Elder Craig Anderson

SLC Airport

2009-12-23T07:46:00.001-08:00

Open House

2009-12-22T06:38:00.000-08:00

Craig will be arriving home from Taiwan in just a few short hours. He is expected home late tonight- Dec 22, 2009. Anyone who wishes to join in welcoming us home can come to the Anderson home Dec 23, 2009 from 2:00-5:00pm for an open house.

2009-12-20T15:30:00.000-08:00

Props to the Elder Anderson Cheersquad and Dan Jones- Dec 19, 2009

2009-12-20T15:29:00.000-08:00

Two years ago I started off as a 19 year old kid that didn’t know a thing. Two years has come and gone and now I have become a 21 year old young man that still doesn’t know much, but I am working on it. Many missionaries refer to their time on their missions as the “the best two years.” It is an interesting phrase to use; I think it is true to an extent. However, the Gospel is all about progression and becoming better. For me to this point in my life, it truly has been the best two years, but I believe that the following two years will be even better.

So what do I say to you all in the last email I will send to you as a missionary of the Lord Jesus Christ? Do I tell you a funny story or do I take this last chance to bare my testimony of our Savior? Hopefully I can do a little of both.

I have truly enjoyed the emails, letters, and packages that you have all sent to me. The support from home has been the second most comforting gift I have been given on my mission. The first most comforting gift has been the companionship of the Holy Ghost. On those days where I felt tired, ill, homesick, and down, your letters have always helped to cheer me up.

Working in the mission field has been the single most rewarding experience of my life. I have gained a stronger testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ. I have learned how to enjoy the most difficult experiences and I have learned to cherish the family and friends that the Lord has given me.

I think it is ironic that we as people truly do not appreciate the things we possess until we do not have them anymore. Whether it is our comfortable living habits or our friends and family by our side, we can never fully appreciate how much they mean to us until we have left them or they have left us. Just wanted to let you all know how much I appreciate you now.

Well now that we got all that gushy mushy junk said, lets get on to what happened this week. I am training my replacement, Elder Canann to take over my position. He is doing a great job and I am sure he will do just fine. We are so busy! Probably the busiest I have been on my mission. I am still trying to finish everything up so that he doesn’t have any loose ends. I had a lot of projects going and now it is time to wrap them up. We are having a mission Christmas activity on the 24th and even though I am not going to be there I still have to plan for it. Not to mention we have been closing down lots of apartments recently because the number of missionaries is going down slightly so we have been using the Frummer to transport all the stuff out of the apartments. You would be surprised how much stuff you can fit inside of a VW Van.

Last night, we had a caroling activity downtown. We have it again tonight and Sunday night. I am in charge of the sound and the video presentation. I think I told you about the crazy wiring job I did to get the sound to work. It was really fun, but really cold! I am not kidding, you are probably laughing thinking that I am going to freeze to death when I get home. It really was cold though. Below 50 degrees! I am so excited to see snow and go skiing and be freezing and drink hot chocolate and sleep in a nice warm bed in our freezing house. That is assuming I don’t get hypothermia tonight. I have 2 more nights in Taiwan. To be honest it feels like I am getting ready to go on vacation. The main reason being that I feel like I am leaving home and work, it is a weird feeling. Mostly sweet, I have always liked new things. So it is just on to a new adventure.

We just got back from the caroling activity. It went really well. We met a lot of great people and it was a very good way to introduce the Church to the people here. Several people stopped and sat down with the missionaries right then and there. I taught a couple for about 45 minutes while the choir sang in the background, I had to get up a couple times to go adjust the projector and sound, but besides that it was a really great lesson. I had a choir singing in the background, which was pretty cool. Anyways, I got the man’s email and so now we are going to be pen pals when I get back.

I wanted to leave you all with a final testimony and picture. The attached picture is from our “Dan Jones” activity. Dan Jones is one of the most amazing missionaries of all time. He went to England many many years ago and stood on soap boxes in the city and shared the gospel. Well we also do that here in Taichung. We go to the night markets and stand on our boxes to share our witness of Christ to all those that hear us. You would be surprised how effective it is in Taiwan. We have lots and lots of good contacts.

I know that Christ lives. He is our Savoir. At times it may seem so hard to grasp, but it is truly so simple. He loves us, he wants us to find happiness in this life. By following his teachings and abiding by his laws we WILL be happy. There are no exceptions! Everyone that obeys the commandments of God will be happy. And it is not a temporary state of happiness, but a permanent one as long as we continue to follow his guidance. I know that Joseph Smith is a prophet in this day in age. I know that he saw God, the Father, and His Son Jesus Christ, I know that they literally appeared to him in the flesh and at that time selected Joseph as a leader of the Church of Christ in our day. I know that Heavenly Father hears and answers every one of our prayers, and I know that He can give us instruction if we are willing to pray to him. I also know that Heavenly Father has giving us modern day prophets that may direct us through the spiritual dangers that we face in our society. And I know that if we trust in the Lord and listen to his messengers that we will be able to cross over any trial or tribulation that may come our way. Because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ we all will be resurrected. I also know that families are forever. Death is not an end but simply a waiting period. Death cannot separate our loved ones from us forever.

Coming on my mission has been the most important decision I have made thus far in my life. People may think that the 2 years missionaries spend is such a great sacrifice, but I know that it is not so. I feel that I have grown in ways that I never would have been able to, had I not come. Whom the Lord calls, the Lord qualifies. What more can I say, Jesus lives and has once again restored all of his truth to the Earth as promised in ancient times.

Attached is the last picture I want to send you, it is me in the night market, standing on my soap box. Hope you like it.

With Love,
Elder Craig Alan Anderson
Taiwan Taichung Mission
January 9th 2009 – December 22nd 2010

Pictures for Taipei

2009-12-20T15:26:00.000-08:00

Swearing Nuns and My New Taxi Company- Dec 12, 2009

2009-12-20T15:25:00.002-08:00

What another great week on this beautiful island! My replacement is coming in on Monday, so I have been trying to wrap up all the loose ends. There are a lot! There are just so many little things going on. Since Christmas is almost here there are a lot of little details that I have to keep track of. Not mention rigging the wiring for the Christmas performance. Everyone was very impressed by my splicing techniques. Thanks Dad for teaching me that one! Who needs to buy a cord when you can make your own right?

On Wednesday I went to the Taipei Mission Office. That was fun! I saw one of my old friends from the MTC. We were in the same district during our training at the Missionary Training Center. Anyways, I have now served in every mission office in Taiwan! Pretty cool huh?

I met this really funny German guy this week. 3 TIMES! If you run into the same person twice it is pretty rare, but 3 times, now that has got to be a message to him. Anyways, the first time he was a little rude, but I simply smiled and tried not to argue with him. He couldn’t seem to get over the fact that I was American, I had to tell him several times, “Listen, I am not a representative of my country, I am a representative of Jesus Christ.” He wanted to talk about politics and started whining about the war in Iraq. I simply said, “As missionaries we do not talk about politics, we share a message about the love of Jesus Christ for each of us.” That is when he told me he was atheist. He even looked up in the sky and yelled “Where are you God?!” Then he laughed and said that if there was a God why did he let such bad things happen. He was 65 years old and seemed a little stubborn, this is just the kind of guy that I am good at getting too. Do you remember my 65 year old Jewish convert from Philadelphia? I like the older guys, they know a lot.

Anyways, 2 days latter we were walking down the street and he saw me. He literally jumped into the air and waved to me. So we biked on over and started talking with him again. Apparently, he must have enjoyed our first conversation because he was very ecstatic to see us. My poor companion can’t participate very much since he doesn’t speak English very well, so he just listens quietly and occasionally says something brief. By the way he still won’t tell me his name, he thinks it is a game. I don’t even ask now, so I just call him my German friend, and he likes that just fine.

Just a minute ago we were eating at our favorite vegetarian restaurant and sure enough, my German friend was in there, I was thinking about yelling out “Hey Hanz!” Just to see if that was his name or not, you’ve got about a 50/50 chance. It is like with Middle Eastern men and the name Mohammad, or Hispanics and the name Pedro. In the end I let “Hanz” eat in peace until he got up to leave and then I waved him over and we chatted for a second. I am going to get him to church, one of these times his old stubbornness is going to crumble.

My companion’s teeth are hurting him so we are going to the dentist in about half an hour. I have been to the dentist once since I have been here. I thought I had a cavity but in the end they found out it was nothing and just cleaned my teeth for me. I should probably get a check up when I come back.

Tomorrow my amount of days in Taiwan will be in the single digits. As of December 22nd I will have served for 713 days which is the equivalent to 17,112 Hours, or 1,026,720. So mom if it feels like I have been away from you for 1 million minutes, don’t worry it really has been 1 million minutes!

After today I should have one more chance to email you, maybe 2. Are there any last requests you have for me? Any advice? And no at the moment I am not accepting post-mission dates. The signup sheet has not been posted yet. Tryouts will be held on January 2nd! 

Oh boy I am going to have to work on my sense of humor. I think it may have been contaminated. That is okay as long I think my humor is funny that is all that matters. It is going to be so hilarious, I will make a comment and start laughing my head off and the rest of you are going to be looking at me like, is he crazy? That was the stupidest thing I have ever heard. I think he ate to much MSG when he was in Taiwan! The must have put the wrong kind of shrooms in his chicken foot soup!

Be patient, in time you will change and think it is funny too!

I had a really cool experience this week that really reminded me how important it is to listen to the Holy Ghost. It was something very simple, but in the end it made a huge difference. President Hoer called and asked me to go pick up a missionary at the train station. We were only going to pick up one missionary so normally we would take the smaller car. In the office we have a rule that as soon as you are done driving the cars you have to put the keys back. So if you aren’t using the car the keys are to be put back in the cupboard immediately. Anyways, as I went to grab the keys to the small SUV I had an impression to grab all the keys. You have to understand how strange that seemed to me at the time. Taking all the keys at one time would be breaking a rule (my own rule.) I followed it and decided to grab all the keys. As we walked at of the office and ran to the parking lot, I was thinking, “That was really stupid of you to grab all the keys. What if somebody else needs one of the cars?” I just ignored it and started to get in the SUV, and then I had a feeling that I should drive the big van. Once again I was thinking, “Are you serious? We are picking up one person? Why would I need the van?” I took the keys out of the ignition and we hopped into the VW Van (My Ferummer, as you might remember (that is Ferrari Hummer for those of you that may have forgotten)). My companion even asked me “Why are we taking the big car?” I just ignored him and we started to drive off in the van. The whole way to the train station I kept thinking “This is ridiculous, we are picking up one person, why am I driving this Semi-truck?” We pulled in and picked up the one sister that we were supposed to take back to the office. As we pulled out of the train station out of the corner of my eye I saw a silhouette of 2 missionaries. I turned my head and sure enough there they were! Two more missionaries that looked lost. I waved them down and parked the car in the middle of the road. We started throwing their luggage into the back of the car. Just as I loaded the last bag I saw another set of missionaries, and then another set! The 1 missionary that I was originally supposed to pick up turned into 7! I crammed them all in the van, luggage and all and headed back to the office, grinning the entire way for the inspiration that the Holy Ghost had given to me.

It made me realize that even the small little things can be important enough to have the assistance of Heaven. Making some missionaries take taxis to the office would not have been the end of the world, but it probably saved us quite a bit of money and time. Not to mention, some of them may not have been able to figure out how to get there. You are all probably laughing thinking how silly this story sounds, but it was so weird. I rarely go against my own logic, but for some reason, I decided to listen to those promptings and sure enough I really did need the big van.

Remember to listen to those soft promptings that you have. I know that if we are worthy we can have those soft promptings daily.

Oh yeah, I got yelled at by a Buddhist nun today! She was the meanest Buddhist nun I have ever met! Usually they are somewhat nice, they don’t smile much, but at least they don’t yell. But today I met my first yelling nun. We were in a jade market buying some things and we ran across her, I said hello and she muttered something under her breath, then my companion asked how are you and she started saying “I’m terrible, life sucks!” Then she called my companion a devil and walked away. I stood there in shock along with about 5 other people. It was weird. Of course we weren’t preaching with her all we did was say hello. My companion and I just kind of smiled and shrugged it off. We looked at the bystanders and they just looked us and shrugged like, “That was weird.” Next time she comes back I will have to do some of my Kung Fu on her. Nun or not you don’t call my companion a devil! Just kidding I would never fight anybody for yelling at us. If I did I would have to get in a fight almost every day because people like to yell at us. It is fun though! You get to learn all sorts of new words that missionaries shouldn’t learn!

Love you,
Elder Craig Anderson

My Hummer and Taoist God- Dec 4, 2009

2009-12-20T15:25:00.001-08:00

Happy Birthday Mom!
So all of you that forgot it is my mother’s birthday today, might want to pick up the phone and give her a call. She is the best mom and always remembers when it is everybody else’s special day cuz she has such a sweet heart. So you better go do something nice for her or I will kick you when I get back. Yeah Ali, I will kick you, my kicking foot is pretty good now to since I have to beat away the wild dogs that always try and eat our legs when we ride our bikes. Watch out!
Love you mom, don’t think of it as getting one year older, think of it as you becoming one year wiser. I sure hope dad remembered!!! Yikes!!! Just kidding I am sure dad has some great plan involved where a flying elephant circus swoops in performs a show and then carries you off to the Mediterranean to go ride on Aladdin’s magic carpet.
I love how creative dad is with trips and celebrations. I remember one time when we were in Malaysia; we had been trekking across asia for about 2 weeks and after staying with the Iban head hunters in the middle of the Sarawak rain forest our next adventure was supposed to be some monkey jungle quite a ways away. As we all piled in the car to head back to civilization, I remember the topic of screaming monkeys pulling our hair came up. I think someone suggest that it might be best to skip the monkey abuse and go straight to Thailand for a little R and R on the beaches. In the end the monkeys lost and we were on a plane to Koh Sumai.
So I am getting transferred to the Taipei Mission! Crazy huh? Only for 1 day though. On Wednesday I will be going up there to install their new computer referral system for them. It should be kind of fun. I am going to be super busy right up until the end. Not many people get to serve in 3 different missions! Usually you only get to serve in 1. We had to get special permission for this assignment from the area presidency, normally missionaries are not supposed to leave their mission area unless there is an emergency or some other reason, but we got the go ahead so off I am to play with computers in Taipei.
I know I have mentioned to you all about what it is like driving in Taiwan before, but honestly this week was even crazier. I drove the huge VW van through gaps that anorexic super models couldn’t fit through. Seriously, I was rubbing on both sides, didn’t even scratch it though. I like to call it the precision fender bender, without the bender. My companion is Taiwanese and has never driven a car before, so he always freaks out when we are doing some crazy maneuvers in the van. He has finally learned to trust me, but occasionally he will emit an involuntary yelp when he thinks our young lives are about to be extinguished. I normally wouldn’t tell you this, because I am sure it makes you worried, but hey oh well, you only have 2 more weeks to worry about me. If you don’t drive like Jeff Gordon over here, everyone will steal your spot, so you have gotta drive like you are a Ferrari and push people around like you are a Hummer. That is why the church came out with the Ferummer (AKA the VW Transporter). It gets the job done!
Are you getting excited for Christmas? I am! I love Christmas and the cold and the snow. I just can’t wait to jump into a big pile of snow and eat a snowball! Yes, dad I know not to eat the yellow ones! Thanks for the tip.
I am still working hard, I am excited to come home, but my bags are far from packed. I am not trunky! Lately, I have been taken down a lot of phone numbers and emails for people all over Taiwan. Everybody I meet I try to get them to email me when I get back. I want to find a way to continue to share the gospel with these people. Plus all Taiwanese people love to use instant messaging and email so that will be perfect, even after I come home I can continue to do share the gospel in Chinese. Elder Bednar the Apostle instructed us missionaries to continue to use the gift of tongues that Heavenly Father has given us to preach the Gospel in the Chinese language. What better way to do that then thru emails! Not to mention, thru emails I could speak with Cantonese people too. Cantonese and mandarin use the same characters, but Cantonese does not sound anything like mandarin. I can hardly understand 5 words in Cantonese. It is okay though, most of Asia speaks mandarin.
We met a Brazillian man last week! So we took him to the office to see if we could find a Portugese Book of Mormon and sure enough, there was one in the back room on a shelf. Who would have thought that we would have Portugese Books of Mormon in Taiwan? Miracles do happen. He was very excited to read, it seemed as if he hadn’t had any contact with religion for quite some time, but he sounded eager to start again. His English was very good, and I was thankful that we were able to communicate.
Did I ever tell you about the Iraqi guy I contacted? That was awkward! I was really nice to him, but I don’t think he liked me very much, once I found out he was Iraqi it made a little more sense. I wanted to tell him, hey I wasn’t the one who decided to invade your country? At first I talked to him in Chinese, but then we started talking about religous stuff and he didn’t understand, and I didn’t know what to do, however he spoke very good English so we switched and started talking in English, his English was very good, much better than his Chinese. I found out he was Muslim and we chatted for a second, but I think that I offended him by simply talking to him. It was probably the most awkward thing that has ever happened to me. I contacted a Muslim Man a long time ago and he yelled at me in Arabic. The first guy I contacted I didn’t know he was Muslim because he was wearing a helmet.
This week we met with a man named Zhang Jia Hao. It was such an amazing lesson! Jia Hao believes that there are many Gods, he believes that if we follow one God we will get the blessings from one God. My companion asked him if he thought God was perfect and he said no. So the next question we asked was “What do you think it would be like to have a perfect Heavenly Fahter?” he thought about it for a second and said great. Then my companion made a great point. He said if there is more than one God and they are all imperfect Gods, what would happen if one of those Gods woke up one day and decided he wanted to start doing evil things, since according to Taoism Gods are imperfect they will make similar mistakes that we make. Obviously, God could not be God if he made mistakes. Jia hao thought about it for a while and finally came to the conclusion that a perfect God would be the best one to follow. He still believes that there are many many gods, but at least now he thinks there might be a perfect God. There is a perfect God. He is our creator! It is really neat to think about that! We were all created by a Perfect Being who does not make mistakes. We are created in His image just as Genesis 1:27 says. It would be so hard for me to believe in a God that does not have a form, it is clearly stated that we are created in God’s image. If God was a cloud of intangible mist then that is what we would be too, but we are not! We have 2 arms and 2 legs and 10 finger and 10 toes, just as he has.
I saw some great changes happen to Jia Hao as we taught him. You could see his previous misconceptions about God start to melt away and you could tell from the look on his face that he was truly pondering about what it would be like to have a perfect person, that looks just like us, that loves us and wants to care for us, as our God. He has been coming to church for the past 4 weeks and has changed so much. I sure hope he accepts this message and lets it change his life.

Love you all,
Elder Anderson

Chinese Joke

A little over 100 years ago in Mainland China, the family outhouses were all located on the banks of rivers to keep the environment clean. One day there was a young school boy who was walking to school. As the boy walked he passed by the outhouse and noticed a very pretty butterfly that had seated itself on the roof of the outhouse. He struggled and stretched to reach the butterfly and just when he had almost grabbed it, his weight started to stress the wood on the outhouse and the outhouse started to collapse. He quickly jumped back to the safety of the shore and watched as the outhouse tumbled and dipped in the river. He knew his father was going to be upset, but he still had school so he hurried off to school. During the day they learned about American History. They studied about how George Washington cut down his father’s cherished cherry tree. When George Washington told his father what he had done, his father calmly forgave him and was appreciative of George’s honesty. George Washington said that this experience in his life was one of the moments that turned him into such a great man. When the young Chinese boy heard this story he became very excited, he knew his father was a great man, and he hoped so dearly that his father could show such love and understanding as George Washington’s father had shown.
After class the boy hurried home to talk with his father. He found his father reading and asked his father if he could have a minute to speak with him. The father agreed and the boy said “Father I am so sorry this morning I knocked the outhouse into the river.” The Father looked at the boy for a moment and then spanked him. The boy started to cry and said “Dad, why are you mad, I wanted to be honest, when George Washington cut down the cherry tree, his father forgave him?” The dad looked at his son and said “George Washington’s father wasn’t in the cherry tree when he cut it down now was he!”

My companion tells everyone this joke and he thinks it is hilarious. It is kind of funny, hope you enjoy it.

Buddhist Nuns and Thanksgiving Hamburger- Nov 27, 2009

2009-12-20T15:24:00.002-08:00

ately we have been visiting the Xiao Family. What an interesting family. They have 2 kids who are the most well behaved Taiwanese children I have ever seen. The dad is hilarious, he chews Beatle nut, smokes, and drinks all at the same time. I was quite impressed. I can’t imagine that it tasted very good though. We don’t visit them that often because they are hardly ever home and we don’t have time most nights to go over to their house. Even though we try and go work from 6pm to 9pm sometimes stuff comes up. These past couple of weeks a lot of stuff has been coming up. But thankfully last night we had the chance to swing on by the Xiao Families house.

Mrs. Xiao is very religious and she wants he family to be too. She is Buddhist, but is very open to all good religions. The husband however, is basically the opposite, he thinks religion is silly and doesn’t really want anything to do with it. He like us though, mostly just because he thinks we are funny. The kids love us too, I always teach them some English.

Last night we shared with him the organization of Heavenly Father’s church. He said, isn’t there only 1 Jesus Christ? Then why are there so many different Christian churches. He brought up the fact that a perfect God would not have that many different sects. We agreed which seemed to make him a little dumbfounded. It was like a deer in the headlights, he didn’t know what to say after we said, “Your right Mr. Xiao, a perfect God would not create that many churches that teach different things.” My companion and I didn’t say anything for a couple seconds just to make sure he absorbed what we had just said. I couldn’t help but smirk a little bit from the expression on his face. He shared with him a brief message about the Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and introduced the Bible and the Book of Mormon to him. At this point he threw his hands up in the air and said, “ I can’t read this, if I read this I will fall a sleep and my mind goes numb.” Mr. Xiao isn’t exactly the kind a guy that likes to sit down and read a book. Actually, I am not entirely sure he can read. He told my companion it’s too bad that you all don’t have a movie that we could watch about this, because there is no way that I can read this scripture. As he said, that my companion reached into his bag and pulled out a DVD about how the Gospel was restored. We popped it in and watched it. Mr. Xiao seemed to like it, but I am not sure he took it very seriously. That is one of the problems with showing people religious stuff through TV. A lot of people are so used to seeing fake stuff on TV that they are not able to recognize the difference between what is real and what is not.

After visiting with Mr. Xiao, we went over to visit Grandpa Zhang. He is another really awesome 85 year old man who loves Buddhism. We don’t really teach him a whole lot, mostly we just visit him to keep him company and share a brief message with him. He seems to like our visits a lot though. In his house he has a speaker that constantly repeats this Buddhist prayer over and over and over. The prayer has a tune to it and it makes me sleepy. I had better be careful, I might get hypnotized by the Buddhist monks and kidnapped. Hahaha… seriously though, those monks are dangerous. I learned something interesting about monks the other day. In Buddhism a monk came become a monk 7 times. So if he wants to he can quit and go back to normal life, then years later he can go back and become a monk again. However Buddhist nuns can only do it once. I admire the Buddhist nuns a lot more now.

After getting lullabyied to sleep by the Buddhist man we headed home to start our 9 o’clock work in the office. At 10 we headed over to close an apartment that was about 40 minutes away. We loaded everything up and headed back to Taichung to put all the stuff in our storage unit. Finally at about 2:30 we headed to bed. The reason we do it so late is because if we do it during the day we will create traffic jams. We have to park the car in the middle of the rode to put the furniture in it. Since the alleys that the apartments are on are usually pretty small we have to go at night so that we have a place to park the car. Taiwan is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Driving a big old van here is a nightmare. I am pretty used to it now though. Once you learn their driving style it’s not a big deal. So that is basically what we did yesterday.

I know I promised you pictures of the Christmas lights, but I didn’t get them off of President Hoers camera yet. When he comes back I will get them.

I hope you ate a lot for me at thanksgiving. I ate Burger King to celebrate my birthday, it was pretty good, but they put to much mayo on it. I think I am going to become a vegetarian when I get home. Hahaha… yeah right? The vegetarian food over here is so good, but I am sure it is really hard to find back home not to mention I bet it is super expensive.

Love ya,

Elder Craig Anderson

Christmas Lights and the Long Night of Apostacy- Nov 20, 2009

2009-12-20T15:24:00.001-08:00

Let me tell you a thing or two about Christmas lights. First off, I don’t know who invented the if one bulb goes out they all go out Christmas light strands, but they drive me crazy. I have been putting up all the Christmas lights around the church buildings and I am going crazy. I have spent a ton of time trying to find that one bulb that is out. There is one good thing though, the lights we have only go out partially, so only about half of them won’t light up. That makes it a lot nicer because then you can eliminate the number of bulbs you have to inspect by half.

Yes, we are getting ready for Christmas. Since I am an activities coordinator of sorts I get to do all the planning and preparation. It is pretty fun, on Thursday we had about 14 missionaries come and help string up the lights. I planned out where we were going to put them all and then they came and strung ‘em up. It was like I had 30 little hands of my own.

We still have quite a bit left to do, so I will send you pictures next week when I am done. Well Happy Thanksgiving! I am sure you are all headed to Grandma Woods’ house for turkey. That sounds really tasty! It’s okay I will go out to eat somewhere nice to celebrate. Plus it will be a double whammy with my birthday and all. That means I can spend twice as much and eat twice as much too! Oh snap!

