a couple minutes we have to go over to the hospital to stay with an Elder who has appendicitis. Yikes! He is doing great, but he can’t leave the hospital for about 4 days and he needs someone to be with him. We are going over in a second to keep him company. I have been so lucky on my mission, I have hardly had any healthy problems. Accept for the ingrown toenail thing. That was pretty gross. I don’t dare email you pictures, I will show you them when I get back.
Speaking of pictures here are some pictures that I just took! Oh yeah happy Halloween, I am mad at my bike right now so I was gonna throw it at something. Piece of junk.
This week I did some fun stuff. I rewrote a program for the referral system that we use. It is in JAVA and I don’t know the JAVA language but I was able to do it with the help of Google. I went through some online tutorials so that was fun.
Then Sister Hoer, President Hoer’s wife, has a talk that she was giving so I prepared a 20 minute long video about how to conduct a good Sunday school lesson for children. She had a friend film primary Sunday school back in the states and then ship it to us here. She gave us a lot of video but it was hard to find good pieces to show the people here. In the end it turned out pretty good and I think it will really help the teachers here improve their classes.
I installed a new hard drives into President’s laptop. Installing hard drives is one of my least favorite things to do. It is easy to do, but it is hard to get the persons settings and programs all reinstalled properly. It went smoothly though so that was good.
I hacked into our wireless network here at the office, no one knew the password and it wasn’t written down anywhere it seemed like a fun challenge to me. I even called the man that is in charge of all the churches computers in Asia and he didn’t know it either even though he set it up. In the end though after about 2 hours of hacking I got it.
I am pretty set on studying Electrical Engineering when I get home. I need to talk to Joe Bond our neighbor, I know that is what he studied but then he went back to school and became a lawyer. Apparently he must not have liked it very much so maybe I should talk to somebody else.
Love you all,
Elder Craig Alan Anderson
Taiwan Taichung Mission
P.S. - I could be in the missionary circus with stunts like these.
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