This week we had some really spiritual lessons. We had a lesson with a man named Nelson Lin. He is 62 years old, retired, and single, so he is very willing to meet with us. Another great thing is that he is Christian already so all the really basic things we teach to people he is like “Oh, yeah, I already know.” He is awesome and we are getting to be pretty good friends. Anyways, he has been coming to church for a while know and we have been sharing with him about Prophets and Apostles.

Yesterday we talked about the Nicene Creed. He had heard of it but didn’t really understand a lot of what had happened. It was really fun being able to talk to someone about the history of Christianity. If I were to talk to our other investigators like that they would all fall asleep and be really confused.

Anyways, we talked about how in 325 B.C. a group of Christians got together and debated about the nature of God and his church. I told him very frankly that many people that attended and influenced that Creed were not true disciples of Jesus Christ and in fact did things quite contrary to the Gospel teachings. However, some of these not so righteous people had the greatest influence as to the outcome of that meeting.

The outcome was a lot of truth mixed in with a little bit of false teachings. I felt the spirit so strong as I testified to Nelson that Heavenly Father, had once again restored the truths that were lost many years ago.

I know that God loves us, just as he loved the people of ancient times. I know that because of this love for us he has given us his Prophets and Apostles, to guide us through these last days. Right now more than any time in history we need the guidance of God inspired men. Our generation lives in a time when the spirituality of man is constantly being attacked. I find it hard to believe that Heavenly Father would not provide the same organization and support as he did in days of old. The good news is that he does provide that support, but just as in the ancient times, it is up to the people to listen. Just as Moses brought the people out of Egypt, we have a living prophet that through the direction of God can bring those that are willing out of the Spiritual danger that they may be in.

Many will say that after Christ there was no more revelation. Who was Paul? Luke? What about John? Didn’t they receive revelation and inspiration for the people of that time long after the Crucifixion of Christ? They did, so why is it so hard to believe that in the last days Heavenly Father would send forth his messengers to fight against the evils in this world?

Nelson of course brought up the last verses of Revelations that says
“ 18. For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: 19. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.”

Many people including Nelson believe this scripture to mean that besides the Bible there is no other scripture. Interestingly enough John was on the island of Patmos when he wrote Revelations. Not only did he not know that the Bible would later be compiled into the Bible that we know today, but since we don’t even know when John passed away the book of Revelations could very well have been written before the other Apostles wrote other portions of the Bible.

We talked about how the Bible was compiled very similarly to how the Nicene Creed was compiled. A bunch of people got together and decided what things they wanted in the Bible. They also decided on meanings of scriptures, the order and chronology of the Bible and what parts to include and omit.

No wonder King James took it upon himself in 1604 to compile a more complete more accurate version of the Bible. Since that time subsequent version have been published, however, if Chapter 22 verse 18 of Revelations really means what a lot of people think it means than any alteration or so called “translation” of the Bible would be a sin.

Nelson seemed intrigued by our discussion and was willing to study and research the topic more thoroughly, we set a baptismal goal with him for next next week. He said that if he receives a witness that Heavenly Father has given us a restored Gospel, then he will be baptized on that day. I am excited for him and it is so fun to see his eyes light up when he realizes a particular Gospel truth that he never understood before.

Well I have got another Ping Pong appointment with my Ping Pong friend. He is the best person I have ever played in my life. I have played with a lot of people here in Taiwan and he is the best by far. It is gonna be a good game today.

Love you all,
Elder Anderson

The Why Child and Why You are So Trunky- Nov 13, 2009

2009-12-20T15:23:00.001-08:00

So I appreciate the fact that everyone is counting down the days until I come home. That lets me know how much you all love me. Are you all trying to make me trunky? Hahaha… I am doing fine. We stay so busy in the office that even if I wanted to be trunky, I just don’t have time to be. Right now I am in the process of stringing up the Christmas lights for the office. Not to mention planning for Elder Watson the Asia Area President to come on Monday. Then we have zone conference Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. And then on the 4th I am helping Taipei install the new referral system that I have been working on for their cell phones, consider it my birthday present to mom. And then if I make it through all of that I have to get everything ready for Christmas, including planning all the choirs and making sure the Missionary Conference goes well. When you have 180+ missionaries it takes a lot of work to keep everything all organized. I am loving being busy, it makes me feel like I am making a difference. You should see my office right now; it is covered in Christmas lights and cell phones. If you thought mom had too many Christmas lights, think again. We have more here, I guarantee it. And they AREN’T the good kind that don’t break. They are the kind where if one goes out half of them go out. It’s okay though I am getting pretty good and finding the broken ones. Oh I forgot to mention that we have to close down 6 apartments too. We just closed one down the other night and we were out until 2am finishing it all up. Then we had to get up at 5am to help the returning missionaries get up to Taipei. There was one normal missionary that was with us on that day and he was ready to pass out. All of us in the office were just giggling because of how tired he was. Despite the fact that I like to sleep, I have realized that you don’t need that much of it, as long as you have a good attitude and are taking good care of yourself you will hardly be tired. Attitude has a lot to do with it, if you allow yourself to be tired you will be.
I have a ping pong appointment in a couple of minutes so that will be fun. It is hard to find people to play ping pong with me. Before I came I thought that every Asian could play ping pong and do kong fu at the same time. I guess not. Oh well as long I can play ping pong.
We got a referral from the California missionaries last week. They faxed us the information for a man that they had been teaching there in Richmond. I called him up and he is super nice. At first I thought that he probably spoke English since he was meeting with the missionaries there, but then I realized he didn’t speak at all. I was really confused! He must have been meeting with the Chinese Speaking Elders there in Richmond. I have several friends from the MTC that went to California Chinese speaking. Anyways this guys name is Lin Jing and he is awesome. I talked to him on the phone for about 20 minutes the other day and he seemed to me to be a real thinker. I love thinkers, they are the best ones to teach. A lot of people just listen and then after you finish the meeting they stop thinking. But thinkers, they absorb everything you say and think about it. They think up questions and they try and spot the areas that aren’t that clear. Well this Lin Jing was a thinker. I could tell he put lots of thought into everything the missionaries had told him before. He had all these questions. The key to learning is questions, if you never ask the question, you never get the answer.
As a kid I remember being a “Why?” child, I am sure that my parents can attest to that.
“Why does the TV hum when you turn it on dad?”
“Mom, why do dogs wag their tails when they are happy?”
In Chinese we call these the “move your head questions,” meaning that you have got to put a little bit of effort into the question. Of course we all know, what you put in is what you get out. If you want to get the answer, then you have got to ask the question.
The same law applies to the Gospel. If you want to know why Jesus had to come to earth to perform the Atonement, then you have got to ask the question. The only problem with the “why child” situation is that the “why child” is asking an imperfect parent (Sorry mom and dad, but for this example you have to be imperfect.) When the why child ask mom or dad why a certain thing is the way it is they get an imperfect answer. However, when we as children of Heavenly Father ask the “why questions” we get a perfect answer. Not only is the answer perfect factually, but it is also perfect as far as the timeline of Heavenly Father is concerned. There are certain questions that a young child may ask that a wise parent my simply leave to a later date to completely answer. Heavenly Father works the same way, sometimes it is not the correct time to answer our questions. Sometimes he will answer part of it and let us continue to ponder. Then once we have reached a higher stage of spiritual maturity, He will finish answering the question.
Oh ya, don’t let me forget to tell you about my companions sleep walking story. I will wait a couple weeks to tell you this one. It was hilarious, and I know I wouldn’t be able to do it justice in an email.
Gotta go love ya,
Elder Craig Alan Anderson

Intellect of Man and Footprints in the Sand Nov 7, 2009

2009-12-20T15:22:00.000-08:00

Here is some news for you. I am staying in the office for this last move! Crazy huh? I am a little bummed, but at the same time I am really excited to be able to use my talents to serve the Lord. I think I will survive 6 more weeks in the office. Elder Alexander is moving out of the office, which is too bad. There are 2 companionships in the office. So the 4 of us live together which is fun. Elder Evans and Elder Alexander are gone a lot, but it is still fun having them around. Especially since my companion is Taiwanese it is fun to be able to talk with him about Taiwanese stuff and then talk with the other Elders about other stuff. Elder Alexander is a New Zealander, but I have almost got him converted. Give it time and he will be moving to the States.
I think I have told you before but a lot of people think I look Asian. Weird huh? They will always ask me if I am from Taiwan. Lately I have been speaking with a Hong Kong accent so everyone thinks I am from Hong Kong. On the street I always let people guess where I am from and about 3/10 will guess Hong Kong. President Hsu would be proud that is where he is from.
I got my Halloween package! Wow Halloween is great isn’t it? I think I like the fact that it means winter is coming. I love the winter, it is so cold and clean and fresh. Not to mention the snow is just so much fun to play in.
My last 6 weeks in Taiwan. What the heck? Where does the time go? It does seem like a long time since I have been home, but it is still weird to think that my time here is coming to an end. I am sure I said that 4 weeks ago but now the date is just creeping up on me.
We have been teaching a Mr. Gao lately. He is a security guard at a big apartment complex. He loves having us come but last night we had a very interesting lesson with him. He got in a car accident 4 days ago, but didn’t get hurt, which is actually quite amazing since he was riding a scooter and the other person was driving a car. Anyways he told us that he thought the Buddhist god was punishing him for learning about Jesus Christ. I asked him, how do you know Heavenly Father wasn’t protecting you when you got in that car crash? It could have been a lot worse. That reminds me of why it is important to be optimistic. If you think everything is a trial you will fail to see the blessings.
Like Mr. Gao for example, he is so focused on his accident being a punishment that he overlooks the miracle that he was not severely hurt. It is weird how change of attitude can change the situation. When we see ourselves as the victim, then we will forever be the victim, but if we see ourselves as the victor or whatever you want to call it that is exactly what you will be.
So the new office couple is here. Elder and Sister Greene! They are great! Elder and Sister Dowse are leaving in two weeks and the Greenes will take their place. Right now the Greenes are just getting settled in. As a matter of fact I just went over to their apartment to get their internet setup for them. Elder Greene is great, but when he told me he used to be a Highway Patrolmen I started to get a little worried. Hahaha… I think you all know how I feel about the Highway patrol. He is great though and is slowly changing my mind above those highway patrols guys.
Tonight the other Elder Alexander and Elder Evans have a baptism. It is a nice 30 year old guy from Tennessee, named Josh. We don’t usually see to many foreigners get baptized over here, mostly because there aren’t very many of them. About 2 months ago, he came to church with one of his friends. He has a great story, he was in the process of becoming a Catholic Priest, but the more he studied and prepared the more confused he got. In the end he decided to come to Taiwan and work for a little bit to give him some time to clear his head. Well it just so happened that one of his coworkers is a member of the church and started sharing with him. He figured he had a lot of time on the weekends so he might as well come to church. He came, liked it, met the missionaries and started meeting with Elder Alexander and Elder Evans. They gave him a Book of Mormon, he read it cover to cover the first week and said that he had never felt such a strong confirmation from the Holy Ghost that what he he was reading was true. However, for a while he wasn’t sure if he wanted to get rebaptized. Finally, two weeks ago the elders shared with him the importance of baptism by immersion. Josh said that when they shared this with him he knew without a doubt that what they were saying was true. Elders Alexander and Elder Evans testified to him that they are personal representatives of Jesus Christ sent forth to preach the Gospel by the power of the spirit to help those that are willing come unto Him.
What I love so much about this experience is how apparent it is that conversion is not because of the missionaries ability to speak with elegance, but because. So many people think their way out of believing in Christ. Of course it is important to ponder and wonder about the mysteries of God, but when we start thinking that our own intelligence is greater than that of Heavenly Fathers we start to get into dangerous waters. I know that is why Heavenly Father selected 19-21 year old boys to go forth to preach the gospel. In the scriptures it says “That the afulness of my bgospel might be cproclaimed by the dweak and the simple,” I know that this is true. We missionaries are not the most educated group of people in the world. Most of us have not even graduate from college. So why would Heavenly Father call us to take his gospel to the entire world? Well I think it relates a lot to Josh’s story. You cannot be converted to the Gospel of Jesus Christ by intellect alone. The Spirit is the most important factor in the conversion process. We may be weak and simple as missionaries, but we carry a fullness of the Spirit. The power of the Spirit is more powerful than all the intellect of man. In 1 Corinthians 1:25 it says “The afoolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”
It is so true! When I read this scripture it reminds me of how Satan will try and convince us that we are so smart. In the Book of Mormon 2nd Nephi 9:28 it says “O that cunning aplan of the evil one! O the bvainness, and the frailties, and the cfoolishness of men! When they are dlearned they think they are ewise, and they fhearken not unto the gcounsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their hwisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish.”
I have seen this on my mission so much. People want to rely on themselves without looking to God. In the world that we live in now it is so easy to completely forget how much we need Him. We live in a comfortable time, because of our daily comforts we develop a false sense of security. We begin to feel like we are in control of our lives. We begin to feel as if we don’t need anybody else to help us. When this happens people start to turn away from God and it is not until we are brought back down to our knees before we realize that we have needed him all along.
There is that poem that I have always loved.
One night a man had a dream.
He dreamed he was walking along the beach with the Lord.
Across the sky flashed scenes from his life.
For each scene, he noticed two sets of footprints in the sand:
one belonging to him, and the other to the Lord.
When the last scene of his life flashed before him
he looked back, at the footprints in the sand.
He noticed that many times along the path of his life
there was only one set of footprints.
He also noticed that it happened at the very lowest and saddest times of his life.
This really bothered him and he questioned the LORD about it:
"Lord, you said that once I decided to follow you,
you'd walk with me all the way.
But I have noticed that during the most troublesome times in my life
there is only one set of footprints.
I don't understand why when I needed you most you would leave me."
The Lord replied:
"My son, My precious child, I love you and I would never leave you,
During your times of trial and suffering,
when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.

What a comfort it is to know that despite our stubbornness and pride Heavenly Father will always be there to carry us if we are willing to follow him. I hope that all of us will never assume that those solitary footsteps in the sand are our own. But I hope that we may remember that they are his.
Thanks for everything
Love
Elder Craig Anderson

Hacker Frogs and Circus Sea Turtles

2009-11-09T12:04:00.001-08:00

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.

Rubber Band Balls Thanksgiving

2009-11-09T12:02:00.000-08:00

Well I am emailing a little later in the day today because I got really busy. You probably want to know what was so important that it took me 2 extra hours to right an email to you all. Well rubberband balls of course.
There is a family that came into the office the other day and they saw a rubber band ball that I had on my desk. Whenever you eat lunch in Taiwan you get a paper box filed with rice and stuff. To keep the box closed they wrap it with rubberbands. So everyday I get a couple rubber bands and add them to my ball. Usually I take a couple off everyday too to use for things. Anyways, this family saw the rubber band ball and they thought it was the coolest thing in the entire world. I promised them if they came back on Saturday I would teach them how to make them. I guess no one over here has ever made a rubber band ball. They thought it was great. The mom and the 2 kids were so amazed at the rubber band balls. They were talking and the little girl was like “My friends are going to be so jealous, they are going to want my rubber band ball.” Anyways, so here are some pictures that you might think are funny.
This week was another interesting week. I am now officially driving on an expired international license!! Hahaha… its okay though I drive so fast the police can’t catch me. I am just kidding. But really though my international license is going to expire soon, its such a pain. You have to get a new one every 6 months.
Rick from Ping Dong came and visited me in Taichung. It was almost a year ago exactly that we has baptized. Now he is doing awesome, he has the Melchizedek Priesthood and is a Sunday School teacher for the Gospel Principles class. There is no better way for someone to learn more about the gospel. In preparing his lessons for Sunday, I am sure he learns a ton and his testimony grows stronger.
I am still doing what I do in the mission office. I am just glad that I don’t have to do the accounting for the mission. Right now we have an older couple, Sister and Elder Dowse, they work here. But before they came it was a missionary that had to do it. It is so great to have these senior missionaries come and work in the mission field. Since many senior missionaries are not physically able to go out and be a normal missionary, it is perfect because they can take the place of a younger missionary and then that missionary can go out into the field and be a normal missionary.
Well Halloween is almost here. That is fun! The younger kids here celebrate Halloween, but not on the large scale like we do back home. Halloween is my second favorite holiday. My first is Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the best, grandma always cooks some amazing food and we can escape the cold in Utah to go to California for a while. Plus, when it is thanksgiving time, it is also usually my birthday!
I am starving, I didn’t eat breakfast so we are going to go eat lunch now!

Love ya,
Elder Anderson

Mountain Movers and Gamblers

2009-11-09T12:01:00.001-08:00

Chinese Lesson: The Old Fool Moves a Mountain
Thousands of years ago in Mainland China, there was a man who lived in the mountains with his family. He was a hard working and very diligent in everything he did to provide for his family. As he worked day in and day out he began to realize that there was a enormous obstacle in his way that prevented him from being able to provide well for his family. That obstacle just so happened to be an gigantic mountain.
He decided that he must move this mountain so that his posterity could have a smoother path. Every day after he performed his daily labors he would go to the mountain and shovel for as long and as hard as his strength would permit. He did this everyday for several years. People walking by would stop and tell him that he was a fool, he was stupid, there was no way he could ever move an entire mountain. Nearly every day somebody would come and try to convince him to stop his foolish digging. But this old man continued.
Finally after years of digging, the mountain showed no sign of change. However, the man did not care, he was determined to move the mountain, so he kept digging. The Chinese god’s watched this man everyday and were so dumbfounded by his wasted efforts. After seeing the old man struggle for years to move this mountain, the gods were so moved by his determination and persistence that they moved the mountain for him.
Old fools can move mountains.
I may not be that old, but sometimes I do feel like a fool trying to move a mountain by myself. There are so many great things that I love about this Chinese Legend. I am not going to even tell you why I like it, read it yourself and pick out the parts you like.
This week we were really busy preparing for Zone Conference. We hold one conference here in Taichung and one in Kaohsiung. Since they are in 2 different places it is a pain to prepare for, but it is over, the mountain has been moved.
Last night when we were contacting people on the street, I ran into the most normal homeless man I have ever met in my entire life. Normally, the homeless aren’t that normal. But his guy was completely normal. He told me his story. He said:
“Several years ago I was a very wealthy business man. I had a wife, 2 kids, a great job, a nice car, I had everything, until I lost it all in one night.”
After he said this to me I was so intrigued that I had to listen. He continued and said, “I used to love to play Majiang (Chinese Checkers), I would play on the weekends and sometimes at work when we had a break. After playing for a while me and my friends would go to watch the professionals play and we started betting. First we started betting small until finally we were betting in upwards of 10,000 USD. My good friend told me that there was a big match coming up and that he had the inside scoop, so we could bet and make a lot of money.”
Little did this poor man know that his friend had rigged a game. This guy bet everything he had and lost. He told me at first he didn’t even know what had happened, he thought how could it be. It wasn’t until several weeks afterwards that he found out that his so called friend had cheated him.
Anyways, long story short. This guy is very intelligent, very hard working, but since the economy is terrible right now he cannot find a job. He wants to find a manual labor job which is weird because he is so smart. The most interesting thing about this man was that he was very happy. I even asked him, why in the world are you so happy and he smiled and said. “it’s my own fault, that I don’t have any money, and I only have 3 options. The first option, I can be mad at myself for being so stupid, the second option I can be mad at my friend for cheating me, or the third option I can forget about it and start over.” He chose the third option. This man was amazing, he didn’t even ask for money or anything. He flat out told me “I need to pay the price for my actions, so I will not borrow money from my family.” It was almost like he was teaching himself a lesson. Another sad thing about his man was that they wouldn’t even let him in the homeless shelter here. To get into a homeless shelter you have to have your Government ID. Anyways, the workers at the homeless shelter said that he couldn’t stay there because he was from Taipei. Isn’t that crazy? You can only go to a homeless shelter in the city you are registered in.
He is coming to Church on Sunday! I normally am a little apprehensive to bring homeless people into the church because the majority of them are a little crazy. But I am telling you this guy is just like you and me. Average Joe who did something really stupid.
Go move some mountains!
Elder Craig Anderson

Grapefruit and Beetle Nut

2009-11-09T12:00:00.000-08:00

I have a new companion. He just moved into the office to take Elder Li’s place. His name is Elder Chou. Great guy! His whole family has been member since before he was born. Most of my native companions were not that lucky. Some of their parents were opposed to them coming on missions. I don’t know why though, making a 19 year old kid, spend 24 hours a day thinking about others is so good for them. Now that I am 20 I am not like those 19 year olds hahaha…
I heard a weird noise outside of our house 2 nights ago so I ran out to look and see what was going on. Since we live above the office we are always on alert to make sure no one breaks in and steals all our computers and passports. Anyways, I went outside to inspect what was going on and there was this poor old man with his head against our gate making a whimpering noise. It was late at night, and we often have drunks that walk by and make weird noises, but I could tell that this old man was different. I went and got my companion and we went down to talk to him to see what was wrong. I asked him, “Hey mister? Are you okay?” He was a little startled at first but once he saw that we were missionaries, I don’t think he was scared. He humbly asked if we had anything to eat. I thought about it for a second that we had some fruits that someone had given us the day before. We gave him 3 of these giant grapefruit like fruits and he was so excited. He kept thanking us and thanking us. I wanted to go get more, but we can’t leave that late at night to go buy more. People ask us for “food” all the time, but what they really want is money. Of course if someone needs food we are more than willing to buy some for them, but as missionaries we have a rule that we can’t give out money. Anyways, I thought about it for a second, said a little prayer asking Heavenly Father for us to find a way to help him more. After thinking for a moment I realized that there was an entire box of food I had for prepared for the next couple Sundays (since we can’t go buy food on Sunday). We ran back upstairs, grabbed the box of food and took it downstairs to give it to this man. Since the box wouldn’t fit through the slits of the gate we had to hand it to him piece by piece until he got it all on the other side. He began to quiver with excitement and even though it was dark he looked at us with a face that radiate with a sense of gratitude. Once again he thanked us and began to gather his new treasure together. My companion and I went back upstairs. My companion went back to bed immediately, but I couldn’t sleep. I stood up against the window and watched this old man as he inspected every package of crackers and noodles as if he was inspecting a diamond. I felt guilty for how ungrateful I am. I few tears fell as I pondered the poor journey that this old man still had ahead of him. As I sat there for the next hour or so, I reflected on the sacrifice that the Savior made as he suffered in the Garden of Gesthamene so that He may understand every pain and temptation that each of us will feel during our life here on this earth. As I continued to ponder, the words of a hymn came to mind,
A poor wayfaring Man of grief,
Hath often crossed me on my way,
Who sued so humbly for relief
That I could never answer nay.
I had not power to ask his name,
Whereto he went, or whence he came;
Yet there was something in his eye
That won my love; I knew not why.
He that can lift should lift. All of us are in a position that we may lift. “Lift up the hands that hang down… strengthen feeble knees.” As we find opportunities to serve those around us we will feel the love of our Heavenly Father. We will find more peace in our lives and we will become closer to the Lord Jesus Christ. As Paul said, “Faith without works is dead.” You can read and pray all you want, but until you go do something about it, it doesn’t do any good. The knowledge of the Gospel is not enough, living the Gospel and applying it is the only way that we may find true happiness and peace in this life. Anything else that we think brings us happiness, is most likely only temporary.
I hope I didn’t rattle on too long there. I just wanted to share this special experience with you.
On a much lighter note, I thought I would tell you about my good friend Huang. He is a great guy who does all the shipping for our office. We do a lot of shipping, we ship Books and Bikes and Luggage and all sorts of stuff, hundreds of packages every month. I work a lot with this man. Well Mr. Huang is a very nice guy, he is what we might consider a Taiwanese Redneck. He comes into our office and smells so strongly of beetle nut (the stuff that is like tobacco) that it makes it hard for me to breath when I am around him. When I am working with him I often have to take a couple steps back and breathe and then start again. This Mr. Huang is such a nice man, I wish we could just get him to quit all his bad habits. He loves us so we are always encouraging him to quit smoking and chewing. He is very respectful to us and I think he loves the feeling he gets when he is in our office. I am sure all his friends are like him, so when he come an office that is filled with well-dressed clean cut people, you would think he would feel out of place. But it is the opposite, we treat him like he should be treated and he completely changes. He works everyday but we are trying to get him to come to church. We often run into him outside, and he will wave us over and talk with us for a little while.
I have another friend here that is a lot like Mr. Huang. He is always hanging out with his drunk friends, he has got tattoos over his whole body and is usually chewing beetle nut. 2 nights ago, we were in his neighborhood so when I drove by his house I waved and he got so excited he chased after us. I stopped and started talking with him. Since buildings here are all 5 or 6 stories usually the bottom floors are businesses and then the top floors is where the owners live. So here we were on this busy street. My friend is not wearing a shirt, he’s teeth are red from the beetle nut and he is smoking at the same time. I shared a little bit with him, asked how his prayers were going, and then I noticed that about half the street was just staring at the 2 of us in amazement. Hahahaha… I guess it would be a pretty funny site to see. Me standing next to this half naked man, with his drunk friends in the background hooting and hollering. I like this guy though, he is young, he has already come to church once and he loved it. We have just got to get him out of where he is living and working!
Well, love you all.

Elder Anderson

Sea of Heads Sept 26, 2009

2009-09-26T07:22:00.000-07:00

As I pull up to the stop light I look over the tops of the sea of heads bobbing around as everyone positioned themselves for the long wait of the red light. As a missionary in a country over populated by scooters, you quickly learn how to recognize your companion from the helmet that he wears. There could be over 100 people waiting at a single stop light and you can only see the tops of their helmets. There he is the black and gold helmet with the white strip. Now that I found him I can relax and look for somebody to talk to. I start talking with the man on my left, no response. He won't even look at me. I always think this is the most fun because the more they refuse to look at you the louder you can talk, after about 10 seconds you are screaming "Hey mister, how are you?" "Can you see me?" Finally, everyone is looking at the man that I am talking to like "Come on man, just talk to him!" It's fun! It is even funnier when they refuse to look at you but you can make them laugh. You tell them a joke and they look straight ahead like you aren't even there, but then they will start to giggle. It is the best when you make the old guys laugh. I figure if I can make somebody smile, then that is a success.

The light turns green, now I have got to maneuver quickly so that I don't get stampeded by the horde of busy motorist behind me. With a few close calls I manage to pull away without getting turned into a clean cut, well dressed, pancake. Once again I started scanning for that helmet that I so readily know. Target Locked! 50 meters ahead right hand side! My good ol' companion Elder Li. Missionaries aren't missionaries without their companions.

We bike over to a little convenience store in the neighborhood to do a little contacting. I run into a guy that is a doctor, really nice, thinks he is too intelligent for religion. That comment makes me smirk, thinking about all the insanely intelligent people that were all very religious, all of which I am sure were much more intelligent than this man. It is okay though, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not about the power of intellect but about the Power of the Holy Ghost and the Light of Christ. I continue to chat with this doctor to see if he is willing to at least come try and understand. He says he has no time. I smirk again, he must have forgotten that he mentioned he had retired 2 years ago. Finally, I hit him with one of my favorite questions, “So how do you know that our religion or any religion for that matter isn’t true?” On the street many people will try and prove that there is no God. It is so interesting, they will claim that they know that there is not God through the same illogical ways that believers of religion claim that they know that there is a God. Usually, it is something along the lines of, “I have read a lot of books and I just feel like there isn’t a God.” Feel? I thought you said that you knew there isn’t a God? At about this point I like to respond with “Really? Me too! Except I am the exact opposite. I have read a lot of books and I have felt that there is a God who loves us. We are his children and he wants us to find time to get to know him.” Finally, I ask a follow up question to this doctor “So how can you be sure that the message we are sharing is not from God?” The doctor thinks about it for a second and comes to the conclusion that majority of people who are asked this question come to, he says “I guess I would have to come understand a little bit about it and then make my own decision about whether it is true or not.” He sets up a time! Now the ball is in his court, if he comes he may hear the most powerful message he has ever heard, if he doesn’t he has missed out on a great opportunity to learn of our eternal purpose and the importance of families in this eternal plan that Heavenly Father has created for us.
Where is my companion? Once again I repeat the searching process as I look for my companion at one of the corners of the intersection. President Hoer has suggested that we contact people on our own so that we can talk to twice as many people. Very rarely do we contact together. Quite often people will remind me “Hey aren’t there usually 2 of you guys? Where is your partner?” Despite the fact that most people are not interested in our message, they do admire us and tend to look out for us. I have had people ask me if I was lost because they had never seen a missionary without his companion by his side. Usually my companion is no more than 30 yards away, but if you aren’t paying attention it would be easy to only see one of us. Especially since I am American, I tend to stick out a little more than my native companion.
Well it is getting a little late so we decide to head back to the office. 9 o’clock, we do a quick little plan for the next day. 9:30, nightly reports, I start talking with all the Zone Leaders to see how their Zones are doing. With about 9 Zones in South Central Taiwan, I only have time to talk to each Zone for about 3 minutes. I type up a quick report to let President Hoer know how the Zones are doing and highlight any areas that they might be struggling.

10 o’clock I start working on little projects that I have going on. The projects vary from week to week. Sometimes fun and exciting, other times boring and tedious. They are all important though. Currently I am selling the Mission Offices junk. I am sure some of you that have lived with me might remember looking for something that you had put down in storage, only to find out that months earlier I had sold it on ebay. Hahaha… well I am basically doing that to the mission office right now. Of course I don’t keep any of the money; it all goes back into helping the missionaries. I have already sold old cell phones, extra computers, hard drives, monitors, old bicycles, recyclable metals, network parts, etc. Who would have thought that I would be able to use this talent of mine to help out the mission office? I guess we are all under that obligation to use our talents and special skills to push forth the work of the Lord. I just never thought that I would use my dejunking ability to help save money for the mission.
I was thinking about why I had this skill the other day, and I came to the conclusion that in all things there is a positive and a negative. Every action must have an equal and opposite reaction. Mom, loves to save things! Even mom will admit that she hates to throw things out. She is so cute, she will save every card that we have ever given her. I hear she is better now, but before, the house policy was, “We might be able to use it later.” I guess when I was younger I got tired of waiting for “later” so I started selling our junk on the “black market,” known to many as ebay. After several months of this underground life of mine, I was discovered when an old GPS system that had been placed down in the basement for more than 90 days disappeared. Poor dad must have thought that there were little Gremlins in our house using our GPS to circumnavigate the globe. I should have stuck with the Gremlin story, but finally I decided it was time to come out, I was cornered, there was no were left to turn. And that was the day I told my parents I was a dejunker.
I kind of function like the US Postal system, anything after 90 days is declared a lost item and may be discarded or sold, if after 90 days no one claims the package the workers, get to rip it upon and have a free for all. I’m not sure if President knows how much I like to sell junk. I have always had this fascination with selling stuff that I think is useless and watching people pay money for it. Mind blowing!
11 o’clock rolls around, I am tired. My eyes hurt, my legs are sore, even my ears seem to ache. We lock up, close the safes with all the passports and mission money, bolt the doors and windows, and arm the alarm system. Luckily, we only have to walk to the second floor to find our beds. I take a quick shower, dry off, eat a muffin from Costco!! (Yeah you read that right buddy, the Dowse’s buy me Costco muffins and MILK!!!) Do you have any idea how hard it is to find good milk in Asia? I have tried to tell the dairy farmers here, you can NOT feed a cow RICE!! Cows need good stuff like grass and hay maybe a little oats, that will make some good milk! They don’t listen they still feed the poor things rice, Costco cows must not be rice cows because it is pretty good milk.
After my muffin and milk, I climb into bed set the alarm for 6:30 and say my prayers. To be honest half the time I fall asleep in the middle of them. I think Heavenly Father understands. Usually, I wake up the next morning and finish them.
BEEP BEEP BEEP! I am gonna throw my companions clock at the wall. Could anyone find a more annoying alarm clock? I doubt it. Just so you all know, I still hate mornings! Time to get up and do it all again.
Wash, rinse, and repeat!
Love ya,
Elder Craig Anderson
Taiwan Taichung Mission

Pictures

1．Andy's Baptism, i can't remember if i sent it to you.
2. The before and after shots of the network that i rebuilt.
3. The typhoon got so bad that we couldn't pedal our bikes so we ran into this really nice restaurant and spent a lot of money. ($10 USD per person) At least we were safe. It was a little embarassing because we were dripping wet and there were little puddles every where we walked. A worker brought us some towels and followed us around to mop up behind us. I felt so bad, but at least i wasn't getting ripped apart by the typhoon.
4. Goofy picture of the network afterwards.
5. at the beach in kaohsiung. there is a giant ship in the background.
6. the final result.
7. It looked like a bunch of High School kids threw together this network in their Technology class.
8. a typically stop light NOT during rush hour.

Empty Nest and Spankins Sept 18, 2009

2009-09-26T07:20:00.000-07:00

Hey all,
Today I decided to send you some “Peace.” Since I can’t light a bunch of Chinese lanterns and make them fly to America I just decided to send a picture. On the side of this lantern it says “The Peace Light.” I thought that was a neat thing to have written on the side. So here it is, your Peace Light. I hope it brings you peace this week. When I saw this lantern it made me think of St Matthew 5: 14-16
“14 Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. 15 Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. 16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”
I know I have shared that scripture with you all before, but I thought this little lantern was pretty cool. I hope that it reminds you to let your light shine baby!! Hahahaha… go do some good stuff this week.
Well, I had a great battle this week with the network here at the office. I can hear you groaning how boring!!. No my friends, not boring at all! I thought it was quite fun. I ripped apart the old networking for the office and installed a brand new server. It looks great. Some of you might be wondering, what does it take to keep a Mission Office running. Well, we have 12 Computers, 2 network printers and a wireless router. Not to mention we have our own personal web server that I am setting up. Pretty sweet huh? I will send you some pics next week maybe.
Lately Mom and Dad have been emailing me telling me that they don’t know what to do with out Ali around. Well don’t forget that even after your kids have moved out that you aren’t done raising us! (I know that the correct term there would be rearing, but I think it sounds funny. Tell my English teacher I don’t care what she says rearing still sounds like something dad’s do when they get angry at their kids and they can’t find the belt to spank them with.
“Honey, I can’t find my belt, get my Rearer!”
“Come here you little brat I am gonna give you a rearing!”
”See look when kids are bad they get a rearing, how does your rear-end feel after that rearing?”
”You will think twice before you do that again won’t yeah?”
Anyways, I think that this whole pretending to be sad that all the kids are gone thing is all a front for their excitement to have a some time to relax. Yes, dad no more getting toilet papered by Ali’s friends on Friday night. Yes, mom you do not have to kick the Ali’s hoodlum friends out when it starts to get late. And yes no more random explosions near the house (Well at least not until December 22nd). It will be fun! Rest up now, plus you never know when it will be your turn to go on a mission!
Well, I didn’t get in any dog fights this week. I wasn’t attacked by any drunk men. I also was not hit by a car. It was a good week, a bit uneventful but good.

Elder Anderson

p.s. the second picture is my name in chinese. i wasn't sure if you all had ever seen it before.

Rabid Dog and the Great Invasion Sept 11, 2009

2009-09-26T07:19:00.001-07:00

Wow! Lots and lots of letters!

Thanks for all the letters that many of you sent to me last week. It was neat to hear how everybody was doing. Thanks Dad for being the one that handed out paper and pens. I never thought you would be a "paper pusher" hahaha... okay another stupid joke I'm sorry. I am not really sure what being in Asia has done to my sense of humor. As I am sure you guessed humor over here is different. It's funny, but it is just different. Kind of like British humor. I know exactly what Dad is thinking. I hate British humor. My dad is not a big fan. Don't worry dad after hanging out with me for a while you will thing its funny!

So I hear somebody ran into one of my mission friends in Utah. Elder Richter wasn't my companion, but we went on exchanges several times. I hope he is doing good. Sounds like he hasn't quite adjusted though if he is still wearing Taiwan shirts around. I think that is funny that Grandma Elaine and Tom walked up to him and said hello in chinese. I bet he thought that was great!

This week was pretty normal! Fortunately Taiwan was not taking over by the Chinese. Fewwhh... we are safe for another week.

The Taiwanese are convinced that at any moment the Chinese are gonna hop in their row boats and row themselves over here and invade. Well it hasn't happened yet and if it did I am pretty sure the ships that the US has stationed between China and Taiwan would be more than obliged to come over and lend a hand.

So I am thinking that all my friends are basically home from their missions! When does Austin get back? I can't believe it.

Since I am in the Mission office, i have been thinking about starting a TV show. Called "The Office," I know I know, it sounds like a lame name but I think it could be big. ;)

We have started preaching in a new area. Last week we stopped in one are and started in this new area. It's downtown. some other missionaries will take over our other area. Me and Elder Li are so lost, Taichung is huge and we are in the downtown. Since we just started over there, we do not have any investigators, so we don't have any really cooling teaching stories this week.

OOOO, I almost forgot! I got in a fight with a dog! Yeah, it was crazy! In the middle of downtown right out front of our office building, there was this dog, tearing up our lawn and digging and stuff. So I ran outside and was like "Hey, you little punk get out of here?" Of course the dog only speaks Chinese, so I had to tell him in Chinese. He didn't seem to quite understand so finally I yelled at him in Taiwanese and then he knew that I meant business! He started barking and growling at me and even took a lung towards me. However, I am not a new missionary, I know how to make dogs the bravest of dogs wet there pants. So I very calming bent over and pretended to pick up a rock. I lifted my arm and cranked it back all the way like I was going to hurl it at him with all my might. His eyes got really big and I think he muttered some bad words in Taiwanese, and then he bolted! Fast little stinker, all that yapping for nothing, in the end he chickened out, funny thing is is that I didn't even have a rock in my hand. I love that trick, it never gets old! I think mom taught me that one.

Okay, that story was only partially true. He didn't swear in Taiwanese he swore in Chinese.

Love ya all,

Elder Anderson

Water Filters and Mike the American Sept 6, 2009

2009-09-26T07:18:00.001-07:00

Well I guess I should apologize for not emailing on Saturday. It is a long story, but basically I fell asleep. We got busy working in the morning and I completely forgot that it was our day to rest! To me it just felt like a normal day. Being in the office is just like that, we usually don’t get a preparation day and if we do it is just a couple hours to take a breather. So I am sorry if you waited for my email and never got it.
Another busy busy week fighting Chinese cell phone companies. And by the way, no they do not speak English, its quite funny when they try though. It is also very frustrating because they try and take advantage of us because they think the church is rich, they don’t realize that the missionaries are the ones paying for it and that each missionary only has 400 USD a month to survive. Those little scam artists. Its okay we are slowly beating them into submission.
Things have started to slow down now that I have gotten settled in. Although I was in the office before it is a completely different experience here. Back in Kaohsiung, the senior missionary couple there did a lot more than the ones here, so I have to do a lot of extra stuff, which is one of the reasons we are always so busy. Plus President Hoer is always throwing on new projects and stuff. You are probably all wondering, what kind of projects could a mission president possibly come up with? You know what I wonder that a lot too, but sure enough he seems to find ones.
Recently I have been working on getting all the water filters for the entire mission figured out. If you drank the water that comes out of the tap over here, you would most likely turn into a werewolf or a vampire, if you were lucky. It’s pretty gross stuff! I guess when you put 23 million people on a little tiny island you can’t expect the water sanitation to be that great! Anyways, so all the missionary apartments all have these permanent water filter units installed. The filters in them need to be changed periodically. It used to be that missionaries would keep track and change the filters themselves, but we have found that missionaries often forget to swap filters, which isn’t good because we don’t want werewolf missionaries, although vampire missionaries could beneficial because then we could just bite people, and they would turn into a Mormon missionary vampires. But for now we are just going to stick to our normal way or preaching the gospel, I will put in a suggestion though that in the future we could consider upgrading all our missionaries to vampire status.
That project has been going really well, we are getting all the schedules synchronized and organizing the mass amounts of replacement filters that were previously stored at every missionary’s house. Now we are storing all the filters at my house! I have to swim though filters to find my stuff in the mornings . Its okay, though, if it floods again I won’t have to worry about finding drinking water, I can just open up my doors and windows, let all the water in and use the replacement filters as straws.
Apart from the experiences listed above we had some great proselyting experiences. I ran into this guy from Idaho, he was pretty nice guy, his girlfriend who was also from Idaho was not a nice guy. She was a mean girl! I talked to him for a couple minutes and he was great, he was interested and was like “Yeah, okay, I will meet with you.” So I set up a time and then his girlfriend came out to get on the scooter with him and she was not cool. I should have told her to go back inside and let the big boys talk. Just before he was about to give me his cell phone number she hopped on the scooter and was like, “Oh we are not interested.” And I was like “No, actually he is.” I can’t stand it when people try and talk for other people, it happens all the time. Usually with couples, the husband will be really cool and then the wife is terrible. Sometimes I on the street, I will politely tell the wives that I am speaking with their husbands not them. If you do it politely in Chinese it is actually not rude at all. Anyways, I was so made at this Idaho girl, I love teaching Americans, I am sure you remember Robert the Jewish guy. He was a blast to teach! By the way he is doing good and his 2 sons were baptized 3 weeks after I left.
Mike, this guy from Idaho, was like, “Well she will get mad at me if I meet with you.” So I asked her “Hey, kaylee(I can’t remember her name now, I think my mind subconsciously wiped it from my memory) will you get mad at Mike if he comes to church?” Finally, she was like “No I guess not.” And then she started to be nice. We talked about the Plan of Salvation and our purpose here on this earth. I told them “Even if you don’t have interest in what we share you can at least come and understand what we are all about. Heck, at least you will have a cool story to share with your friends.” They laughed and agreed that their friends would think that them meeting with the Mormon missionaries would be a quite intriguing story. Sad part of the story though is that since they just got here to teach english, they don’t have cell phones yet and they didn’t want to give me their bosses number because they thought it might get them in trouble if the missionaries called him. They also don’t know where they will be moving either. I gave them my cell number and they took it, he said he would call. I sure hope they call, but the interesting thing is that people very rarely will take the initiative to get in touch with us. The few that do are usually really really really ready for the gospel, or crazy and want to talk to the handsome Americans. I hope that Mike calls!!
On the street occasionally people will say to us “Why do you go preach, everybody already knows! Leave us alone!” If everybody already knew then we would not have over 1500 baptisms a year in our mission alone mostly from street contacts. People need somebody else to take the initiative for them. Even though a lot of people are interested they would never go out and look for the missionaries. As a matter of fact, I have talked with well over a hundred people on the street that were like, “I am so glad that you stopped to talk to me, I have always wanted to meet with you guys, but I was to shy to wave you down.”
Anyways, I think the moral of the story is that, despite the fact that occasionally somebody will get angry with us for contacting them on the street, it is worth it when we truly find someone who has been prepared by the Lord for us to find. We are not confrontational usually ;), so I think it is very interesting when people start yelling at us before we have even finished our “hello, how are you?” sentence. It is fun though, I have learned that there is nothing better to do but smile as wide as you can. Although, smiling wider might make the person that is yelling at you angrier, it makes the bystanders realize that we are just nice young men trying to share the truth about God.
That reminds me of onetime when I was in Kaohsiung, I pulled up to talk to this man and right of the bat he started swearing and yelling at me in Taiwanese. Luckily, or unluckily, depending on how you see it, I speak enough Taiwanese to know exactly what he was saying. He made himself look like a fool, in the end though a lady that had pulled up behind us watched the whole thing. She watched as this man attempted to spit on me, don’t worry I dodged it, and then afterwards she actually contacted us and was like hey, where is your church? I want my sons to go. She even offered to buy my companion a new basket for his bicycle because his was all broken up. I’m not really headed anywhere with this, just sharing some random missionary experiences.
Peace,
Elder Anderson

You Though AT&T Was Bad Aug 28, 2009

2009-09-26T07:17:00.000-07:00

Well Grandma Wood gets my award of appreciation for her email this week. She was the only one that remembered that there is a poor little missionary over in the South China Sea floating around. Ok ok ok… so now that the typhoon is gone I am no longer floating.  Thanks grams I love you to pieces.
I was just teasing you all, I am sure that you haven’t gotten used to the fact that I email on Saturdays now Instead of Wednesdays. This week has gone by so fast! Being in the office just makes time fly by. We are just busy busy busy. All day!
I am in charge of working out the cell phone situations for all the missionaries in the mission. We currently have 118 cell phones. So recently I have been working with a cell phone company called ZhongHua to get a new cell phone contract signed. It makes me want to pull my hair out. You thought cell phone companies in the states were bad. Ha… Try Taiwanese cell phone companies, you have to be extra careful or else they will try and charge you all sorts of penalties. For example 2 days ago I sent an email to our contact at the cell phone company, She didn’t respond. So yesterday early in the morning I sent another email, no response. Finally at about 4:30 pm I called her and was like hey did you get my emails. And she was like yeah, but I finish doing it before responding. Whatever she was trying to wait until the next payment period started before responding. What I told her to do in the emails was cancel 10 phone lines, before July. We pay month to month so as soon as the 1st of the month comes around we are automatically signed up for the entire month. Anyways, so after I called and told her I wanted them cancelled yesterday she was like okay. You know what happened? She called us back about an hour and a half later. She knows that the Operations Manager (me) is in charge of the phone stuff, but she asked to talk with President Hoer. Luckily, I heard my companion answer the phone. Anyways, so she got on the line with President Hoer. President didn’t know that I have been trying to get her to cancel the phones for the past 3 days. So I started listening to the conversation on speaker phone and then she said, “So I will just go ahead and cancel those phones next week, is that okay?” Sneaky little stinker huh? She knows how our mission office runs because they have been dealing with us for years, so she tried to go around the person that actually does the phones so that they could force us to sign up for another month. However, I ran into President’s Office and told him, “Hey, tell her not okay, she needs to cancel those phones today!” So he told her and then she tried to say, well lets just wait until Monday, but Monday would be the start of a new payment period. Isn’t that a slimy thing to do?! I was so ticked. Anyways, we got them cancelled.
Hahaha… I feel bad for you all. You have to read about me whining about cell phone companies. You probably want to hear about missionary stuff. Hahaha… well, we had a couple of good lessons last night. We were walking around in this park looking for people to contact and I ran into this somewhat drunk man. He wasn’t like drunk drunk, he was just a little buzzed. You know the really friendly type. Anyways, as soon as he saw me HE started talking to ME. Crazy! People hardly ever talk to us first, usually they look at us like we are alien cyborgs. So I sat down with this man and started talking with him. Really nice guy! Anyways, he told me all about how when he was younger he was in some Chinese mafia and used to be the one they would send to scare people or beat up people. Then he got married and decided to leave the mafia and all his mafia friends abandoned him. He had a really bad drinking problem though. And then a couple years ago he had his first kid, so he got a real job and stopped smoking. Then after another year he started to not drink as much. So now he only drinks on Friday nights occasionally with his friends in the park. Anyways, I sat down with him and we talked about eternal families, that if we prepare in this life we can live with our families in the life to come. He loved it! And said he would come to church on Sunday. He wasn’t really drunk so he won’t forget, plus I have his cell phone number. But he wants to bring his whole family. It was perfect too because he said he was looking for something to help him make the final change to being a good person. I told him through Jesus Christ we can all change. We will see what happens I guess.

Love ya
Elder Anderson

MIssion Office Chapter 2 Aug 21, 2009

2009-08-24T12:56:00.002-07:00

Well things have settled down back to normal here. well at least as normal as things can get. We are working away in the office. Although the flooding has been really devastating to a lot of people here, it has been a great opportunity for everyone to work together and serve each other. i think it has been a tragic typhoon, but it has also been an uplifting experience to see people performing selfless service. many of the missionaries were down there cleaning up mud and debris that had been washed into peoples homes. i was moved to Taichung the day that they organized the service groups. Oh well, my work here in the office is important too.

If I had one complaint about being in the office, it would be that you miss out on all the action. Being in the office in Taichung is about the same as being in the office in Kaohsiung, of course there is a different mission president i report to, but for the most part it is the same. my duties here are quite a bit different though. I work on apartments and getting contracts setup with land lords. because missionaries move so often there has to be someone that organizes all the apartment stuff. I prepare all the stuff for new missionaries and missionaries going home. I am currently working on our english class website for all of Taiwan, it will be a website that Taiwanese people can go to to check locations and times for our english classes. Usually by 6pm we are out the door doing normal missionary stuff for 3 hours. My companion is a native, but we both are so busy that we hardly ever talk. Elder Li my companion is in charge of recording all the baptisms in the mission. That is what i used to do!

I still can't believe that I am back in the office. There are 186 missionaries in our mission and I have been in here twice!!! If I didn't know that they needed me here I would feel like it was some sort of punishment. hahaha...

President Hoer is great! he is a fast pace guy, I like it! We get along really well and so far it has been a great experience working with him. He used to be a business man in China before so I have a lot to learn from him.

I wish I could explain everything that I do, but it is hard. I am whats called the Mission Operations Manager, basically anytime there is anything that happens in the, whether its the Mayor of Taichung coming to visit us or a missionaries toilet gets broken, I get to deal with it. I was looking at my phone records for the past 2 weeks and it looks like I will average about 800 outgoing calls and about 1000 incoming calls in a month. Thats a lot of phone calls!!! So that is what I do.

There are 4 Elders in the Office. Elder Li, Elder Yang, Elder Alexander and I. Elder Yang and Elder Alexander are Assistants, they are hardly ever here though. Within 6 weeks they visit about a third of the missionaries in the mission. So that is about 60 missionaries, it takes them a long time, about 30 days to go and drive to every place and spend a full day with all the missionaries. It sounds like a lot of fun, but I am glad that I don't have to do that, I like sleeping in my own bed.

There are also a senoir couple that works in the office. Elder and Sister Douse, they are great. I work right next to Elder Douse.

We unfortunately do not get fed here. We have to fend for ourselves, but its okay because Taiwan has soooo many great places to eat.

President and Sister Hoer are great, we are their inside Assistants. We help them do things to help the mission. Most of it is just managerial stuff and organization nonsense. I am sure you are all a little shocked to hear that i have to be organized. Crazy huh?

My favorite thing about being in the office is the Air Conditioning hahaha... Really!! Apart from loving the AC I really doing things that help the other missionaries better do the work.

Of course the toughest thing about being here is not being able to be a normal missionary. Also it is tough not sleeping as much. We are often out past midnight doing running errands. Like last week, a land lord called and told us that we needed to move our stuff out in 24 hours, he originally told us we had 1 week. So we took the mission vans and were packing stuff until about 2 in the morning. Oh ya, we still have to get up at 6:30, so that other missionaries don't misunderstand and think we are being lazy.

Thank goodness though, when we do get to sleep our apartment is right about the office. It makes it very convenient for 2 reasons. Its easy to get home :), and 2nd if anyone ever tried to break in we would here them for sure.

Although I hate to admit it, i think i will probably be here until i come home. i am hoping that that is not so, but we will see.

Taichung city is great! It is really big and I am still a little lost, since we don't spend all day outside wandering around I still don't know the roads that great. I know how to get to different cities because we visit other areas quite often, but as far as downtown I still don't quite get it. i haven't even been here for 2 weeks though, i am sure i will figure it out.

Well i kinda rambled a lot. i better go. love yall

Elder Craig Anderson

I'm Alive Aug 14, 2009

2009-08-24T12:56:00.001-07:00

Well, i am sorry for the lack of communication the past couple weeks. As i am sure you can guess, things have been crazy hahaha... well i might as well tell you right off the bat, i am back in the office. Its okay though, i am excited to work with President Hoer, he is an awesome man. I was able to make it out of the office for a little over a month, but i am back in! it will be fun to help out in a different ways.

Oh ya, so i moved to Taichung. It is really far away from where i was. I was just in FengShan, the typhoon hit there so bad. Crazy Crazy! My companion and I were running around every where trying to help out. We tried to get a sandbagging crew put together, but no one had any sand bags. So it was pretty sad to just see the water fill up in peoples houses and not be able to do anything about it. Don't worry it was really safe, we were not anywhere in the mountains. Luckily, we do not have any missionaries that live up in the mountains. Really though, we are okay, not a really big deal. I have got some really cool videos though.

Shortly after the typhoon started to leave, i got a call informing me that i was to report back to the office. i was a little sad at first, but i am really glad to be able to help out.

Because of the flooding it was so hard to get from FengShan to TaiChung. Normally the trip would take about 3 hours on the train, but there was some flooding over the tracks and some bridges got washed away. So i had to change trains 4 times and them i had to get on 2 buses that transfered me to different train stops. It took 7 hours to get here. I am happy to be here. I have been here since Monday.

from now on i will be emailing on saturday. That is the preparation day that president has set aside for us.

I love my mission! This is just another opportunity to serve in a different capacity. President Hoer is hoping that i can help out a lot, since I know the Kaohsiung mission. Ideally, this will make the merge better.

Well I love you all. Thank you for all the emails. Sorry I don't have time to write each one of you. I only get an hour if that. In the office, we get so busy that sometimes we can only find 10 minutes to write.

Love,
Elder Anderson

I'm Okay Aug 14, 2009

2009-08-24T12:55:00.003-07:00

im okay. don't worry. there was little flooding where i was. i will email you in a couple hours.

love
elder anderson

Sorry Sorry Sorry Aug 4, 2009

2009-08-24T12:55:00.001-07:00

So last week there was a major computer failure! We are only supposed to use this email system, but last week the email systems all went down. I had just spent 40 minutes typing to you all last week and then when I went to send it kept saying server not found. Me and my companion were pretty agitated. This seems to happen a lot. We found out later that President Hoer gave people permission to use another email system like yahoo or gmail, but by the time we found out our day was already over and we couldn't go back to email. Sorry Sorry Sorry!

I will try and sum up last week and this week. I think I told you already our investigator Andy got baptized. He is doing really good! On Sunday he even went up during Sacrament meeting and shared his testimony and conversion with the entire congregation! He is a really awesome kid!

Well last week we had an interesting visit to the hospital hahahaha... I figure by now all you readers are on the edge of your seats. It wasn't that intense. My foot has been bothering me for the past 8 months because of this stupid ingrown toenail. Usually I can just dig the little stinker out my self, but about 2 weeks ago that little nail decided it wanted to become a submarine and dive to the bottom. Sure enough it took a 90 degree turn right into my foot. I did pretty good and i had dug it out all the way, but then the nail broke off and I knew i was in trouble. About 3 days later I could hardly walk so I called up Sister Hoer to ask her if I could go to the hospital to get it cut out. She gave me the go ahead and so we went.

I felt like I was walking to my death bed hahaha... I think Amy had an ingrown toenail once. And I remember her saying how much it hurt and then I remember one time her little gauze thing that was on it fell off and I saw her foot and it terrified me. So needless to say I was very reluctant to go. (Sorry Amy if it wasn't you, but I do remember very distinctly when I was really young somebody had an ingrown toenail and it sounded scary.

Don't worry the hospital we went to was one of the nicest hospitals I have ever been to. They sent me to the Dermatologist. The doctor was really good. She looked at it and said okay we can do this. And I was like no we can't, not with out serious anesthetic. I tried to get her to give me laughing gas, but she just laughed at me and grabbed pliers. She was really nice and once she realized how deep it was she agreed that we needed to do use a little local anesthetic. I was so glad! I had heard of other missionaries where the doctor calls the nurse in and a couple of the nurses quickly grab the missionary and hold him down while the doctor rips out the nail. Luckily, the doctor just shot some stuff in my foot which did actually hurt a little, but after that i didn't feel a thing. They went in and hacked away like Indiana Jones in the Amazon. It was pretty crazy watching this lady chop up my foot. I am sure you are all noxious by now so I will spare you the details, but it has been a week and it is basically healed up. The day after I could hardly walk, but after that it was fine. I am all better now though!

It was kind of a fun experience because I learned a bunch of new medical terms like Local anesthitic and laughing gas. When I asked the doctor if I she could give me laughing gas, she looked at me and laughed and said no no no no. I was sad, i thought that if i said it in chinese she might be nice.

Earthquake! The other night me and my companion were sleeping and at about 3 in the morning everything started shaking. I woke up and i looked over and saw my companion sitting up in his bad. He sounded scared, he has only been here for about 4 months so the Earthquakes are a little new to him. I think the funniest earthquake i have seen on my mission was during our personal study in the morning. When i was in the big city, with Elder Johnson, I was sitting there reading the New Testament and i had my feet on the legs of the chair I was sitting on. Then all of the sudden I felt my chair shaking and I thought it was my companion messing with me. So I was like "Hey Elder, knock it off, quite kicking my chair." Then I flipped around and realized that it was an earthquake. It was pretty funny, i felt stupid.

Oh Ya!!! So you know how i was jocking about delivering mineral water to the World Games?!?! Well Guess what?! It wasn't mineral water, it was fruit tea! Hahaha... isnt that hilarious, I had a feeling it was going to be something heavy and boring so I guessed a beverage. Sure enough, we showed up and they had us load an armored car full of Fruit Tea. It was fun though to be able to talk with some Americans and chat about what they thought of Taiwan. They spoke a little chinese, later on I found out that they were both Majoring in Chinese and Asian Studies. One of them was this really funny African American Lady from Kansas. She was super nice and just thought we were awesome. I convinced her to go on a mission for her church when she gets back. Seriously, i am not kidding, either that or the Peace Corp she said. Anyways, we rode in the Armored car to go drop off the tea at this venue. After that we hung out at the venue and talked with the people that came into the American Booth. It was pretty cool, every country had their own little booth. Not to be arrogant, but the American Booth was by far the coolest. Everyone that came in got free Oreos and Ocean Spray Fruit Tea. Then they had an astronaut come and talk to commenmorate the 40th anniversary of us landing on the moon. To bad it was all in English, most of the people there couldn't speak English. I almost volunteered to translate for them, but i stopped myself when the astronaut starting saying "Lunar Module, Moon Roover, liquid oxygen rocket propellant, gravitational orbit reentry " hahaha... yeah sorry NASA. I haven't learned what those words even mean in English yet. It was fun though.

We went to the Vaticaan Booth. That was actually pretty cool, but all the volunteers got really nervous when we walked in and they started to try and speak English with us but I had no idea what they were saying, which made me nervous, so finally we just asked them to speak in Chinese and once they realized we spoke chinese they all calmed down and everything went back to normal. They took us around and showed us all about Mass. It was a little awkward, but neat at the same time. I still don't really get the whole deal about praying to the all the different Saints though.

After that we went and looked at the Israel Tent. That was pretty cool too, we had a Christian Chinese Israeli guide us through the tent. So we learned about Judaism and Catholsism.

Well I hope i remembered everything from last week. My companion and i are doing really good. I might have time to send some pictures next week. We are going to go play ping pong in a second. Alright well i love yall.

Elder Craig Anderson

the Summit and Operation World Games July 21, 2009

2009-08-24T12:54:00.000-07:00

Hey Hey hey!!!!

I can't believe that Ali and Dad made it! Sounds like it was quite the adventure. I am so jealous! Although we get to see a lot of neat things happen on a mission, in Taiwan it is not very adventurous. The only adventurous thing we ever really get to do is eat crazy things, but by now I have already eaten them all. Plus, I have been here so long I am starting to like the crazy weird things.

I bet that hike was so hard. I was thinking, since we do live at about 6000 feet i am sure you guys were already pretty ready for the hike. Not to mention the training that i know you have been doing. so cool!!

Although we didn't get to go on some crazy African safari, On Sunday we did have a little activity with the American "Embassay" in Taiwan. I have to put Embassay in paranthesis because since the UN will not recognize Taiwan as its own country, technically, we are not allowed to have an embassay. However, we do have what is called AIT. Which is the American Institue in Taiwan. That's pretty clever huh? They say we can't build an embassay so we said fine we aren't building an embassay we are builing and "insitute" punks. Hahaha...

Anyways, Sunday night because the World Games are going on in Kaohsiung right now, the embassay (lower case e ;) ) needed people that are both fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese to assist the Athletes and what not. So they had us stationed at different hotels throughout the city to assist the athletes in getting to this big event at the mall. Our job was to excort the athletes from their hotels to the American Party at the mall. Well it just so happens that the hotel we were scheduled to be stationed at was for all the Frisbee Players. And they just so happened to have an event that night, so NOONE came for us to excort. O well it was still fun standing their feeling important.

So we called up the embassay and told them that none of our atheletes came but they told us to come to the American Party anyways. So we went to this huge party the funniest thing that happened was that our bishop was there. As we went to walk though "pseudo-security" that they had setup we saw our bishop who is a police chief. He is a really nice guy and he was glad to see us. I call it pseudo security because as soon as I walked through the metal detectors they started beeping and ringing like I was carrying a fully automatic machine gun. But I think all the police officers were to embarassed to come pat me down. Plus right as the alarms went off our bishop came over with a big smile on his face to shake our hands. I could have been packing heat!!! How do they know i wasn't? And maybe our bishop was in on it. ssshhhh... don't tell them.

At the party we were supposed to help the guest and what not, but it turns out that the majority of the people that came to the party were not even American. Out of all the people at the American Party only about 5 percent of them were American and that includes the 10 missionaries that were there. President Hoer came down to attend, originally we were supposed to do a little more translating for the athletes, but it turns out most of the athletes didn't really seem to mind not understanding.

It is okay though. Elder Christensen and I have another assignment on friday at the embassay. On this assignment we get to ride in an armored car. Hahaha... Seriously, but it is not that cool we are just helping them transport some stuff to the world games. I think we are supposed to help the driver get there and unload the stuff safely, I am pretty sure the driver is American. As of right now we don't know what the "stuff" is but apparently it needs to be transported in an Armored car. Who better to trust then a pair of Mormon Missionaries hahahah... That is probably what the embassay is thinking too.

The reason we got this service oppurtunity is because the main guy at the embassay is a returned missionary who served in Taiwan, he has really good chinese and he is kind of like the liason between the english speakers and the chinese speakers. but because of the World Games he has had to much on his hands so he asked the Mission if we could help out and do a little service for Taiwan and for the United States. It should be pretty cool. I am sure Mom is reading this thinking, I don't want my son riding in an armored car with who knows what they are transporting. Don't worry mom, i bet we are in charge of the imported mineral water that the american athletes demand to drink. i still don't get the whole concept of putting water in a bottle and selling it at ridiculous prices.

As i am sure you know, we love to do service and we are hoping that by doing service like this that we can be a good influence on everybody.

i think i told you about how we went and taught the cops english right? we were joking about it the other day, if we ever get in trouble in Taiwan i think we will be okay. The embassay loves us, the Kaohsiung Police chief loves us, heck we could probably get a permit to park our bicycles where ever we want. :)

So apart from the service we have been doing our investigators are also doing really well. We have a baptism scheduled for Saturday. Zheng Cong Da. He is a great kid! 15 years old and is moving right along in learning about the gospel. We are excited for him!

Yesterday we went to Taichung to have our first Zone Conference as the new mission. I love our new mission president. President Hoer is just as amazing as President Hsu. I guess when people are called directly by a Prophet of God they usually are pretty great people. Its amazing how inspired the callings and assignments for all the volunteers in the church are.

Well as you all continue to climb the "mountains" in your life, remember to take a shot at climbing the spiritual Kilimanjaros that are sitting right before us.

Love you all,
Elder Craig Anderson

P.S. - Oh ya can somebody do me a favor and call Obama and tell him that I am not going to be able to make it to our Luncheon on Friday. Tell him Jack Bower and I are busy transporting the mineral water.

Stunt Devils and teenagers July 14, 2009

2009-08-24T12:53:00.000-07:00

well i may not be summiting everest this week. but it has been a pretty good week:). i hope dad and ali are doing good and having fun.

this week was such an awesome week. we talked with a lot of people and it was awesome. we didn't reach the goal of talking with 1000 people, which was fine because this week we spent most of our time teaching people. everyday we had about 5-7 appointments. it was really nice. there are 3 young kids that we have been working with that are getting ready to get baptized. there are all 16 year old guys and they are awesome. i never knew 16 year old guys ccould be so spiritual. anyways, we are trying to make them all become friends so that they can strengthen each as they grow in the church.

there is one kid named Andiee who is just awesome. He met the missionaries about 3 years ago and came to church a lot, but his parents didn't like him going to church because they are buddhist so they told him he couldn't go anymore. well last week we ran into him on the street and he was like yeah i would love to come back to church, but my parents say i can't. so we told him to go tell his parents that he wanted to come to church on sundays and stuff and his parents said that would be great as long as it makes him a better person. which of course it will!! he loves praying and reading the scriptures and he loves church. there aren't to many 16 year olds who love sitting thru 3 hours of church, but you can just tell he loves every minute of it.

the other 2 kids are Weng Kid and, Xu kid. I found these drumsticks in our apartment, i have no idea what they were doing there. anyways, the Xu kid plays the drums so we took them over to his house last night and gave them too him. his dad was so touched by us giving him these old drumsticks that we found. now his dad is super happy that his son is going to become christian. as a matter of fact he has been asking us, what else does he need to do? he will even make sure his son is saying his prayers at night! isn't that awesome! his dad is buddhist, but will still make sure that his son is being true to his commitments.

as far as preaching the gospel, everything has been going great. however, recently my companion took up being a stuntman. 4 days ago we were going to visit this investigator out in the middle of no where and we were cruising down this pretty steep hill, i was about 50 yards behind my companion, when all of the sudden this scooter pulled out from a side street right into his path. my companion isn't a very coordinated kid and he kind of freaked out and ran straight into the scooter. He went flying thru the air and did a full flip. hahahaha... luckily he was fine, but now i call him Evil Kanevil. his bike was beat up really badly and he was a little scratched up. the front tie on his bike was all crooked! i guess thats what happens when you ram right into a scooter.

he has only been here for 3 months and is still getting used to the driving style over here. its okay though, i think this accident has been a great learning experience hahaha.

well it was great to hear that Grandma is doing so well. sounds like everything is under control. hope you start feeling better grams. i love you and pray for you all the time.

love you all,
Elder Anderson

sombreros and spagetti July 16, 2009

2009-08-24T12:50:00.001-07:00

This week was another very interesting and busy week. The weeks seem to flying by! President Hsu will be heading home in less than 2 weeks! After that our new Mission President will be coming down and meeting with the office staff down here. Hopefully, I will get to leave the mission office and get to go back into the field. At the present time I should be going back out to be a normal missionary soon.
I really want to go to a place that is smaller and more rural. I feel like I can do more good in those places. In the city there is just TOO much stuff to do you can’t figure out what to do. But out in the country you can really focus on a couple people rather than trying to juggle 20 or more in the city.
So you will not believe this! Right next to our office is a new Mexican Restaurant. It is authentic!! There is this guy from LA. He grew up in the states but his parents are Taiwanese. He doesn’t really speak Chinese, but he speaks English just as good as any American. He isn’t really Taiwanese at all he is American. Anyways, he just opened up this shop and the food is so good. He is a really nice guy and he is already asking questions about us. I am hoping that we can just kind of eat Mexican food with him and talk to him about the gospel. He is such a nice guy, probably about 26, his name is Mark Wu.
It was really funny, because lately I have been thinking about how much I missed Mexican food and then sure enough we see the sign for “Pacos Tacos” pop up last week. Eating at peoples restaurants and making friends with them is such a great way to share the Gospel. What happens is people kind of realize that we are people too. A lot of people when they see us must see us as aliens or machines or something. There is this Wei Family that I always go and eat their noodles at their noodle shop. They might be coming to church soon. They love us though and think we are the funniest nicest people in the world. In actuality they are the funniest nicest people in the world.
Well I need to go get my fix of Mexican food.
LOVE YA,

So I ripped apart our network here at the office, because whoever put it together before must have thought that networks are supposed to look like a bowl full of spaghetti noodles. Hope you like the pics!

July 5, 2009. Hoses and 1000

2009-07-05T20:33:00.000-07:00

I finally moved away from the office!! I am a place called Feng Shan now and it is an awesome place. It is rural in some places and really busy in others. It is perfect. My new companion is Elder Nicolai Christensen from Park City, UT. This is the first companion that I have had that has lived so close to us.

Once I found out he was from Park City, I had to ask him if he ever remembered when the big red "PC" statue in front of their school got painted yellow. He said he remembered it and he told me all about it. I started laughing and had to tell him that it was me that painted it. Small world huh? It was homecoming week so I had to do something to show my school spirit right?

Anyways, today is our P-day because we merged with Tiachung Mission last week. All the people in Taichung are moving today. So I will still email you on Wednesday as normal.

Elder Christensen is on his 3rd move so he is still really new, which is really fun. For example last night we were eating at a members house and Sister Lin was asking if we were full, and we were so full, so I told her that I was full but my companion was still starving so she came back with a big old plate full of sausage and kept putting them in his bowl. Hahahahaha... And then 2 days ago there was this kid playing with a hose and I told the kid, "Hey my companion wants you to spray him!" and so the kid looked at me like "Really?" and I was like "Yeah, he says it is really hot and that he wants you to spray him a little bit." Right as the kid started to spray my companion Elder Christensen figured out what was going on and ran away.

We are getting along great. He is a really great guy! Our area is struggling a little bit, we don't really have a lot of investigators currently, but we have a goal to invite 1000 people to meet with us this week. I think we can do it!

The Taichung Mission is really different from my old Kaohsiung Mission. They have different ways of doing things and different rules, which will be hard to adjust too but I think it will a great learning experience. I miss President and Sister Hsu so much. Those 2 were so awesome, I hope they are doing good and having a nice rest in Hawaii. That is where they live so I guess it isn't probably like the vacation we would think it is, but I bet they are taking a rest after 3 years of service.

Being a missionary really takes a lot out of people. I saw President and Sister Hsu's picture from 3 years ago and they looked so much younger hahahaha... I guess they did worry a lot about us missionaries.

So funny story, I have been using a left over bike from a missionary that just went home and it is terrible. If you pedal to hard the chain will skip off of the teeth on the gears. Anyways i was pedaling up the driveway from the parking garage underneath out apartment and sure enough it started skipping of the teeth. it is really loud when it does it, so the security guard that protects our complex came running over and saw me walking my bike up the embankment with the chain clicking against the gears. I told him "This bike is a piece of junk." and he laughed and in English said "Made in China." Hahaha... it was just funny because Taiwanese people are really proud of the quality stuff that they make so it made me laugh.

Today we are going to a science museum so that should be pretty cool. I have actually been wanting to go to this museum for a long time, but all my other companions had either already been or they just didn't want to go. But this morning Elder Christensen was like hey do you wanna go? So i we are going. Probably sounds boring to you, but I think it will be cool.

Pray for us this week so that we can talk with 1000 people! Love you all,

Elder Anderson

June 30, 2009 Email

2009-06-30T20:47:00.001-07:00

Elder Yang just happens to be terrified of elevators. As we have been packing up the mission office, it has been hilarious to see Elder Yang as he nervously gets in the elevator with all the boxes. Finally, we took the last trip to the car and we headed back up to clean the office.
Well we cleaned everything up and at about 10:15PM decided to head home to get some sleep. As we headed down the elevators we all looked at each other and it just seem to click in everybody’s head all at the same time. “1..2...3.. JUMP!” So we took a little jump in the elevator just to scare Elder Yang, however, it must have also shocked the elevator too because it came to an abrupt stop! We started pushing all the buttons and it wouldn’t move.
Luckily however we did have ice cream on hand so we called the management and then sat down and started to eat our ice cream. Finally an hour and a half later, all of the sudden it started moving again and we were freed. It was a very interesting being in the elevator that late at night, for a minute or two there I thought that we might be having a little camp out in the elevator.

Love Elder Craig Anderson

Return Date

2009-06-26T13:34:00.001-07:00

As you will see in the letter below. Craig's official release date will be December 22, 2009. What fun to have him home right before Christmas and for the holidays.

Robert

2009-06-26T13:33:00.001-07:00

HELLO!!!

So this week was so stinking awesome! We had 2 baptisms. I know I have told you all about the Jewish man that we have been working with. He has been doing so well lately and then finally he was ready. He has been meeting with the missionaries for over a year and has progressed slowly the whole time. Since he is about 60 years old and has a very strong Jewish background, it has been a hard long road. But through the power of the Spirit influencing him day by day he was able to change.
His story is very unique. A little over a year ago, the missionaries were heading home late at night and they ran across a drunken white man on the street. His name was Robert Hirsch. He was lost and drunk out of his mind. They felt bad for the poor guy so they asked him for his wallet to see if they could find his address for him. They found his address and realized that it was way too far away to walk. So they jumped in a taxi with him and took him home. After dropping him off the missionaries headed home. A couple days went by and the missionaries didn’t think much about the incident, but they had a strong impression to call him and see if he was doing ok.

They called him up and asked how he was doing. He was so thankful for what they did for him that he invited them over for dinner. Days later they went over to his house to eat a special spaghetti dinner that he had prepared for them. He introduced the missionaries to his wife and 3 kids. They all sat down for a good ol’ American dinner as Robert would call it. During the dinner of course the topic turned to religion. Poor guy just wanted to thank the Elders for helping him, he probably didn’t want to talk about religion. Hahaha… Well what did he expect. However it went very well and Robert was very interested in the “Mormon” religion that he had always heard so much about. The missionaries quickly explained that the “Mormon Church” is not our actually name, it is a nickname that other people have given us and they told him that our church’s full name is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They explained that the center of our religion is the savior Jesus Christ. Of course Robert teased them about some of the rumors and half truths he had heard about our church but in the end he was still very intrigued and decided to keep listening.

The first several lessons were very rough. Coming from a non-Christian background made learning the gospel just that much more difficult. As he continued to meet with missionaries regularly his attitude started to change. He started to treat his family more kindly, he started to quit some of his addictions, and he started to feel the love of the Lord as he began to pray and repent.

His progress has been very obvious, about 5 months ago I had the opportunity of being in this same area. On several occasions I was able to meet Robert and talk to him at church. At the time he was meeting with the other Elders so I never taught him at his home, but at church I would talk with him and we started to develop a friendship. I don’t know why, but I always seem to make friends with 60 year guys. They are usually the smartest and most interesting people though.

Well I moved away for a couple months and then came back to this area when I moved into the Mission Office. We started teaching him regularly and began helping him to prepare for baptism. I think the most memorable moment of teaching Robert was the night that we got him to forfeit all of his cigarettes and alcohol. He has always struggled with drinking and smoking, but on that night he decided to change. He went into the back room, grabbed several bottles of rice whiskey and we all went and dumped them out. Since Robert doesn’t speak Chinese I asked his son in Chinese if there was any more alcohol in the house. His son thought about it for a minute and ran off into another room and came back with another bottle. So once again we went back and dumped it all out. It was kind of funny because I don’t think Robert was trying to hide it, he just forgot about that bottle, but of course we had to tease him a little bit about it.

We left that night with several packs of cigarettes in our pockets. Thank goodness our Mission President didn’t come visit us. It would have been a little hard to explain why our pockets were full of cigarettes and why we smelled like smoke. Hahaha… Luckily we didn’t run into anyone so we just went home and flushed them down the toilet because we were afraid that if we threw them in the trash our neighbors might think we were smoking.
Anyways, finally on Thursday he was baptized. He still isn’t perfect and will probably struggle with several things throughout the remainder of his life. However, the change that has happened to his family is so amazing. They truly have felt the love of the Gospel. His wife decided to wait a little while to be baptized, but Robert and his daughter Elli were baptized. They all come every Sunday and are probably the most active members of our ward.

Here are their pictures. Elder Frandsen performed the baptisms, Elder and Sister Frandsen are the coolest. Elder Frandsen was a missionary here about 30 years ago. Him and his wife have been here for about 1 year and they always feed us really good food  They will be heading home in about October just before I come home on the 22nd of December. Oh and yes that is the official day I will be coming home.

Anyways, I hope that Robert’s conversion story makes sense. I am having a hard time thinking how to write today. I am sure I left out a ton of little details but I will rewrite it in my journal later. Love ya all.
Peace,
Elder Craig Anderso

Sombreos and Spagetti

2009-06-17T08:46:00.001-07:00

Clearest Day Yet

2009-06-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

June 9, 2009

2009-06-10T07:24:00.001-07:00

A picture of one of the clearest days i have ever seen in Taiwan!
I don't know if i have ever told you all about the random fireworks that get light off over here. Somedays you will be biking down the street and all of the sudden things will start exploding all around you. I am starting to get used to it, but the other day I honestly thought the Bloods and the Crips had started a turf war and I was stuck in the middle. Of course my companion who is a native was probably wondering why in the world I dove underneath an empty dumpster and curled up in the fetal position. They don't have guns over here so when they hear fireworks they think " oh fireworks!" or as they would think in chinese "ah! qing chang hong hang bang bing bong su ran pao" (And yes that is all one word). But of course being an American I hear loud bangs and 2 thoughts go through my head the 1st "Is it hunting season?" If the answer is yes, then everything is ok. If the answer is no, then of course the next natural reaction is to curl up in a ball and hide. hahaha...
so if you are wondering whether or not i really did curl up underneath a dumpster or not, the answer is no i didn't not. but only because there aren't any dumpsters here. They recycle everything so they won't put dumpsters out on the street because if they do people will use them. But the other day i almost really did get a bottle rocket to the face. That was fun. Just like old times.
Love you all,
Elder Craig Anderson
PS – stay away from fireworks!

June 4, 2009 Monkeys

2009-06-10T07:23:00.001-07:00

Well I am sorry I didn’t email yesterday! Things got really crazy and we were so busy I couldn’t even sit down for 10 minutes. I t turns out moving a mission is a lot of work. It’s okay though, it is really fun and I get to learn a lot.
This week has been another wonderful week. Yesterday morning we actually went to a place called Monkey Mountain. And yes you guessed it. It had monkeys on it. Lots of monkeys, they are crazy. I thought they were going to eat me. We brought a loaf of bread with us to feed them and it was very intense. You had to be really sneaky about pulling the bread out of your bag or else they would jump you. They are evil little creatures!!
I am sure Ali is reading this and just shaking her head thinking that monkeys can’t be mean. Ali trust me all I can say is Wrong, Evil, Smell, Bad, gross, mean. Hahaha… it was really fun though to get outside of the office and go climb a mountain. Besides the monkeys there was a really good view of the city. Luckily there wasn’t that much pollution in the air yesterday so it was pretty clear.
I start to love the culture more and more here. What I mean by that is the old Chinese culture. In old Chinese culture, people are very respectful, families are the most important and they believe in doing good things. Their views are very similar to ours or at least used to be very similar to ours.
Here are some pictures of the monkey gang that we ran into. I hope you like them.

love ya
Elder Craig Anderson

May 19, 2009

2009-06-10T07:19:00.000-07:00

This week we met the coolest guy on the street. He is so perfect! We went and ate dinner together and he was asking all these really deep soul searching questions. I really like him a lot. He is a computer programmer in the building across the street from ours. On the way home the other night we saw him on the street and started talking with him. At first he was really stand offish, but then I started talking about computers with him and he really warmed up.

We gave him a church pamphlet and invited him to read it. So we setup a time to meet a couple days later. We all went to this little shop across the street and ate. He had read the pamphlet several times and had all these awesome questions about, "why are we here on earth?" "how do we know what is true?" So good! We gave him a Book of Mormon and setup another time to meet. He was so excited to read scriptures, when we gave it to him he could hardly pay attention to what we were talking about because he was flipping over the pages and holding it like it was the best gift he had ever gotten.

His name is Benjamin Chen, we actually helped him pick the name Benjamin because he didn't have an English name. Most people over here have an English name that they use. But Benjamin didn't so we helped him pick.

Today there are some new missionaries coming to our mission. 3 new ones to be exact. The new missionaries are so much fun because they are so perfect. Their faith is so strong and they just have no idea what to do. But you can feel their enthusiasm for the work and its awesome. Although they are completely clueless about how to do missionary work, they bring a spirit and a drive that is a strong inspiration and motivation to us. I love being around the new missionaries because they are basically white slates. You can teach them, and they are willing to accept what you teach. Even when we eat it is just so hilarious to watch this missionaries try to use chopsticks hahahaha... Don't worry I usually don't laugh at them. As I am sure you can tell I am excited to welcome these new missionaries today.

I have good news too! I do not have to do referrals anymore! Last week I was supposed to move from my current job to do that, but my company Elder Zheng isn't moving. I am so relieved, I was really not that excited to do that job. So I get to keep doing what I have been doing for a while now. Anyways, thats good right?

I also have some more good news. I might be leaving the Office on July 1st to go back out into the field. Originally President Hoer of the Taichong Mission was going to take all of us in the Mission Office up to Taichong and work from there, but now it looks like they won't need us so we can go back and be normal missionaries again!!!! I am so excited, but still plans could change. Lets just hope I can get out into the field soon.

Well thats the story for the week. If you have complaints please email them to somebody else. :) hahaha

love ya
Elder Craig Anderson

May 12, 2009

2009-06-10T07:14:00.001-07:00

Happy Mother’s Day to everybody!
It has been another great week in the service of the Lord! We saw so many miracles and blessings this week. Since we only have a couple hours at night to go proselyte we usually do not find that many people to teach, but lately we have been so blessed to find people everywhere. It seems like we can hardly step foot out of the office without talking with somebody that has an interest in hearing the Gospel.

Last night we got out of the office a little late and were hoping that we could find one person that would set up a time with us for latter in the week. Instead of finding 1 person, we found 2 and instead of setting them up they agreed to sitting down with us immediately. Both of them have setup times to meet with us again. They are so good!!

On Sunday, we had a really neat experience with a man that just walked into the church. I know that doesn’t sound that miraculous to you, but in Taiwan, people do not just walk into a Christian Church. So we gave him a little tour of the Chapel and then sat down with him. As we were talking with him we asked him, “Why did you decide to come into the Church?” and he said, “When I saw it, it looked really warm and friendly, kind of like as if it were my home.” It was one of the best lessons I think I have ever seen. He was so excited about reading the scriptures and when we offered to give him the Book of Mormon, he insisted he must buy the book. Obviously we can’t take many, so we insisted that we absolutely would not accept any payment. He was so astonished and excited about this new scripture he had to read. Unfortunately, his family was still waiting for him outside. They had been eating at the restaurant next to our Chapel and he finished early so he could come take a look inside our church. So he had to leave in a hurry and we didn’t get a chance to set up another time to meet with him. I hope he comes back next week, he was really intelligent.

Then when we were tracting the other night we were trying desperately to find a family. We could not for the life of us find a family that was willing to listen to our message about eternal families. Finally, we knocked on this one door and at first I didn’t think they were going to let us in, but they did and we taught them all about who Heavenly Father is and what his plan is for us. It was a very different family, it was an uncle who takes care of his brothers kids. One of the kids was mentally handicapped and we think that the uncle might have adopted the kids because their parents passed away or just aren’t able to care for these kids. We are going back on Sunday to teach them more about the Plan of Salvation.

As for the office week, it continues on. We are still preparing for the merge of the 2 missions on July 1st. So we have about 6 weeks to get everything ready for that. But guess what happened!? My shredder broke! I was so sad, but after fiddling with it for a while I fixed it. My companion tried to stick about 30 sheets thru at the same time and it clogged it up really good. Anyways, as the sequel to my last adventure with the shredder I have included some pictures.

1st picture is my companion and I with 2 other elders at the Aquarium on our rest day. My companion is on the far left. And then there is Elder Fronk and Elder Wang
2nd picture is me fiddling with the shredder…. Hahaha I am sure you hate pictures of this by now
And then the rest are just some random pictures

Love yall

Elder Craig Anderson

April 2- what you see below

2009-04-08T14:48:00.000-07:00

Hey Hey Hey
Well it has been another wonderful week in the Office. Since it was the end of the move last week I was really busy. I have to prepare a lot of things when missionaries get moved around, so it is a big headache. When 50 people get up and move and you have to keep track of them all it makes it really tough. I can't even imagine how they got work done back in the day when they didn't have computers. I have a hard enough time working with everything even though I can use a computer.

Since we don't go out that much, I don't really have any cool stories, so I figured I would have to spoil you all with some pictures.

1 - We went and hiked this mountain on preparation day and on the very top of the mountain there are these natural gas geysers. Anyways, they spit out this really cool mud stuff and over time it makes these little mud pillars, or mud volcanoes. I was worried it might explode while I was on top of it... Just kidding they don't really explode, they just kind of squirt.

2 - You remember that old man who would always cheat when we played Ping Pong. Well we got him on tape, I might have to notify the local judicial system about the evidence we have gathered. Currently it is still an on-going investigation, but with this latest break through I think we can close it.

3 - This is my old companion Elder Li! He is awesome and we had such an amazing 4 weeks together. It was to bad that we didn't get to spend the whole 6 weeks working together, but I had to go and get myself assigned to working in the Mission Office.

4 - This is my favorite food street in Gang Shan. They have the best curry pork in the entire world. Oh and just so you know, this is one of the wider alley ways. They can get a lot smaller, trust me.

5 - For those of you that know me really well, this picture might seem weird. I hate bowling! But we went on preparation day and it was actually really fun.

6 - This is just some random guy that wanted to take a picture with me. They were really nice and we invited them to come to church.

7 - And last but not least (matter of fact this is my favorite picture), this is the Soy Sauce aisle at the grocery store. Everything on the left hand side is strictly Soy Sauce!!! Who would have thought that they would have that much Soy Sauce in Asia!

Anyways, things are going great I am still acclimating to being in an office. We stay really busy, you would think that because I can use a computer pretty well it would make things go smoother, which it does, but then I end up picking up extra projects and what not to help out the office. Like the software we are making for the native missionaries to learn English. It is fun though, and it is a whole different aspect of Missionary work that i get to learn about. It is also fun to be able to talk with president hsu as often as we get to and learn about how the mission is run and about the inspiration that is involved with every little detail.

Well I hope these pictures can stifle your thirst to know about what is going on in my life.

I love you all so much,

Elder Craig Anderson

April 2, 2009- picures

2009-04-08T14:29:00.000-07:00

FIRST WEEK IN THE OFFICE.......

2009-04-01T13:30:00.000-07:00

MARCH 31
Well its not as bad as I thought it was going to be being inside. I am actually very grateful that I get to sit in the air conditioning during the heat of the day hahaha... Summer is almost here too and it is starting to get really hot out there. My schedule is basically the same. 6:30 get up and run for 20 minutes. 7:00 shower, 7:45 eat breakfast. 8:00 personal study, 9:00 - 9:50 companion study. Then after that my time is a little more uncertain. Usually, I have to make a ton of phone calls to gather some information about the mission. So from about 10:00 - 10:30 I spend time talking to other missionaries about their areas and their recent baptisms. When I have time there are some things that I need to do. The first thing I do is organize baptismal records. When people get baptized they send the records to me and then I type them into the computer and make back ups in case the original gets lost. Then I type in all their information so that we can send them mail easily. After that I send it all to Taibei.
Then before Wednesday of every week I prepare a powerpoint of the mission. I just include a bunch of things that President Hsu needs to know about. Like which areas are struggling and which areas are doing really good. This helps him to know how to better help the mission improve. My favorite part of my job is the little side projects that i get to do. Right now I am writing a program for the Chinese Elders after they go home to help them learn English. It is going to be an interactive CD that they can use on their computer to practice English. And lastly my job is to backup everything and prepare for the move up to Taichong in 3 months. I have a lot of time so it should go pretty smooth. Basically that is my job right now. Some days are really exciting and we get to drive around and visit far away places, and then other days are really boring and you just sit there and type away all day. Oh ya... I got an International Drivers License so I can drive around the mission cars. Last week we went to Ping Dong (my favorite place in Taiwan) to help setup an activity that was going on over there. Obviously, our rules are a little more flexible then most missionaries. Sometimes we have to stay out late or get up early, so that is kind of nice not always being in a rush to get home at night. Right now we have an investigator named Robert. Robert is American, he is about 60 years old and is very close to getting baptized. I met Robert 3 months ago when I was here and I got to be really good friends with him. Now I get to teach him! It is really strange teaching in English. Robert is very patient and is sure to correct me when what I am saying doesn't make sense. We laugh about it because sometimes, I say things in Chinese and I don't even realize and he just looks at me like, "Are you trying to be cute boy?!" hahaha its funny. He is a really nice guy who was raised Jewish. When he was in his 30's he started traveling the world teaching English. He has got a lot of crazy stories, Anyways he ended up in Taiwan and got married and has been here for about 17years. He has 3 kids and a wife. Robert, his wife and his daughter all are getting ready to be baptized in May. I'm so excited for them. Well, I love you all keep up the good work!
Elder Craig Anderson

WELL I GOT SOME NEWS.....

2009-04-01T13:27:00.000-07:00

MARCH 24
Hey, Well quite a lot has happened since we last talked. On last Thursday, about 30 seconds after I had gotten out of bed. The phone started to ring. Since it was 6:30 am, I was already a little drowsy. I answered the phone and quickly realized that the person on the other end was our Mission President, President Hsu. I already knew what he wanted. On Wednesday night I had a very strange feeling that the next day President Hsu was going to call me to be a Mission Office Elder. Sure enough President Hsu told me that he had decided to call me to be the Recorder in the mission office. He said that because of the merging of our mission and the Taichong mission they need me to come be here during the transfer to make sure all the data and what not gets setup correctly. Right now I am emailing you from my desk. It is really weird, I can't believe that I am no longer out in the mission field. It is okay though because from 6 pm to 9pm we get to be normal missionaries. It is also weird from not being able to use computers to using a computer all day long. It is fun though, I get to learn a lot about how the Missionary work is going. It is also neat because part of my job is to record the new baptisms, so I get to share in the excitement and joy of seeing somebody accept the Gospel of Jesus Christ. My job basically includes processing the mission information to better help President Hsu run the mission. Apart from that I am the computer repairman of course. After President Hsu called me on Thursday it has been crazy. He told me I needed to pack up and be at the office in 3 hours. So I threw everything in my bags, including my wet clothes that were still in the washer. Hahahaha... It has been great though. There is a lot to learn and the Elder that I am replacing only has about 1 week to show me everything that I am supposed to do. It is really fun though to be back in my old area. Last night we went to visit one of my old investigators from 3 months ago. I am back in the city now. Downtown Kaohsiung. It is great! So now when you guys think of me, don't think of me being out on the street talking with people or walking down the street preaching. I am in and office from 8am - 6pm. But after 6pm I am normal again get to go outside! I love going outside. I was never much of an inside person. But I am happy to be in a position that I can help out. Right now this is where I am needed and I know that the Lord confirmed it to me that Wednesday night before I got the call. My investigators in Gang Shan will be taken care of by my old companion. My new company is an Elder Zheng. He is awesome and is from Taiwan. He is hilarious! Well I have got a lot of stuff to do so I gotta go but I love you all and look forward to hearing your responses next week.
Craig

Jehovah's Witness and Rick

2009-04-01T13:19:00.000-07:00

MARCH 17
This week, I got to play Ping Pong twice! Right before English class I played for about 15 minutes! I never realized how much I missed little things like that. We played with that old man a couple weeks ago, but we don't have a whole lot of time. I bought a Chinese paddle, and I have got some crazy spins on that ball now. All of our investigators are doing awesome. We have 3 that are so close to getting baptized. It seems like people always get right up to the very last step and then they lose faith. If only they would take one more step of faith. There is a new college kid that we have been meeting with named Cai Jing Wei. He is so cool! Everytime we set up an appointment he rides his bike 30 minutes to come meet with us. And then on Sundays he rides his bike 30 minutes there and back to come to Church. He is a really humble kid, who is sincere in his desire to know. Sometimes people we meet with aren't really there to learn they are just there to mock us or start arguments. Usually, the people that argue are the funniest because, us missionaries refuse to argue. It doesn't do any good to argue. No one learns anything and the Spirit leaves. We won't raise our voices, which usually just makes them more agitate because they are trying to makes them more agitate because they are trying to get a reaction out of us.
Speaking of arguments. These Jehovahs Witness missionaries are staulking me. They came to our church and were trying to tell me that every hardship that we have, is God punishing us! I was nice to them and told them that I believed differently. Look at Job for example, He was such a good guy, but he went through some really tough hardships. Anyways, they were very agressive, but we were still nice to them. I guess I wasn't mean enough though because they keep coming back. Everytime they come they tell me that they just want to encourage us to read the Bible. I was a little more firm this time and I told I do read the Bible, every morning for at least one hour. And they were like no you need to read the Bible, what they meant was I needed to read the Bible the way they see the Bible. Finally I told them listen, there are thousands of different christian churches in this world, how do I know that your perspective on the Bible is the correct one? They seemed a little confused and said that if I was reading the Bible carefully then there wouldn't be any confusion about correct doctrine. I told them that is what every church says. I don't think they have had many chances to talk to other Christians. Less than 5 percent of Taiwan is Christian so they mostly talk with Taoists and Buddhists. Anyways, I shared with them in Ephesians 4 about, Apostles, Prophets, and Evangelists. I asked them if Christ promised us these Apostles and Prophets, Where are they now? I love that chapter in it, it talks about how, Apostles and Prophets are necessary for the unifying of the saints. I love that line! Anyways, I told them that I truly believe Heavenly Father has once again given us Apostles and Prophets, just like Moses and Abraham. To guide us so that we are not 'tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine' that is blown our way. I tried to give them a Book of Mormon, but of course they didn't accept. They didn't really want to let me talk actually. If people want to have an open discussion where both sides get to share spiritual experiences and insights I am more than willing to participate. But if you want to come and start arguments and say things that are meant to hurt people, then I won't sit down with you. The Jehovahs witness missionaries always want to sit down, but I know that if we sit down we will just spend an hour and a half listening to them talk. Next time they come I am going to hide, hahaha, just kidding. I won't hide. But I WILL continue to bare testimony for the living Prophets and Apostles on the earth today. Anyways, i wrote a lot more about them than I wanted. :). Guess who came to see my on Sunday? Rick, my new convert from Ping Dong. I didn't know he was coming and when he walked into the Chapel I almost had a heartattack. Hahaha... I haven't seem him in months. He is doing so good and is a Sunday School teacher now. Every other week he teaches the adult Sunday School and then on the weeks he isn't teaching the Adults he teaches the 8 to 12 year olds. He is so awesome! He is so smart and has learned the Gospel so fast! It is amazing that someone who wasn't christian 8 months ago, now has one of the strongest testimonies of Jesus Christ. It was so good to see him and it made me want to work even harder as a missionary to find more people that are ready to hear the Gospel. When people learn by the spirit like Rick, rather than learning by the intellect, you can learn so much faster. To me it is amazing that members like Rick can understand the Bible better than people that have been studying it there whole lives. If you study it like a Chemistry textbook, you aren't going to learn a whole lot, but if you study it as the word of God you are going to learn really fast.
Well I got to go eat hot pot. Hot pot is like a big stew and everyone has there own pot and you through in all sorts of stuff. Its great because everyone gets there own so you get to make your own soup. Usually you boil your meat and vegetables and then you pull them out and dip them in sauce and eat it with rice. Its sooooo good. thinking about it right now makes me even hungry,
Love yall Elder Craig Anderson
Taiwan Kaohsiung Mission

CRAIG STILL DOING WELL

2009-03-12T17:11:00.000-07:00

Elder Craig Anderson is as enthusiastic as ever about his call to serve the people in Taiwan. His latest email described a new and exciting change that will occur in his mission in July.His current Mission President will be released and two mission will combine to make one.
The Taichung Mission President, Michael Hoer will oversee the new larger mission and he now serves as the president of the current, smaller Taiwan, Taichung Mission.This mission covers the area north of Elder Anderson's current mission.Elder Anderson is excited about this upcoming change as it means he will get to see more of Taiwan. His family anxiously awaits to see if this means he will be coming home at the same date he originally was given in December. We all wish Elder Anderson the best and are so excited for this new development.

March 10, 2009

2009-03-12T17:02:00.000-07:00

Taichong Mission and Exterminators
I have some really cool things to tell you guys! As a matter of fact they will change the rest of my mission. As I am sure some of you know President Hsu our mission president will be heading home in July. So the past couple weeks we have been waiting to hear who our new mission President will be. Well yesterday at the Leadership Training Meeting, President Hsu read to us a letter from the Prophet. In the letter it stated that the Kaohsiung Mission will be consolidated into the Taichong mission! Starting July 1st I will be a Taichong Mission Missionary. The Kaohsiung Mission is becoming part of Taichong. How crazy is that? I will now have a chance maybe to go serve in Central Taiwan. Taichong doesnt take care of northern Taiwan though so i wont go to Taibei. But still. Not many missionaries get to say they served in 2 different missions. My new mission president is the current Taichong Mission President. I don't know him or much about him, but it will be fun to work with a new mission president. All the missionaries are so suprised. We are excited though, it will probably be a little tough to transition at first, but it should be a great learning opportunity.
After the Leadership Training Meeting yesterday, I helped president Hsu setup a backup for his computer. I wrote a really cool backup program that they use in the mission office and he just wanted me to put that on one more computer so it was pretty easy. I was teasing him that he can't tell the new mission president that I can fix computers, maybe I can keep it a secret and fly under the radar. haha actually if they need help I am willing to help.
This week we have had 2 investigators that are so close to baptism. One is a native aboriginee kid, named kang bi. He is awesome, as a matter of fact, he is the pianist for another church here in Gang Shan. Its an aboriginee christian church and is a little different from most christian churches, but he has been reading the scriptures and praying like crazy. If you do those 2 things you will gain a testimony of the Book of Mormon. If you dont you wont. He is awesome. We invited him to be baptized and he said he would have to think about it. Since right now he has a responsibility at the other church he doesn't want to just run away. He is so awesome! we don't want him to ditch his responsibility either, so he has been trying to find somebody else to take his place. As soon as he can find somebody he will get baptized. We just hope he can find somebody!!!
Our other investigator is a filipino guy named Greg. I think I have told you about Greg before. He is so hilarious. Since my companion can't speak English, usually Greg and I just talk. I help my companion translate if he wants, but usually he just lets me teach Greg. We taught Greg at a 7-11 so the environment wasn't the best. I invited him to be baptized and he agreed!!! But he said he doesn't want to in Taiwan. I don't blame him either. If I was him chuch is very difficult to attend in Chinese. I translate for him, but it is not the same. He is going home in September or October and wants to be baptized when he gets home!! We will forward all the information to the Phillipines, but until then we will keep meeting with him.
Well My time is running low. Time is not like gasoline unfortunately, you can not refill it whenever you are almost out.
Gotta go Love Elder Anderson
ooo hahaha... so this week our aparment complex hired exterminators to come and spray all the sewers in the area. It smelled really bad cuz they use this smoke stuff, but I couldn't help but laugh at all those little mosquitos in there choking. My companion knows a little enlglish and he does an imitation of a mosuito in the sewers. He bends his knees and starts to shake and says "I'm so sccaarreedd!" Hahahah it looks so hilarious. I am glad they finally did something about the mosquitos thoough, cuz it was getting really bad.

March 3, 2009

2009-03-12T16:54:00.000-07:00

NEW BABIES AND F-22'S
Congratulations to Crystal and Jake! So his name is Samuel? Can i call him Sambo, or Simba for short? Hahaha, I hear he is cute and looks a lot like Jake. But you really can't tell he is so young. Crystal you should be glad people don't say he looks like you, if people started telling me that I looked like a pudgy little bald bundle of love I might be a little offend.) I can't believe i have a new nephew, before I get home someone better teach that kid how to hold a fishing rod. I have 2 nieces and one nephew now. SO stink cool! Well Gang Shan is doing crazy good! Because there are only 2 of us now, we stay very busy. As a matter of fact, during our nightly planning sessions we only have to spend about 5 minutes planning, because the days are already planned out for this week. Lots and lots of lessons.
We visited the new Liu family this week. They love us, we brought some games over to there house and talked about how our priorities effect our lives and that family should be our number one priority. The parents loved it and invited us over again this saturday, this time to talk about our church's message.
Last night we met with the funniest man I have ever met. He was so energetic and at first I thought he was mocking us because he was acting so excited when were teaching him new stuff! But then I realized he was genuinely excited, we gave him a Book of Mormon and he said we would have it read in 2 weeks. We tried to tell him that speed wasn't the most important thing and that pondering its message was most important, but he seemed pretty intent on reading in 2 weeks. hahaha... o well it should be good. That was one of the best lessons I think I have ever had. When I spoke it just seemed so natural, usually I am usually trying to compose grammar and think of the right word, but last night it was perfect. It truly was an awesome lesson!
I love my new companion. Elder Li is hilarious. We get along great! I really like being with native companions, they seem a lot more humble. We are doing so great here! I probably won't be moving at least for another 2 months or so, so I am glad that our area is doing so well. When your area is struggling it makes the work a lot tougher. Last Sunday I played the piano again for Sacrament meeting, but this time i had practiced. During lunch and dinner time last week I practiced a couple new Hymns. I really like to play piano, just not in front of 80 people. It is weird how you can play a song perfectly by yourself, but as soon as you get up in front of a congregation its totally different. It is also tough, because you have to listen to the congregation and adjust your speed. I had never really be a church pianist before until I came here. Hahahaha.... poor Gang Shan has to listen to me every Sunday. Its not that bad, as long as I can practice during meal times.
I have I ever whined about the mosquitos here. Man they are everywhere, I swam through a flock of them the other night. There were so many I thought that they were going to pick me up and carry me away. My companion calls them F-22 like the fighter airplanes. It's hilarious cuz he says it in English and it makes me laugh every time. Right after he says it he makes the sound of a turbine engine. Oh good times. Amazingly, I havent gotten bitten at all recently, I have been really careful cuz some of them have got a weird fever thing that I dont want to get. I guess Gang Shan is infamous for mosquitos. We are famous for 2 things here, Mosquitos and Goat meat. Its actually pretty good eatin, sometimes the Mosquitos get a little fiesty when you try and put then in the Microwave, but I usually just flex my muslcles and show them who is boss and they jump right in.
We live in an brand spanking new apartment complex built for Veterans so all the people there are mostly old army dudes. They are pretty hardcore old guys there. That guy I play ping pong with is an old army man. Anyways, it is weird cuz there are thousands of older people and then these young 20 year olds. It kind of feels like we are living in an retirement home. hahaha, I dont feel retired, I feel tired, but not retired. Wow to be "re"-tired most be really tiring. Ok that wasn't funny.
I know I tell you all the time, but I love my mission. I don't think there is anything more that I would like to do write now than be a missionary. Of course I miss home and america but it is fun to be have the chance to serve that I have. Lastly, iIwanted to tell you about Superman. There is a member here named Superman. He is very special. Really weird actually, anyways, he is about 45 years old.He is working on graduating from college, which I think is awesome. But he wants me to do all his English homework. I guess its not really homework, he has to translate his thesis into english. Most of the students just pay to have it done, but he doesnt have enough money. A couple weeks ago my companion volunteered me to translate this paper. It is so hard, I just finished yesterday. This paper destroyed my confidence hahaha. I thought that i had okay chinese, but this paper was going off on all this crazy stuff, like mechanically engineering. I wanted to cry when I was trying to translate it. Anyways, superman was very grateful for the free missionary english translation. It was interesting service that we were able to do this week. Plus I learned a lot of useless technical terms I almost got eaten by our elevator. Elevators in asia are different then our American elevators. Elevators here have an appetite. And if you get stuck in the middle they will squeeze you until you are flat as a piece of paper. Its okay though we were able to pry it open and release me from it evil little jaws. My shoulders are still a little sore. Hahahaha... Well I pray for me to find more families to teach.
Love ya Elder Craig Anderson

February 22, 2009

2009-03-12T16:49:00.000-07:00

OOPS I FORGET- MIRACLES RIGHT AND LEFT
Well I forgot to tell last week, that today is move day. I didn't move though I am still in Gang Shan. My new companions is Elder Li, he is from Taibei. Anyways, he was in the other companionship in my apartment, but now there are only 2 Elders in Gang Shan instead of 4. Its really cool to be with someone I already know. It should be a great move. Right now we have a lot of really cool investigators so we should stay pretty busy. So I have been playing the piano in Church the past couple weeks for sacrament meeting. Anyways, usually the coordinator calls me on like Tuesday and tells me that they need me to play, but he didn't call me this week so I just figured he got another person to do it. However when I showed up sunday morning he told me he needed me to play. If i haven't practiced at all that week I can't play. So I told him I would have to play one of the songs that I played last week and then I told him that the other 2 I didnt really know that well. So sacrament started and I played the prelude music, which was actually me just trying to practice the last 2 songs really fast. I got them down pretty good. Sacrament meeting started and the opening hymn was really easy. I played it no problems. Then came the sacrament hymn, which was also really easy, I messed up a little but I dont think anyone noticed.. Finally it came to the congregational hymn when everyone stands up and sings and stuff. So I got up there and started to play, but I was so nervous I could hardly make my fingers move. About half way through the 1st verse i decided just to play the right hand so at least there was a tune. I dont know why but I couldn't even do that, I kept having to stop and start and stop and start, finally about half way through the 2nd verse I just grabbed the Hymn book and jumped up on my feet and started singing the Hymn as loud as I could. The Bishop looked at me and gave me a humorous smile. Anyways, I had to quit playing halfway through the Hymn and just start singing. When you get nervous it makes it impossible to play. Everyone thought that it was pretty funny, so I wasn't that embarassed. I just wish the coordinator would have told me before i got there. Hahahaha... Since we are short 1 companionship here in Gang Shan that puts a lot of work on our shoulders. Our area is huge now! It spans quite a bit of land. We are going to be biking a lot this move I bet to go visit people all over the place. I don't know what we are going to do for our English class because Elder Li doesn't speak english. That will make things a little difficult. I guess we will find a way. I know I am emailing you a couple days earlier than normal, so don't feel bad about the fact that you didnt email me or anything. However, I must say thank you to Aunt Marylin and Ali for sending me emails this week.
Well I realized that I have stopped telling you all about the little things of Taiwan. They all just seem so normal to me now that I forget that you guys don't know. Have I ever told you that 7 Elevens own the world over here. Every street has got a 7-11 and i am not even exagerrating. You can pay your bills there, you can even go to these little computer stations and order a taxi! Its crazy, you use this little touch screen and then 5 minutes later there is a taxi waiting for you at the 7-11. Now that it is getting hot again we have been going to the little drink stands everywhere. They mostly sell tea, but obviously since we can't drink tea we buy juice and stuff.
Last week Elder Williamme and I saw so many miracles. Two weeks ago we had a rough week, but last week we had 5 new investigators. And one of them is a family. We have been praying to find a family, and finally we were tracting on Friday and we ran into the Liu man. We talked to him a little bit about the Gospel and he didnt seem to interested, but we asked if we could come back on Saturday and share a little more about our family message. He was a little reluctant, but said okay. So on Saturday we went back over and just chatted with him for a while and started to share about how families can be together forever. And that through the teachings of Jesus Christ our families can become stronger. He got so excited and started opening up to us about all the worries he has about his 3 sons. Anyways, he asked us to come back this Saturday to share with his whole family!
Every once in a while people will let us into there house, but people almost never invite us to come back and share the gospel with there family. Usually we ask them and then they just tell us they don't have time. I am so excited, because this Liu guy seemed really excited about what we told him too. That was only one of several miracles. On Saturday morning I got a phone call from a number I didn't know. So I answered and it was a guy that we had talked to on the street the other day. At the time he didn't want to give us his phone number so we just gave him ours. He gave us one of those "Don't call me, I'll call you lines..." I was thinking the whole time, come on body we are not stupid. We are missionaries, we get rejected more than Mugsy Bugs does playing against Shaq. Lo and behold, he did call us back and said he wanted to meet with us. We met with him and he was awesome. He is a young guy named Wu and he seemed to really listen to what we were sharing. I have never had someone like that call me back! It was awesome, I felt a little guilty though because when i gave him our number I didnt actually have the faith that he was going to call us back. Its crazy! The blessings are every where. This is a pretty long email, so i will let you all go. Have a good week i guess i will "talk" to you in a little over a week.
Elder Craig Anderson

February 17, 2009

2009-03-12T16:45:00.000-07:00

MICHAEL JACKSON AND THE COLOR ORANGE
Today we finally have a rest! We have been running around so much this move. Last week we were in Taipei and the week before that we we went hiking. Today, we are just going to relax and play some ping pong. I found a new ping pong friend, I think he is pretty good. We will see. Last week was a really tough week as far as teaching went. The entire week last week we only taught one lesson. All we did last week was talk to people on the street. For some reason all of our good investigators were too busy. But on Sunday they all came to church so that was good. It was a little embarassing when we went to talk to the bishop this week, even in Asia 1 lesson is a pretty low number. Its okay though because this week we found a ton of really interested people. On Monday we had 3 new investigators. So I guess after our trials we get a little ward. Right now I am in a smaller city called Gang Shan. Its actually got a large land mass, but once you get out of the city it gets pretty rural. I am in a small little ward. They are pretty good to us, you can't really blame the members when they are mean to you though. They just don't understand what is like to be a missionary, some of them just don't understand the importance of missionary work. Our bishop though is amazing, he is one of the most amazing members i have ever seen. He is so willing to help and is always encouraging us to do better. Thanks mom for reminding me I am past the half way point. I am so sad, it seems like the time has gone way to fast. Last night I was thinking about what it would feel like when i get released as a missionary. I just can't imagine taking off the name tag that I have the honor or wearing everyday. It is sad to think that i only have one chance to do this. I love my mission what I like most about it is the fact that I get to be a personal representative of Jesus Christ. Anyone can teach about Christ, but I have the privilege of being his messenger. I can't imagine any greater position in the world. Another thing i love about being a missionary is seeing people make changes in their lives to follow the commandments of God. When they do this you can see the light that seems to glow from them. It reminds of the scripture in the Bible. "Let your light so shine before men, that they make see your good works and glorify your God which is in heaven." You truly can tell the difference between people that are living the Gospel of Jesus Christ and those that arent. And that's why I love my mission.
This week we started doing service at this school right next to our apartment. On Tuesdays and Thursdays we are crossing guards hahaha. and we get to wear this little goofy hats and reflective vests. Anyways, I thought it was exciting because its pretty rare to get to wear anything that exotic in public. Can you believe it?! I got to wear a reflective vest hahahaha. Ok it might not seem cool to you, but those vests are pretty sweet, they put Michael Jacksons reflective little outfits to shame. Now all I gotta do is start wearing one white glove and then my wardrobe would be complete. Heck i could even start moon walking across the street as i wave the hunter orange flags above my head.
Love ya all Elder Craig Anderson
Taiwan Kaohsiung Mission

Feb. 11, 2009

2009-03-12T16:44:00.000-07:00

HELLOO!!!!
Sorry for the delayed emailed! we just got back from the temple in Taipei. It was so awesome, it was just really a great experience. While we were up there I ran into an elder I was with in my Missionary Training Center district-I havent seen him in about a year and it was great to catch up for a couple minutes. Occassionally we write a little postcard to eachother but it was fun to see some friends. The coolest thing about the temple was how amazingly spiritual it is. Everytime you go, you can't help but have you faith increased and your appreciation of the Lord Jesus Christ increased also. Luckily the meeting was conducted in English. It would have been really tough in Chinese, its really deep stuff. Well today we don't have a whole lot of time because we just got back and we have to go start our english class in about 45 minutes. But I just wanted to send an email so that you all wouldnt get worried. I love you all so much! So what's new on the home front? I hear rumors of Ford and Chevy and all them went Bankrupt and are no longer making cars or something? I can't believe that. Oh well, we will climb out of the rut i am sure. People are always talking about the economy over here, we arent allowed to make comments about it since we are missionaries so its really weird. We just have to change the subject or keep our mouths shut. The same with politics, which is tough because those are the 2 things that peope like to talk about most. Well since we had to sit on a train for 4 hours today I am a little tired. I am gonna call it quits and head home to grab something to eat. I love you all.
Elder Craig Anderson
Taiwan Kaohsiung Mission

Service Feb 3, 2009

2009-02-04T08:28:00.000-08:00

Well Well Well,

I was thinking last night about what I could possible write to you all back home that would be entertaining or humorous, but this week was a pretty mellow week. Although there weren't any humorous stories we had a really neat spiritual experience on Sunday.

There is a Filipino member named Freddie who is here in Taiwan working. He served a mission in the Phillipines and is just an amazing member. He comes to Church every week and I translate into English for him. His english is really good. Anyways, after church he asked us to give him a priesthood blessing because he had been feeling really homesick and down since he has gotten here. So after church we went into a class room and talked with him for a little while and then I had the opportunity to bless him. As we placed our hands on his head I felt a tremendous desire help him. He looked so depressed and I was honored to be able to give him a blessing. As I said the blessing I truly felt inspired by the Holy Spirit to say those things that would be a comfort to him at that time. I didn't understand his situation, but the Lord did and he was able to comfort Freddie in his time of need. I know that God knows each of us and he also knows each and every one of our trials and pains. It was such a testimony to me, to be able to act as a tool in the Lord's hand and bless this Filipino brother during one of the many trials of his life. I love serving the Lord. Our opportunities to serve come so suddenly and unexpectedly. Last Sunday i never thought i would be giving Freddie a blessing, but I am so thankfully that I was ready and worthy to act as a servant of the Lord. In the Book of Mormon, King Benjamin taught his people "I tell you these things that ye may learn wisdom; that ye may learn when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God." (Mosiah 2:17) When we serve others we express our love and gratitude to our Father in Heaven. So get out there and serve somebody! :) hahaha...

Well my time is a little shorter today because there is a member who is taking us to go take a look around the city for a while. I love ya all and hope you are doing okay.

Love,

Elder Craig Anderson

Happy Chinese New Year Jan 27, 2009

2009-02-04T08:27:00.001-08:00

first things first! i beat that 85 year old man hahaha... he was amazing though! i am sure he would have beat me so bad 40 years ago. me and Elder mickelsen went to play him last week and he was really serious about it. he made elder mickelsen referee while we played. Anyways, the old man cheated so bad hahahaha... i called him out on it a couple times but he always was like ask the ref, and then me and Elder Mickelsen just looked at eachother and smiled and let him do what he wanted. i think its part of the culture here that if you can cheat and get away with it there is no shame in it. it was so hilarious. i think the funniest thing was when the ball bounced twice on his side and he hit it back so i caught it and he gave the point to himself. then i asked him, didn't it hit twice and he said i dunno ask the ref. hahaha. then he started giving himself extra points. anyways, it was so fun i cant even tell you how hilarious it was. a big part of the culture over here is saving face so after i beat him 2 games, he was like, i brought the wrong paddle today, this is the wrong paddle. what a cute old man. i cant really take any pride away from beating an 85 year old guy, but he was stink good. when we first started playing i was worried.

this week is chinese new year. since monday we have been eating like crazy. lunch and dinner is always at a members house. in about 45 minutes we are going to a members for lunch. most of the stores are closed so there is not really any good food to eat, so the members put together this little schedule to invite the missionaries over for a meal. it was really nice of them and it has been a great way to meet the people here.

since i am in a smaller town, nothing to crazy happens for chinese new years. fireworks are always going off and people are always burning the paper money to worship their ancestors. when i first got to taiwan it took sometime to get used to the fireworks here. they use really loud ones and so it feels like little bombs are going off around you. i was thinking about it the other day and this would be a terrible place to bring a war veteran they would be having flash backs every 5 minutes hahaha...

well this year is the year of the BULL. i didnt know that until a couple days ago, but it makes a lot of since now, because lately i have seen a ton of people wearing chicago bulls coats and hats and stuff. i am a Dragon, so i still have a couple more years until its my year.

this week we havent really been teaching that much because everyone is out partying. we have been teaching this Filipino guy named Greg Bancolita, he is awesome. there is a member here from the phillipines so we invited him to come help us teach and he basically taught it all in Tagalog (filipino language). it was awesome. he have been teaching this greg for a while. his english is good, but talking about gospel stuff is a little hard for him. well, i gotta go eat some more chinese food. the gospel is true!!!

love you all,

Elder Anderson

Ping Pong and Drunk Old Men Jan 20, 2009

2009-02-04T08:26:00.000-08:00

There is this guy named Jiang that we went to visit this week. I had never met him before, but my companion said he was a pretty okay investigator. Anyways, when we got to his house he was out front in some lawn chairs drinking tea with his friend. It was about 8 pm at night and really dark. anyways we talked to them for about 5 minutes and then one of their drunk friends starts walking down the alley towards us. When he got to us he was so excited to see foreigners and started rambling on and on. I had to strain my ears to understand what he was saying. He started asking us a ton of questions and when i told him that my chinese last name was Zhang. He freaked, he was like "NOOO WAAYY!! ME TOOO!!!" It is important to make note that there are only 100 chinese surnames, and my name is the most common, so i usually run into about 10 people a day with the same name. But this guy got so excited, he was like " HOW DO YOU SAY ZHANG IN ENGLIGH?" I told him that there is no translation and that my name had no relation to my english name. But he was too drunk to understand, and he kept insisting i teach him how to say ZHANG in English. FInally i spent a couple minutes and taught him how to say ANDERSON. He was so excited he ran over to his friends and was like "wo shi (i am) ANDERSON, wo shi anderson wo shi ANDERSON." It was hilarious, finally i told him how to say "I AM," but he didnt catch the AM part so he ran around for about a minute and a half saying "I ANDERSON! I ANDERSON! I ANDERSON!" hahaha he was having so much fun i didnt want to correct him, plus he wasnt going to remember how to say it the next morning anyways. moral of the story dont drink... hahaha we run into a lot of crazies on the street, but the great thing about Taiwan is that it is one of the safest countries in the world and most people are either scared of us or love talking to us.

My new area is really fun. It is much smaller, but not too small. It is also really fun to have another companionship in the same apartment with us. He have too much fun. Elder Li is Taiwanese so we speak in Chinese most the time. Its really weird talking to other americans in Chinese. My companion is a little bit newer so it is hard to communicate with him, but me, Elder Mickelsen and Elder Li have a blast. Its going to be a great move, we have a lot of good missionaries in this district. The 4 Elders and then 2 sister missionaries.

Currently our area is not doing so well, we dont have very many investigators, but this week we found some really cool ones. 3 in particular. I have never really liked contacting people on the road, but it is really fun! Thats where our 3 best investigators are from. All of them were contacted by us on the road. Usually our best investigators are Member Referrals. When members refer their friends and family to us and then help us teach it is the best. They are what we call Golden Referrals.

In a couple hours i am going to go play ping pong with this 85 year old man. He challenged me. He lives in our apartment complex, mind you our apartment complex has about 1500 people. Its huge! anyways, he told me he is the president of the ping pong club in our complex and he wants to play me. I warned him that i was pretty good, but i am sure he is going to whip my trash. i am excited. i remember one time we were on vacation and an older guy challenged me 50 bucks to a ping pong game. i was too young so dad shook his head yes and said that i could play him. so i played, he was good but i beat him. hahaha. we wouldnt let him pay us though, so everytime he saw us after that he came and bought us sodas and smoothies and stuff. hahaha anyways, this guy is pretty cool and i think by playing him every once in a while we might be able to make friends with people in the complex. i am going to go play during dinner cuz i think thats when the club meets. anyways i have only played a couple times over here so i am really excited.

well i love you all. i love being a missionary. i know that what i am doing is right and that the spreading message of our savior Jesus Christ is the most important thing that i could ever do in my life.

peace
Elder Craig Anderson

Bye Bye Koahsiung

2009-01-13T15:45:00.000-08:00

Well I am emailing you from a smaller town called Gang Shan, which means Mountain Ridge. It is a smaller city, much smaller than Kaohsiung, and there are no skyscapers here. It is rural and not rural at the same time. Anyways, my new companion is Elder Williamee (its pronounced weeamee) anyways, he is a really awesome guy and I am excited to be here with him. This area seems really awesome and I am so excited to go to work here.

It was sad leaving Kaohsiung and Elder Johnson. Me and Elder Johnson got along really well and saw a lot of miracles. It was such an amazing move. This move is going to be just as good. It seems like my mission just keeps getting better and better. Everyday I learn so much.

Since I dont know that much about my new area i dont have much to tell you. The ride over here is always a little weird. When we move we are allowed to be seperated from our companions, so sitting on the train by myself and then waiting at the Train Station was so crazy. As i am sure you all know we are always with our companions so everytime I always feel like I am out in public naked. Hahaha... Im always thinkgin where is my companion?! Where is my companion?!! and then i realize that I dont have a companion. Its so weird! Its actually not that weird, but normally we are just so used to watching out for our companions it becomes second nature to be worrying about 2 people rather than just yourself. You are always checking for cars for your companion and telling them where to turn. Making sure people dont steal their stuff. That kind of stuff. Worrying about just yourself is the weird part.

So Gang Shan isn't that far away from Kaohsiung. Sometimes I wonder if i will ever get to stray very far away from the city. I really want to go up north sometime, see whats up there. Gang Shan is about a 30 minute train ride from the Mission Office.

My new apartment is so nice. Its the nicest one i have ever lived in. There are 4 missionaries in it. Usually we only have 2 missionaries to an apartment, but this one is a little bigger and a LOT nicer. The other companionship is an Elder Li, he is from Taiwan and is a pretty hilarious guy. And then his companion is Elder Mickelson, he is from Washington State.

我要看看一下。你们看得到吗？

He did the chinese characters above show up? Probably not, you alls computers probably cant read them?

Anyways, let me know if you can see those characters.

So on Last Thursday, Elder Johnson and i went to go see if we could find a service oppurtunity at one of the schools in our area. Anyways, we went in and talked with them and they were way excited to have us help them do the crossing guard stuff. Anyways, we were filling out the sign up forms and there was this really hilarious middle aged man and this lady helping. I started writing and chinese and the lady was like "You guys can write in Chinese?!?!?!and then the guy was like "Of course they can write in chinese, their chinese is better than yours is!" it was really hilarious. its not true but they were really nice. my chinese characters are so terrible I can read really well, but writing is not so good. its okay though, my english handwriting isnt that good either. so i didnt really expect my chinese to look good.

well i gotta go do some stuff. love you all.

Elder Craig Anderson
Kaohsiung Mission

Email Jan 4, 2008- Jenga and Stink Awesome Investigators

2009-01-07T14:25:00.000-08:00

Stink i am so happy! Missionary work is so ridiculously hard, but I love seeing the changes we can make in peoples lifes. We have been working with this guy named Zhang Jian, he is about 25 and is one of the most humble guys in the whole world. Anyways, he is addicted to smoking and drinking, just like a typical 20 year old here. But he has a lot of time right now so we have been teaching him about twice a week and then on sunday he comes to church. Well we met with him the other day and he has been reading scriptures like crazy, he is underlining all the parts he really likes and everytime he prays with us it seems more and more sincere. In the lesson the yesterday i asked him if he had noticed any changes in his life since he started meeting with us and reading and praying. He thought for a second and was like I feel more peaceful and I have a real desire to quit some of my bad habits. the coolest thing about it is, that we havent even him told him that in our church we cant drink or smoke. He probably knows, but we havent challenged him to it yet. I love seeing the Lord work his miracles as he prepares people to accept the gospel.

This week we had a really funny family home evening activity with one of the new members of our ward Chen yi zong. He is one of the strongest members and he has only been a member for 9 months. Anyways, we went over to his dormitory and brought jenga. Then we taught a lesson about how satan will decieve us into taking away pieces of our foundation in christ. First we will start listening to bad music and out comes a piece of the Jenga tower. Second we stop praying so we took out more pieces. Anyways, we played and played until finally crash, our foundation crumbled and our testimony is ruined. It was one of the most fun lessons we have taught. We played twice and it started to get really tall, but of course i had to be the one to knock it over hahaha...

My companion and i have been trying a new method for finding investigators. We start eating at the same little mom an pop stores. Needless to say we are starting to get a little plump. just kidding, but we have been eating a lot because. so there is this guy that owns a pudding shop who is pretty cool, i always order icees from him anyways. we went and talked to him for about 30 minutes and taught him about the gospel. Its interesting how if you set up the right situation you can create a little bit of curiousity in anybodies mind. Once the owners get a little curious they start talking with us more and sit down with us as we eat. Anyways the pudding guy is pretty good, yesterday he gave the pudding to us for free. He is a really nice guy.

The economy over here is pretty scary. A lot of people are losing their jobs just like they are in America. As a result of the poor economy a lot of missionaries bikes have been getting stolen. I have a really good lock on mine, but if they have a truck they can just grab it and drive off and cut the lock off later. The missionaries all have like $400 bikes because if you buy a cheap one, it won't last 2 years, especially the way we ride them.

Well the Move Notifications are coming up soon. This Friday, so i will be emailing you again on Monday. Pretty quick. I could stay or i could go, either works for me. I would like to stay and keep working with the investigators that we have right now, but part of me wants to see more of Taiwan. I have never been to the North part of our mission, im a southern boy.

I think i told you all about my goal. Next transfer I am not speaking english with my companion. My goal is to go until the end of my mission. we will see how it goes. I hope i dont train next move, that would be tough for my poor companion if i only spoke chinese to him hahaha.. oh well i bet he would learn really quick.

Until monday...

Elder Craig Alan Anderson

Dec 31, 2008 Email

2009-01-02T11:43:00.000-08:00

Wow!

So I talked to a lot of you on the phone for christmas. That was fun! but really weird. hahaha... Not to mention Ali made fun of me and said my english was weird. ;) Thanks Ali, just kidding i love ya.

Sorry i didnt really know what to tell you all about. I dont know why, but everytime i call home i get really nervous. its like i am calling a really pretty girl to ask her out on a date. that probably sounds weird but seriously thats how it is. So although it was fun to talk to you, it is nice to be back to typing emails. :)

There is a guard who watches our building that we talk with a lot. We told him that we got to call home and he thought that it was strange that we only got to call home twice a year. We told him that we got to email every week and he was amazed. A lot of people really admire and respect the missionaries over here, and thats how we get a lot of people to listen to our message. So everytime we go out on the street we have to be looking and acting our best because people are always watching. We only have to wear our suits on Sundays and then after church we can take them off, but in the Taipei mission they have to wear them all day! I guess since Taipei is a little bit more upper class they want the missionaries to be dressed more professional.

So on Saturday Lin Miao Yin was baptized! He is a really awesome little 65 year old guy. He is only 5'0" but has the spirit of a tiger hahaha... Its funny because I have never seen someone his age accept the gospel. Most people just say they are too old to change religions, but this little guy read and prayed and knew it was true. On Tuesday nights the church has a seminary lesson that anyone can come to, right now they are studying the New Testament, anyways, he looks forward to that everyweek. He says his favorite days are Tuesdays and Sundays so that he can come to class. Lin Miao Yin doesnt have very much money. He has enough for living and paying his rent, but thats about it so my companion and I bought him a white collared shirt and tie so that he looks just like all the other members at church. Brother Lin was so touched that we did that for him. It was really neat to see someone so grateful for the missionaries like he is.

Christmas was pretty fun. It was awesome talking to you guys! Then we had the Mission Conference, where all the missionaries from all over come down and go eat at a really nice all you can eat buffet. Its probably one of the nicest places in Kaohsiung and it was only like $15 USD. Thats alot to spend on 1 meal, but in America it would have been a lot more. I wish food was that cheap in the US. it was good food too, they had all you can eat Hagen Dahz ice cream. MMMMM... i hadnt eaten that kind of food in a while. usually we just eat the rice and noodle "specials". There is a lot of good food here, but we usually try and be somewhat frugal with our money. So every week we will go eat somewhere nicer than the standard street shop. Dont worry the street shops are pretty clean, and we arent stupid we know which ones are good and which ones are bad.

love ya
Elder Craig Anderson
Taiwan Kaohsiung Mission (the other side of the world)

Merry Christmas and Happy Budda?

2008-12-24T09:53:00.001-08:00

Christmas in Taiwan is something else. I saw a Buddhist Temple that had decorated for christmas? Yeah i was a little confused too. But whatever. Most people over here understand a little bit about the holiday, but mostly it is just a commercialized version. In the smaller more traditional districts of the city, there is no decorations or anythin. But in downtown and at hotels there are because there are a lot of foreigners here and people just think it is fun to celebrate american holidays.

Well, this week Elder Johnson and I got sicker than if you rode that stupid spinning tea cup ride at disney land for an hour. it was viscous. Last wednesday we had a mission christmas party and then on Thursday Elder Johnson started throwing up like a there was a small kangaroo jumping up and down inside his stomache. so thrusday we stayed inside. Friday he was really week but at night we were able to go out and when we got back he felt fine.

Well, Friday night was round 2 for our companionship. At about 2 in the morning i woke up and my stomache at that time decided it no longer wanted to be attached to my body. it was not a happy time. well after the attempted exodus of my stomache. i felt much better but since i hadnt slept all night i slept most saturday until at 7 when we had a lesson. so we ordered a taxi to the church. taught the investigator and headed home. sunday i felt fine except our investigator didnt come to church so we called him and were like "hey why didnt you come?!" and he was like because SOMEBODY was sick yesterday hahaha... oopss i felt bad. oh well i feel fine now and wont have to deal with the flu for another year.

i bet my immune system is getting a workout here in asia. with all these people packed in this little area i think it must be getting stronger.

anyways, because we were inside for about 3 and a half days not much happened this week.

i have decided one thing and i cant remember if i already told you or not. i know the Lord sent me to Taiwan for a reason, i know for a fact that there is no way i could have gone on an English Speaking mission. I ran into an American the other day and he was so rude to me, if i had to deal with that in my native tongue everyday i would yell right back at them. in chinese when they are rude its much easier just to say nice things because, i know a lot more nice things to say then mean things hahaha.

so here is the story that accompanies the above paragraph. we were doing traffic control for a school acrossed the street from the churhc. what we do is we stop traffic so the kids can cross. and i noticed this white guy waiting at the entrance of the church so after we finished i went over and asked if he was waiting for someone. he was like ya but i dont have time and started walking off. and then i was like oh sorry are you waiting for missionaries or one of our members or something. and was like listen i aint waiting for the Lord boy. i was a little taking back because i was just trying to help him. so i just told him, sorry sir i didnt mean to make you upset, i was just trying to be helpful because you looked a little out of place. have a nice day! anyways, if i had to deal with that everyday i would go crazy. i took every ounce of my strenth not to make a smart mouth comment back to him.

well anyways. i dont like foreigners here, most of them are really mean. some are so cool though and are really excited to see someone else that speaks english. they are even more relieved when they realize we speak chinese. its fun to help translate conversations for lost tourists and stuff.

well i gotta go

love

Elder Craig Anderson

Hungry Phillapinos and Christmas Instruction

2008-12-18T07:11:00.001-08:00

oday we are having our Mission Christmas Party so we are emailing a little earlier. That also means that I dont have very much time, so I will try and make it quick.

This week I had one of the most amazing experiences of my mission. I was on exchanges with Elder Stockamp and we had just finished a lesson so we decided to go contact. We contacted for about 45 minutes and didnt have any luck. Then we saw these 2 kids sitting down and they looked a little depressed so we headed over to talk with them. We introduced ourselves in Chinese and then they were like, "uhhh we don't speak chinese, can you speak english?" They were from the Phillipines and came to Taiwan for work. Their english was perfect. Anyways, we sat down and talked to them for about 10 minutes about why they are here and why we are here. They that it was really cool that we were missionaries. They were both Christian, anways. We come to find out that they haven't eaten since they got here and since all the banks are closed on the weekend they can't change their money. Not only that, but they cant speak a lick of chinese. I insisted that they let us take them out to eat. Even though I am sure they were super hungry they were very hard to drag to dinner, but as soon as they got food in front of them they gobbled it up. At dinner we all said a prayer together and talked a little bit about how Christ can help us in our times of need. We found out that the reason they had gone to hang out by this river was to try and find other Phillipinos that might help them trade money. They said they had been praying that they would find a way that it would all work out and then not to long after that they said Elder Stockamp and I came over and talked to them.

These poor kids were 19 and 22 and had never left the Phillipines. They came over to work on one of those freighters, but the company that hired them weren't going to take them back on the ship until Monday which was, at the time, still a day and a half away. Anyways, we bought them a big old gallon of fresh water, because the water here is contaminated, and some chips. These kids were awesome, just really humble and faithful to the Lord. Luckily, they did have a hotel room that their employeer had rented out for them. Anyways, we gave them the Church website, because that was all we had to give in english, everything else we have is in chinese. We encourage them when they get back to the Phillipines to talk to the missionaries.

It was really neat experience, because as the kid put it we were an answer to their prayers. And it just felt really good to do honest service for someone that really needed it.

Today is the mission christmas party. We are going to eat at these american/asian buffet. it should be really good. We also get to watch the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas performance which should be really cool.

Speaking of Christmas i got that package Mom. Thanks you guys for all your letters and packages. Anyways so i will be calling on your Christmas day in the evening. I will call at 9 am the day after christmas my time. so figure it out the time difference. i will also be emailing you some international calling card numbers because i have 2 left over and i cant use them here. so i will call you first and then tell you to call me back using those cards. It should be like 6pm christmas day when i call. its too early i cant do math, but i think its 6pm. we will have about one hour to chit chat. hahaha love yall

Elder Craig Anderson
Taiwan, Kaohsiung Mission

Dec 9 Email

2008-12-18T07:10:00.001-08:00

hello everyone,

Its been 10 days since i emailed you all. A lot has happened. Me and my new companion are getting along great. He is awesome. This is his 2nd to last transfer so he only has about 2 and a half months left. We get along great and have a blast working together.

This week we have been teaching like crazy. we went back and met with a bunch of people that the missionaries had forgot about and we found some really awesome people. One of them is a little interesting. He has this "health water" company. I wasnt going to argue with him but he told me that if you drank this water every day you would never get sick and would live forever. They use a "special" water filter. hahaha

My favorite way to teach investigators is to get them to talk. I dont really like to talk a lot and i think the investigators get bored if they have to listen to american accents all day. so usually i ask them questions that get them thinking and then add a little here and there to get them on the right path. After that we usually read a couple scriptures together to help them to better understand specific gospel topics.

Our English class is also going pretty good. or at least it was until my companion and i got sent down to teach the little kids. YIKES!! i am terrified of them. I want to go teach the Advanced class. There are 4 classes, Little Kids, Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. Advanced is the most fun because you basically just talk to them and explain funny little things about the english language.

Anyways, these little kids are crazy, i thought that we were going to get eaten alive. i want the Sister missionaries to come teach it, but they want to teach another class. O well 6 weeks and then we are done with them. There is one kid who is really cool though he is about 7 and can speak english pretty good, he says both his parents speak, but it is still amazing.

To get people to English class we invite them on the street. we do a lot of street contacting, and if it is apparent that they dont have any interest in learning about Jesus Christ we give them an English flyer with the time and address. We also hang up some little posters at colleges to let all the students know that for community service we teach a free english class.

I remember when i was teaching the advanced class we had an entire lesson on english slang. Obviously we only taught appropriate slang but it was really fun. They were really confused about "Let's roll" like lets go. then we told them there were a ton of different was to say the same thing, lets bounce, lets roll, lets hit it. they thought it was really funny.

So christmas is coming up fast. i dont know exactly when i will be calling you, probably christmas evening. it will be the morning for me on the 26th so i am pretty sure evening for you.

This week we had a really funny lesson with a man named Pan. We had a lesson with him or atleast tried to have a lesson with him. We sat down with him and started talking just getting to know him. He knows we are missionaries and what we do as a matter of fact he had met with missionaries before. So we said a prayer with him and then my companion started to open his scriptures and asked Pan if he could share a scripture. Pan told Elder Johnson that he didnt want to here any scriptures and that he just wanted to chat with us. I started laughing out loud. I have never seen any body tell us to close our scriptures. it was so funny, well we arent going to be meeting with him again. After he rejected my companions attempt to share a scripture, he started bombarding us with all sorts of crazy questions. we kept trying to him back on gospel topic but he was bouncing all over the place. Finally elder johnson was like why the stink are you asking so many random questions? and then the guy was like i dunno, i just want to learn about foreigners. so we told him that he can come to english class if he wants to learn about that stuff. we get a lot of people like that, who arent interested in religion.

streets are crazy here. i love small areas a lot better. the only thing better about the city is that you dont get as many crazy accents here. in the country you run into all sorts of different dialects. i could probably understand it know, but before i would have been so lost.

love ya

Elder Anderson

Hey its Me! Email Dec 1, 2008

2008-12-01T12:48:00.001-08:00

well today is move day! i have a new companion Elder Johnson from American Fork Utah. It should be fun! I am staying in Kaohsiung so I did not have to go through the headache of having to pack everything up and move. I know Elder Johnson because we were in the same area when i was down in fang liao.

The past 4 days have been just getting ready for the move. We had a thanksgiving party on Saturday for our ward it was way fun, we put together a little skit about the pilgrims coming to america, but we put a little twist on it. The opening scene there are these 2 missionaries that knock on a familys door that are eating thanksgiving. the little kid runs to the door and sees that its the missionaries and yells back to his dad "hey dad, its missionaries do you want me to close the door?" but the dad says no its thanksgiving let them in. then we changed scenes and it goes to this indian family and the pilgrims knock on the door and the little indian kid runs to the door sees that its foreigners and yells back to the chief "hey dad its some white people, do you want me to close the door?" but the dad says no and lets them come in to eat thanksgiving. it was really funny, but kinda hard to explain.

on Wednesday, my english class students brought me presents. they asked me how old i was 2 weeks ago i told them i would be 20 soon and they remembered my bday. they are so nice, i got a really nice apple and some tasty taiwanese snacks.

on thanksgiving, Sister Frandsen and Elder Frandsen invited us over to eat thanksgiving. it was awesome, of course it was no where even close to as good as thanksgiving at Grandmas, but i atleast got to eat a turkey dinner.

then on friday, we spent the night getting ready for the thanksgiving party.

Saturday, thanksgiving party, packed up elder yen's stuff. and then we had a lesson at night. time flies.

sunday, went to church ate food. organized the stuff we needed for this move. then at night we went to visit an wu family. they are really nice, they feed us.

love ya,

i will email you in 10 days with an update

My Fellow Americans - Email Nov 25

2008-12-01T12:45:00.001-08:00

This has been an awesome week! we have been teaching like crazy! yesterday we had 5 lessons in one day!! thats pretty rare over here. and all of our lessons were with amazing investigators.

Today is my birthday! stink i am 20 years old. actually because of jet lag i wont be 20 until tomorrow hahahaha. my last day as a teenager. it has been a really fun bday. we went and ate steak this afternoon. i will send you the pictures in a minute.

this week is also move week. i could be staying in Kaohsiung, but i could be moving too. i will know on friday and i will email you on monday (your sunday). this has been a really fun move. kaohsiung is a great city. i definitely like the country better though. people are to busy here. in the country it is more slow paced and people will chat with you.

on saturday we are having a big thanksgiving party for our ward. all our members are coming and so are some of our investigators. it should be fun. of course they invited all the americans to come too. my companion and i have been organizing it and so we are encharge of putting it together. its been fun.

this week we set a baptismal date with our brother lin. he is so cute. he is about 60 years old and is just hilarious. its been great teaching him, for the past couple weeks, he originally was the elders in the other districts investigator, but they found out he lives in our area so we took him and started teaching him. he is awesome! he reads a lot, which is the key to conversion, if you havent read the scriptures then it is going to be really hard to have a testimony of them.

yesterday we were teaching him in his small one room apartment. he lives there alone he has never been married. but his apartment is so clean and tidy i was really suprised. anyways, we taught him about baptism and told him that on december 27th we would like him to prepare to get baptized. he was so excited and said absolutely, he told us he had such a huge desire to be baptized. and i know that is true. i feel really bad for him because he just doesnt seem to have much in his life, but i know he has a testimony of Jesus Christ. and if you have got that, thats all you need.

we closed the lesson with a pray and my companion and i got up to leave. he came up to me and gave me a big huge. he is only about 4' 7" so he huged my stomach. i gave him a big huge back. i was really suprised. Chinese people dont huge, they think its really weird, unless it is a big occasion or something. anyways, he is just so cute. i was really moved by his enthusiasm towards baptism and his appreciation of missionaries.

originally he didnt want to let us come over to his house because he said he was a little embarassed since it is so small and he lives alone, but when we were leaving he told us. "come over anytime, this is your other home." i thought that was so nice of him. i seems like every culture has a saying about homes. mi casa es tu casa. that was what he said, except he doesnt speak spanish ;).

well thats about all for this week. dad sent me a letter the other day asking about the computers at the mission office. haha it made me laugh. i got a little tired of always telling you about fixing computer so i just stopped. but trust me i still fix them often enough. it is much more convenient now though being right next to the office. stinking computers.

Elder Anderson

PICTURES!

2008-11-25T12:45:00.000-08:00

Koahsiung city at night
Craig with his good friend the "doorman"
Craig overlooking the ocean

Cruising the streets on bike
With companion

Food and American Aliens

2008-11-21T09:30:00.001-08:00

well, kaohsiung is a big city. big big big city. there is a huge skyscraper here called the 85. i bet if you type 85 kaohsiung and google it you can find the building. we live right underneath that building. no joke, the building shades our apartment. every day except sunday we run around the park next to the ocean. its really cool, but the ocean is kinda gross. it reminds of san franciscos ocean.

it is starting to get cold here. its not really cold, but moderately cool. i hear in january we will wear our coats. so far though i have only worn a long sleeved shirt once.

the food over here is really good. we eat a lot of rice and noodles. actually every other meal we eat rice and then every other meal we eat noodles. the noodles are so good, i will have to make you all them when i get back. i like the cold noodles, but the hot noodles are also really good. there are a lot of different flavors and kinds of noodles they usually have meat and vegetables mixed in.

the rice meal is usually just a chunk of fried pork and sausage with some vegetables, steamed or fried or whatever. then you can put on soy sauce and other stuff. i have only eaten orange chicken once and sweet and sour i have seen but i havent eaten it. american chinese food is so different. the rice meal they usually put this crunchy vegetable stuff on the side. i think it is fermented ginger and garlic, i am not sure. when i first came to taiwan i hated it, then the other day i realized that they lady for got to put a the scoop of fermented ginger on the side and i was so disappointed. it made me laugh because i realized i am slowly becoming chinese. i have learned one thing about the food over here, that is dont ask what it is just enjoy it. its really good food, but sometimes asking what it is ruins it. and to honest sometimes the people dont even know what it is, which is a little scary, but dont worry they dont eat dogs very often over here. as a matter of fact it is illegal unless it is your dog. and even then i am not sure.

right now we are teaching some pretty neat investigators. we have a lot and they are all slowly progressing. most of them are newer investigators that we have been meeting with for maybe about 4 weeks now. there is one man in particular whose name is Chen Zhao Feng. He works in Kaohsiung but he lives farther north, monday to thursday he works and then he goes home. but next week he is staying so he can come to church. at work he reads his scriptures and he always bring awesome questions. he is about 29 30 ish, not married but really smart. he is a really sweet man. since Kaohsiung is not his home, at nights he doesnt really have anything to do so he always is willing to meet after he gets off work. then after we teach him a lesson, he goes home and reads the scriptures that we invited him to read. i hope he can start coming to church more often. he says he can probably work it out so he can come every other week. which would be an awesome start.

well. my "new" companion he is from taiwant. next week is our last week together. this transfer period has gone by so fast. he is a good guy. obviously there are cultural differences but thats what makes it fun. he has helped me with my chinese a ton, and since he doesnt speak english we speak chinese 24/7. its great, i feel really comfortable now.

since mom asked me about food this week i have to tell you about the most delicious drink in the world. they have a drink over here called Winter Melon Tea (its not really tea its just called tea) Dong Gua Cha. anyways, its really good. food is so cheap too. for 2 american dollars i could eat until i am ready to pop. i usually spend about 2 dollars on an average meal. if we want to go eat at a really really nice buffet, i am talking really nice, it is 10 dollars. of course there are some really expensive stuff, like McDonalds and other american restaurants, but for the most part we dont eat there at all.

this week i didnt have a chance to kick any scooters, but we did run into a lot of strange people this week. one man told us that his body could sing. i told him it was his mouth, but he insisted that it was his arms and legs that were singing. i felt really bad for him, because he seemed normal at first but after talking to him for about 30 seconds it was obvious. apart from the singing limbs though he was normal and could have a normal conversation.

then another man stumbled into the church, who was dressed very nicely he looked like an older gentleman, but when you looked into his eyes, you knew he was not there. i think it is so interesting how from someones eyes you can tell if they are crazy or not. anyways this older man told us about his encounter with aliens and how these aliens looked like americans. i didnt feel as bad for this man because it looked like someone was taking good care of him and dressing him and stuff. there is no welfare system here so there are a lot of elderly people on the streets with out homes or food, it is really sad, but atleast this man had someone who was helping him out.

love ya.

Elder Anderson

Hello

2008-11-21T09:29:00.001-08:00

Thanks for the emails this week. Although it wasn't enjoyable to read about Grandpa passing on, I am glad that he is able to rest and be free from pain and the troubles of this world. Its no fun being this far away from you all, especially after finding out about Grandpa, but I know what I am doing is important and that this is where the Lord needs me to be at this time. I hope you are all doing okay.

Whenever someone passes on my mind always travels to the Book of Job. When Job posed the question "If a man dies doeth he live again?" I think this is a question we all ponder at some point. Being a missionary gives me a lot of time to think about questions like this. And I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt in my mind that the answer to Job's question is "YES!" I know that we all, through the power of Jesus Christ, will live again. Despite how sad it is when someone as amazing and loveable as Grandpa passes, in the grand perspective everything will be okay. There is a scripture in Psalms that I have always found comfort in. I may have shared it before, it says "Be still and know that I am God." I know that God loves each and everyone of us and that the path that he has prepared for us individually is for our own benefit and betterment. I want you all to know that I also love each and everyone of you. I hope you have a great week! Let us all press on in the strength of the Lord!

Love,

Elder Craig Anderson

A poem and a pervert

2008-11-05T07:20:00.001-08:00

hey everyone.

basically this week was a good week. we had a area conference, where i got to see a lot of the elders i came to taiwan with. i can not believe that in aabout a month and a half i will be coming up on my year mark. where does time go? i dont have much to write about today. i wrote a little poem about time a couple months ago. i cant remember if i shared it with you before. it says

the older you get,
the quicker time flies,
so get off your butt,
and open your eyes.

the worlds out there,
already to play,
so dont just wait
for that bright sunny day.

put one your shoes,
and get up and go.
through rain and through wind,
through sleet and through snow.

the sooner you do it,
the sooner you'll see,
that life is not about,
the i or the me.

thats all for this week. love you all.

Elder Anderson

oh i almost forgot. so the other night we were biking home. we stopped at a stop light. in front of us was an older man on a scooter and another younger lady on another scooter next to him. i saw the old man scoot a little closer to the lady and start talking to her. i immediately got a sick feeling in my stomache. i knew something was going on. so i biked up to the guy and pulled up on his left hand side where he couldnt see me and listened to what he was saying for about 2 seconds. i heard a couple words that i immediately recognized as pretty foul. even if you didnt speak chinese just by looking at the poor ladies face you would have known he was sexually harassing her. so i said to the man. "HEY, GOOD EVENING!" he looked at me ignored me,and turned back to the lady on the scooter and started talking to her again. so i kicked his scooter and said "HOW ARE YOU THIS EVENING?!" he turned back to me with a little suprised look on his face and was like "uhh, fine i guess." i preceded to speak really loudly and asked him where he was going and just a bunch of other questions until the light turned green. the lady knew what i was doing and waved to me in a thank you kind of way and smiled and drove away. it was pretty funny. my companion didnt know what the heck i was doing, so afterwards he was like. what was that? i told him that the man was saying and he was a little shocked too. he was talking to someone else at the light. it was pretty intense. i felt like i did a good deed though. there are a lot of creepy men like that over here. i am just glad that i am a male, a white male too. they are a little scared of white people so thats good.

well i gotta go.

love ya,

Elder Craig Anderson

The Economy and Police Officers

2008-10-29T07:39:00.001-07:00

Hello everyone,

My new area is great! It is huge, and I am completely lost. I can get to the church and back, but that is about it. There are thousands of people, most of them dont even want to say hello to me, but thats okay. at least i can say hello to them. hahaha. sometimes people are so awkward. i just want to say to them , yes, i am white, yes i am a Mormon mission, and yes i want to talk to you about religion. i will have to give that approach a try when we get back out on the street.

when we contact people here, they always start whining about their work and the economy and money. they all assume that every single american is a millionaire, so they like to whine. whenever they start to whine i tell them about my friend, Elder Seawright, in Africa and how the people there dont have any food or running water. that usually humbles them up real quick. they start to be a little more grateful for what they do have. sometimes i want to ask them, how many meals a day do you eat? because if you have food and a place to sleep, you are pretty well off. thats basically all us missionaries have, food and sleep.

the big focus of this culure is education and money. if you dont have the latest cell phone or the best education then they consider themselves destitute. i am so glad that during these 2 years, i dont have to be distracted by that junk. greed is so evil. happiness is not found in the newest cell phone or the best entertainment system. i had a conversation with a guy the other day. he started the conversation, he was whining about his job didnt make him enough money. so i just said well atleast you have money to eat right? he was like yea thats easy for you to say, i bet you make a ton of money as a missionary. hahaha, i laughed, and told him that we are not only volunteers, but that we pay our own way. he seemed to think that was pretty cool, so we are meeting with him on Friday. i asked him if he had ever seen a sad missionary, and he said no. then i asked him if its not the money, and its not because its fun, then why are missionaries so happy?

funny story:
we were biking to an appointment yesterday, and this cop stuck out his hand and high fived me. hahaha. it was pretty cool, basically made my day. what a nice cop.

my new companion is really cool. he is helping me with my chinese a lot. even though we have a lot of people in our area, we currently do not have any really good investigators. i hope we can find some new people to teach. although there are a lot of people in the city, they seemed to be a little more distracted by worldly desires.

well i love you all and i pray that you are all doing well. i am doing great, tell grandpa wood i love him and that i say hi. i am praying for him.

love,
Elder Craig Anderson

I Moved

2008-10-20T07:26:00.001-07:00

i am in the heart of the city of Kaohsiung. Its huge. and guess what, i wil=
l be right next to the mission office in case of computer problems. coinc=
idence, i think not ;). i am really excited our area is so city like. i h=
ave a new companion who is way cool, his name is Elder Yen and he is from=
taibei. i am so excited.

seriously our area is like down town new york. kinda,. we have a costco, su=
bway, ikea, all sorts of fun stuff. it almost doesnt even feel like a for=
eign place. it is definitely very westernized. stink ya, lots and lots an=
d lots of people.

well my last week in Ping Dong was my best week i have ever had on my missi=
on. for one thing we had a lot of really good lessons and met some great =
new investigators, but the best thing of all was that rick got baptized. =
it was so awesome. On saturday we had his baptism and he asked me to bapt=
ize him. As we waded into the water i started to get a little teary eyed =
because i was so moved by the transformation i have seen in him over the =
past couple months. he followed me into the water and as i said the bapti=
smal pray i was so choked up i could hardly say it. it was so awesome. th=
e best part of it all was that Ricks mom got to come. it was a miracle th=
at she could come. i am so happy that his family is somewhat supportive o=
f him becoming a christian.

on Friday night, i warned him that sometimes when the Holy Spirit is really=
strong it makes people cry. He laughed and said, yeah right i will not c=
ry only sissies cry. hahahaha... well lo and behold, as soon as he came u=
p out of the water he started crying hahaha... i did too. then when he bo=
re his testimony he bore a really powerful testimony and we all laughed b=
ecause he told the congregation that when i told him friday night that he=
might cry he didnt believe me. it was so great.=20

sunday, he was confirmed a member of the church and received the Holy Spiri=
t to be with him as long as he remains worthy. he will too, he is such an=
awesome guy. We all just have got to endure to the end.

(Hey Rick if you are reading this, I luv ya!!)

The last lesson i taught in Ping Dong was with Rick, we taught him a new me=
mber lesson about enduring to the end and honoring our baptismal covenant=
s. Really great, i wish i could send you pictures, but the internet cafe =
we are using is really not very good. one day i will get you some, maybe =
next week. actually i will try and mail some because they printed a bunch=
out for me.

well goodbye to ping dong and hello kaohsiung. talk about excited! its goin=
g to be an awesome move, i might actually learn how to speak chinese now =
that i have a native companion.

i love you all, thanks for the emails, i will email you in 9 days.

love,
Elder Craig Anderson

Soliders and penguins

2008-10-20T07:23:00.000-07:00

Move day is fast approaching! in 2 days my move call will come. I am really excited and nervous. I am pretty sure i will be moving from Ping Dong. i have loved serving the Lord here and have thoroughly enjoyed all the friends i have made. i know this city like the back of my hand. serious, i can predict when things are going to happen. like when the old guy is going to walk by or when the lady with the handicapped dog is going to come home. its so weird! it is a huge city but there are still some small unique pieces that you could only learn about from having lived here for 4 months.

rick is getting baptized on saturday, my last saturday in Ping Dong. i am so excited for him and am so happy that Heavenly Father has allowed me to see this change and process occur. i will send you pictures if i can on monday.

Because of the move, i will be emailing you in 5 days on my monday. so if you want to email me before then that would be great.

Yesterday while we were looking for a member out in the boonies, we came across an army base. there were some soldiers standing at the gate guarding it. my companion thought it would be fun to go talk to them, so we went and chatted with them for a little while. they were pretty nice. after talking to them for a little while i became very thankful that the US does not have a compulsory military service for all our young men. what a pain in the butt that would be to stop your life to go stand at some scorching hot military gate for 1 year. then i realized thats probably what they are thinking when they see me. they probably think, 'wow, what a pain in the butt that must be to stop your life for 2 years to go ride your bike in some scorching hot country were no one really wants to listen to you.' one thing they probably will never understand is that i would give anything to be able to come on this mission. not only is it not a pain in the butt, but an honor and privilege to be able to serve the taiwanese people in a way that only a missionary can. doctors may heal physical wounds, and psychologists may heal emotional wounds, but only the Lord Jesus Christ is able to relieve us from our spiritual wounds. how awesome it is to be able to deliver this message to a people who are so scared by spiritual wounds. i love my mission!

general conference was so amazing! i love hearing the modern day prophets talk. it would be so difficult to face lifes challenges today without these inspired men giving us instruction. when sharing the gospel with the taiwanese people here, that is one of my favorite gospel principles to teach. that God is unchanging, 'he is the same yesterday today and forever.' because God is unchanging he has giving us prophets, just as he gave the people of olden times prophets like Moses and Abraham. several of our investigators came and watched the prophets talk, ALL of our investigators, after hearing them talk agreed that they were definitely God inspired men.

My favorite quote from general conference was by Elder Cook he said, "The rain falls on the just and the unjust." Even when we are living righteous lives we are still not free from the daily storms and battles that may blow our way. i think when some people come across a trial they see it as a curse or chastisment from God. That is not true! Even the righteous have to face battles, matter of fact sometimes it is the righteous and just that have to face the biggest battles. look at Job in the Bible for example. anyways, i just wanted to remind everyone that 'the rain falls on the just and the unjust.' Remember that when things just dont seem to be going your way.

well on a much more serious note i have a joke for you, it might not translate so well.

There was this scientist and he wanted to learn more about penguins so he flew down to Antartica and went to find penguins. the first penguin he found he asked "What is your favorite thing to do?" and the penguin said "kick stuff" the scientist tried to ask the penguin "what stuff?" but the penguin quickly ran away. So the scientist he found another penguin and he asked "what is your favorite thing to do?" and the 2nd penguin said "kick stuff." but before the scientist could ask what that meant the penguin scurried away. Finally the scientist came across another penguin and he went up to him and asked "Do you like to kick stuff?" and the penguin said "NOO!!!!" and the scientist asked "well, why not?" and the penguin said "Because I am Stuff." its a lot funnier in chinese. (if you dont get it the 3rd penguins name is stuff)

okay it was a lame joke just forget it. :)

love ya,
Elder Craig Anderson

Old Men and "fancy hotels"

2008-10-08T11:43:00.001-07:00

thanks for all the emails everyone! i got quite a few this week! i love emails! to be honest the days we get to read emails is my favorite and least favorite day. its my favorite because i get to hear about all you and its like refueling up the love in preparation for the next week. its my least favorite day because, its hard to tell you everything in an email and its tough to have to stop typing when the time runs out.

so i hear that general conference was pretty good. we have not listened to it yet. we will watch it this saturday and sunday. and we get to watch it in english, and the members watch it in chinese. its actually a rule that the missionaries have to watch it in their native language. since it takes them about a week to translate and then mail it, we always watch it the week after it is broadcasted. but thanks for the early information about the temples being built in Rome and Argentina. thats really cool!

well we had quite the run in with a very interesting man the other day. we were biking around in the down town area looking for people to talk to and we came across this guy who was outside of a hotel taking a smoke break. we pulled up to him and started talking to him, and he was really nice and even set up a time to meet with us at the church. as we talked to him we found out that he worked at the hotel and got off work at about 2 in the afternoon. as we were talking to him i noticed 2 old guys across the street, that were pointing at us and just laughing hysterically. i didnt know what the heck they were laughin at so i just waved and smiled at them, and they in a suprisingly friendly manner waved and smiled bike. usually people arent that nice, especially older men. well we finished talking to the guy that was taking a smoke break the old men were still giggling acrossed the road. i for the life of me could not figure out what the heck they were laughing about. so we left. as we biked away i looked back at the hotel that we had just contacted the guy at and i also started laughing hysterically. it turns out that the hotel we stopped out was one of those rent by the hour hotels. i finally figured out why those old men were laughin. they were laughing at these 2 little white missionaries completely oblivous to what kind of establishment they had just attempted to prosylete at. it was pretty funny. from the outside it looks okay, but if you read the sign in chinese you know its not a good place. i didnt read the sign before we stopped to talk to the guy, and plus this hotel is like downtown, its not in the red light district at all, its right next to the train station. anyways, i felt like kind of an idiot, but my companion who has been her for about a year and a half should have recognized those characters too.

o well what can you do. we tried right? we are meeting with that hotel worker tomorrow, we will see how it goes :).

halloween is coming soon! how cool is that? i am so excited to teach everyone over here about it. i think i will dress up as something weird.... maybe a missionary.... no no, thats to scary, everyone would run away from me. oo...wait... they already do. ;)

love ya all,
Elder Craig Anderson

My Secret Admirer

2008-09-24T07:23:00.001-07:00

WOW! I still can't believe Ali is the Homecoming Queen. Thats so amazing! I know she is probably trying to forget about it by now, but I just had to remind everyone.

It was another wonderful week in the heat. There was supposed to be a huge typhoon here yesterday. That was a lie! it sprinkled for about an hour, but it was hardly raining and there was no wind. I was a little annoyed because everyone was acting like it was supposed to be this huge event so they cancelled all these lessons and activities we had scheduled all for nothing. O well, we were able to go and talk with lots of different people yesterday.

Rick is doing so good! He was originally getting baptized this saturday, but because his mom want to come see it, he moved it until october 11th. Its going to be so great! i am so happy that his family is supporting him even though they are all Daoist and Buddhist (fake buddhist). Anyways, its going to be great! he is so prepared and ready to make this step in his life. What a smart guy, he has been reading the scriptures like crazy. He started reading the Book Of Mormon last month and is just about to finish it. We went to get ice cream with him yesterday and just talked about stuff and answered some of his questions. Whenever he reads he takes notes on all the questions he has and then asks us. Most of his questions are just vocabulary questions, he might not quite understand what a certain word means, but he is so smart that everything else he understands perfectly.

So i have a secret admirer here. Someone put an envelope with my name on it in our mailbox and with no return address. It was really nice, and just said. Thanks for your service here in Taiwan, it was really cute. it had my name on it and everything. I wish I new who it was so bad, i think it is this older christian lady that lives in our building, what a nice old lady.

Learning Chinese is going so well! I feel like i broke through this huge barrier last week. I have been studying characters like crazy. Anyways, i feel like i cracked the code to characters and now they are super easy to memorize. There are about 4000 that i want to memorize the meanings and pronunciations. If you know 4000 you are about as fluent as a high school graduate, so thats good enough for me. Once you start to see the meanings in the characters they are really deep. Since it is the oldest writing system known to man it has got some very interesting ties back to religion and stuff. For example the way that you write the word boat, is a boat looking object with 8 mouths around it. DID any one say Noahs arc? there are just tons of stuff like that.

well i dont have any funny stories this week apart from the usual stares and open mouths we get when people see us. i feel like a circus animal somedays. the little kids always yell out funny stuff at us, it makes me laugh.

thats all for this week.

Love ya,
Elder Anderson

Computers

2008-09-17T07:26:00.000-07:00

This week!

Once again the computers in the mission office started an uprising. I wasnt there when it started, but apparently they kept shouting "ANDERSON, ANDERSON, ANDERSON." The Elders in the office tried to negotiate, but the computers had taken the entire mission database hostage. Not willing to budge in either direction, my week in Ping Dong started to look like a week in Kaohsiung at the Mission Office. On Tuesday night i was called and told that first thing in the morning i was to report to the mission office for a day of headaches and frustration.

I awoke the next morning and dragged my companion the 1 hour rain ride to the mission office. I switched places with an elder from the office and my companion and Elder Zhuang headed back down to Ping Dong to continue to work. Once they left to go continue back to proselyting i knew that, this was not going to be a short stay.

As i began to try and talk these electronic pieces of junk (the office computers) down from their insane little fritz that they had gone on. I soon realized that there were some serious problems going on. The hopes of me returning to Ping Dong anytime soon quickly faded, when the computers refused to recognize the chinese character scripts in our mission database. my head throbbed and i went from computer to computer, assessing and rebuilding. there were only 7 computers, but i tell you what, they were the most onnery 7 computers i have ever met. From Wednesday morning till Friday night, i tried to figure the mess out. Finally, in the wee hours of Friday night, everything started to come back together and the computers decided to stop their strike and start working again. I was so thankfully to get out of there. it was so hard. and it wont happen again. i set it up so that everything should work in harmony.

I had to backup everything on all the computers, delete everything and then reinstall everything. One of the computers was put together by some missionaries a couple years ago and i basically had to rebuild the insides of that computer which took most of thursday. On thursday night i went and got the final part for that computer and poof it started working again. whoever put it together used a dremel and a hot glue gun, i am not kidding! i will send you the pictures. after i fixed this disaster, president Hsu had me write a backup program for the entire office. that took a good chunk of friday, now to backup their computers, all they have to do is click one button and everything in the office gets backed up. finally i networked them all back together so that they can share files and databases without any hassle. it should work really well for them. hahaha. but i wasnt in my prosyleting area very much this week. I was happy though that i could help out there. i am glad that i can use one of my talents to help the lords work here in a more abstract way.

Well apart from that everything else is going good. I am excited for this next week. i will be sure to send you some pictures soon. Probably not next week, but the week after. i am really excited, i love ping dong and this will probably be my last move here.

well i love you all,

Elder Craig Anderson

o ya, i know i change my future plans almost everyday, but i am pretty sure that i am going to major in computers. it seems that it was meant to be.

i forgot to tell you. last night for some reason our district leader didnt call us and then at 11:15 he started screaming and bangin on our door. i about freaked out because i was praying and then all of the sudden there is a crazy man banging and screaming at our door. once i realized he was speaking english i knew it was our leader.

so i guess something was wrong with our phone and they couldnt get a hold of us so they rode like 20 minutes to make sure we wer okay. they were all scared that we were hurt or something. Well we came to find out later they were calling the wrong number. oopss hahah... they should trying calling the right number next time before they bike all the way acrossed town to hunt us down.

peace

Ping Dong Ping Dong

2008-09-08T07:15:00.001-07:00

hello family. i am still in ping dong! i love this city and am so glad i get to stay here. my new companion is elder upshaw he is from orem, utah. and has been in taiwan for about a year and a half. so his chinese is pretty good.

i am excited to be able to stay and see these new converts get baptized. really excited. well it was sad to see elder heder go. i really liked elder heder, we got along really well. he is a lot like me, he liked the outdoors and backpacking and stuff like that. and fishing too. so we talked a lot about that stuff. but my new companion seems good too. we are going to do well here in ping dong i think.

after this move i will have spent 4 and a half months here. i know this area like its my home because it is. i will be sad when i have to leave.

this morning i had to go to a funeral for a member in the other branch. she was only about 31. anyways, it was a really sad funeral, it was held in like this warehouse of a place and it was really noisy and just not very good. her family decided to have a traditional taiwanese funeral rather than a christian funeral. it was really sad. especailly because of the environment, it just seemed so hopeless and bleak. i am so grateful for the plan that the Lord has revealed to us in these days. i am glad that we know what happens after death and therefore dont need to fear. it really got me thinking how much of a benefit this knowledge could be to the people of taiwan.

anyways, after the funeral we ran over to the other elders apartment because it was closer and we waited for my new companion to come. i jumped in the shower because i didnt have time to take one this morning. while i was in the shower my district leader i guess decided that my pants needed a washing hahaha actually he didnt realize that they were my pants. so he threw them in the washer and when i got out of the shower we were in a hurry to go get my new companion, but i couldnt find my pants, finally we realized he had put them in the washer. we didnt have any time to so i am sitting here in soaking wet pants hahaha. i feel like i am wearing a diaper or something. the missionary diaper.

well i wont get to email you for another 9 days. i will talk to you then. love ya.

elder anderson

Sept 3, 2008 Email

2008-09-03T07:24:00.000-07:00

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

Email Aug 27, 2008

2008-08-27T07:18:00.001-07:00

Arabs in Tawain-

this week was a hot one. i think i melted. seriously, i am getting skinny, i probably only way like 140 now. i need to eat some more pig foot that will fatten me up. hahaha...

missionary work is hard work. but i tell you what i think i could beat lance armstrong in a bike race right now. some one give him a call and tell him i issued an official challenge ;).

yesterday i had quite the experience. people dont usually get to confrontational here in taiwan, but yesterday this guy started yelling at me in arabic i think. i pulled up to this guy on the street and started talking to him, all i did was ask him how his day was going. and he blew up and started yelling at me. he said something that sounded like "fuska la ohla kiss blah blah blah." i speak chinese and i speak enough taiyu to know that he wasn't speaking either of those languages. i told him i didnt understand what he was saying and then he repeated the exact same thing again. i think it was arabic, i know a little bit of arabic so i im pretty sure thats what he was speaking. thinking back on it he might have been was muslim, i didn't notice at first because he was wearing a helmet, but underneath the helmet he was wearing like a bandanna that tied in the back to cover his head. there arent very many muslims here at all so the thought didnt even cross my mind when i first pulled up to him. it was a little creepy i thought he was gonna try and hit me. he was so mad. all i could do was laugh. no one around me at the stop light seemed to understand what he was saying either. anyways after he yelled at me the same thing 3 times i told him to please speak in chinese and then the light turned green. i told him to have a nice day and then he speed off. ?!?!?!?!funny but so weird though, i hope there is like a rewind button in heaven so i can look back and see what in the world this guy was yelling at me for. all i did was ask him how his day was going?!

well, food here is so good. i have learned to cook some of the things here i will have to cook them for you all when i get home. everyday i find a new delicious item.

speaking of delicious in a minute we are going to this all you can eat buffet place. its really good.

apart from this week just being really physically hard i cant think of anything that stands out. basically just the typical taiwan day. biking in the hot sun trying to find addresses in the worst address system known to man. street address will often go from 13 to 404 then back to like 99. and all these houses are right next to each other. pretty crazy eh?

oh ya the olympics we hardly even mentioned over here. i think taiwan is a little bitter about the whole thing. place i hear that china smacked down taiwans baseball team. apart from that i have not heard a word about then. i saw some cool olympic coke bottles, but thats it. we asked our english class if they wanted to learn how to say some of the events and they had a very "who gives a crap about the olympics" attitude. so ya i dont know anything besides the coke bottles i saw at mcdonalds, i think they are boycotting it because china and taiwan are enemies in a way.

times up i gotta go. i love you all. pray for my investigators. i really do get to eat pigs foot tomorrow. how cool is that?! peace

elder anderson

Aug 20, 2008 email

2008-08-20T07:10:00.001-07:00

So this week i went to the Post Office to cash in my reciept. On all the reciept they have a lottery number so everytime you buy something you get a lottery number. Anyways i took the reciept to the PO and went to the banking section to cash it. I gave it to the lady and she started counting how many numbers i had. 3 is good, but 5 i thought the PO was going to throw a party for me. once the lady realized i had gotten 5 she called over to her friends. HE GOT 5 HE GOT 5. They all came over and were laughing and telling me i needed to take my companion to go eat a steak dinner. then the lady said go shopping go shopping. its really funny how they say it. the word for shopping is shopping. so its all chinese but then they say shopping in a chinese accents and its really cute. makes me laugh every time. anyways, i was a little embarassed to go cash my reciept, especially because taiwanese people think all americans are millionaires. but they were really cool about it and were excited for me, i think most people know that us missionaries live pretty frugally. i took my district to go eat and then i gave the rest back to the mission. anyways it was a experience to remember.

this week we had some amazing lessons. we have a baptism in a couple weeks for mr. hong. and then we have this new investigator who is just amazing, he is cruising through all the reading assignments we give him and he is so smart. he is about 26 and is a teacher. i love him hes the best. we are actually just waiting for him to ask us when he can be baptized. if he wants to he could also do it on the 6th of september with our other investigator. how cool would that be? anyways, i love all of our investigators. i think i am going to have to move in a couple weeks, and i really dont want to. i love this place so much. the members here are so amazing and are always willing to help us teach. plus i have grown really close to these investigators here, the two that are going to get baptized soon. they came to us having no understanding, completely blank, and it so awesome to see them grow and understand what being a follower of Jesus Christ really means.

anyways, we are only allowed to use our cameras on wednesdays and on special occassions, but last night i wish i had a camera. there was this little old man with this little rust out old bike. on the back rack of his bike he had a brand spankind new 60 inche plasma balanced perfectly as he pedaled. i just gazed in amazment. the tv was HUGE! and here was this little old guy carrying it on the back of his bike. i think most americans would have used a truck to carry this tv. i am still astonished, i just wish i could have gotten a picture of it.

another funny story. on monday my companion and i had about an hour to fill so we decided to go down town and talk to people and invite them to come to church. on the way there we ran into this guy that we gave a Book Of Mormon to about 2 weeks ago. he didnt see us on the rode next to him and he took off going the opposite direction. we had written down his number wrong so we hadnt been able to get in contact with him again. i yelled at my companion. then i flipped around and barreled down after him.

you wouldnt think that those little scooters they ride are that fast, but ill tell you what they are fast as heck. i pedaled as hard as i could and i lost sight of him a couple times, my companion was trying to catch up to me. finally a big old truck slowed him down enough for me to catch up. i smiled and pulled up next to him and waved him over to the side. he came on over. i tried to catch my breath, but i was so tired. i had chased him for like 5 minutes. i could hardly write down his number and our number to give to him because i was shaking so bad. he said he had been reading and really liked it so we are going to meet with him this week.

i am so suprised we recognized him on the street. the only reason we recognized him was cuz he had this very unique scar on his left arm, and when he drove by i saw it. asians dont all look the same to me anymore. they did when i first got here. actually a couple times in my first area i got ward members confused with other ward members. it was kinda embarassing. its getting better though, you just pick different features to focus on when remembering faces.

well thats that. i cant think of anything else crazy that happened this week. we are going to play tennis with Rick our investigator today. i am excited. i havent played since high school.

love ya all

elder craig anderson

Aug 12, 2008 Email

2008-08-20T07:09:00.001-07:00

hello base camp!

Taiwan is so nuts i love it! two days ago there was a massive idol worship session that went on in from of our apartment building. they closed down the street and put up tents with insense and fire and stuff burning every where. then they had all these tables with food that they wanted to give there ancestors. me and my companion came home during the worship part. where they all grab incense and mumble and bow a thousand towns to this scary looking statue thingy. well since we live in that apartment building. he had to wade through this crowd of idol worshippers. obviously they know we are Christian missionaries so needless to say it was a little awkward. not for me, but for them. i felt great. i just smiled and said hello to as many people as i could. hahaha oh gosh it was funny, a little creepy but funny. i think they felt awkward because some of them know that it is a little ridiculous, but they just do it out of tradition. anyways, good times. if you can just picture these two white missionaries wading though this crowd of idol worshipping taiwanese people that should bring a smile to your face. it made me laugh!

well we have been meeting with a really nice man named Hong bao ju. he is so cool! before we could even find a time to meet with him he had already come to church 3 sundays in a row. his friend brought him. doing work through the members is really the best way to do it. i am not sure who said it, but they said "missionaries should be full time teachers, and members should be full time finders." i think most church members think that missionaries are out there knocking on doors most of the time. actually we try and to that as least as possible. especially in a prodominitely non christian society, the chances of running into someone that wants to learn about Jesus Christ are very slim.

anyways, Brother Hong has a baptismal date for september 6th. Carson Brown, my good friends birthday. it is also the last day i will be in Ping Dong. I will probably move, im not sure, but i think i will move. i might get assigned to somewhere up north. this hong guy is so cool, he reads his scriptures everday and prays and is just awesome. he is a really humble quiet guy. we also have another really awesome investigator named Yang. he is a stud. about 26 and is a teacher. his english is pretty good. we still teach him in chinese cuz its not that good. hahaha.

i have got to tell you though. that idol worship ceremony thing was pretty intense to walk through. it felt completely void of any love or charity, it actually seemed really scary and irreverent. i didnt bug me cuz we only walked through it, i felt bad for the poor little kids though that were there.

well of course i have another spider story! on friday we had a lesson at the church during lunch. so we went there and got the chairs set up and went to turn on the AC. the AC is in this closet and you have to go flip a switch to turn it on. my companion went into the closet and was about to hit the switch and i yelled at him "DON'T MOVE!" he frooze. on the back side of the switch was a spider the size of my hand. at first he thought i was kidding, but then his eyes adjusted to the dark of the closet and he saw it and about flipped. we quickly evacuated the closet. our investigator Hong showed up and we told him about it. he is a vet so he is used to dealing with crazy stuff, so he grabbed a box and a newspaper and went and forced the spider into the box. then we went and let it go outside. i figured if we killed it he might be offended so we just let it go. a little later that night we told some members about it and they were like "What were you thinking?!" "You should have brought it home and put it inside your house to keep bugs away." i thought they were kidding at first, but then i realized they were serious. there is no way in heck i am putting some giant arachna in the place were i sleep. i could care less if its poisonous or not, when a spider is as big as a McDonalds big mac, there is no way i am putting that thing in my house. they are crazy! if i wanted a pet id buy a dog!

love ya all,

Elder Anderson

Aug 5, 2008 Email

2008-08-06T07:26:00.000-07:00

Well hello everybody. I hear grandpa isn't doing so well. the email that i recieved got chopped in half somewhere along the line. anyways, i hope you are all doing okay. i love ya gramps.

this week was an amazing week! first off, i think i am the luckiest person in the world. i won the Taiwan Lottery. I won 4000 taibi, which is the equivalent to about $150 USD. not to bad eh? the lottery here is different everytime you buy something, all the reciepts have a number on them. so if you save all your reciepts, then at the end of the month you check and see if you won. and i wone. i was only 2 more numbers away from winning a lot more too. its crazy. i am just gonna give the money to the Mission Office though, i would feel weird keeping it.

how crazy is that though? i won the lottery, i won a lot too!

well my new companion he is great. he is from Pleasant Grove, UT. We getting along great, we both love the outdoors and stuff. This is his 7 month on island, so he has been here for about 3 months more than me.

since he is new to the area i get so show him around and introduce him to all of our members and investigators. it is really fun, but a lot of responsibility. because this is my first time being in an area twice in a row. it is my responsibility to know all the streets and places to go and stuff. fun fun fun.

so this sunday we had a really cool experience. we went to a park to go and contact and see if we could talk to anyone there. we werent havent very much luck and were about to leave, but elder heder suggested that we go check out the back of the park. we went to the very back of the park and ran into a member and his friend just out for a walk. his friend was really scared of us at first, but we talked to him and joked with him a little and he warmed up. he then started to tell us how he is scared of white people! i almost laughed, i kept teasing him about it and then i think he realized how ridiculous it was. anyways, he had never really met an american before so we sat down and started talking.

he started talking about how every cultures are to different. i asked him why he thought cultures were so different and he went off about how we all look different and stuff. then i smiled and recited perfectly a chinese proverb that says "All men are brothers." directly translated it means, the 4 oceans are all siblings. in chinese it is "si hai zhinei jei xiongdi." he was a little suprised that we knew this idiom. but then he was like ok so if that is true what does that mean? we were able to teach him all about creation and his member friend bore testimony of it all. then we taught him how to pray and sent him home with a Book Of Mormon. it was so cool! especially because it was a completely unexpected awesome lesson, assisted by a member, in the middle of a public park, in a stinking huge city. i know for a fact that it was not by chance that we came acrossed them.

a cockroach tried to take over my bowl of curry a couple days ago. i laid my curry down for a minute to go get a drink and when i came back there was a cockroach attempting a hostile take over of my delicious bowl of curry. needless to say a battle of epic proportion took place which resulted in the death of my great and noble nemesis. but man was that some good curry. luckily i got to him before he had crawled inside the bowl. all is well, all is well.

love ya,

Elder Anderson

July 27th, 2008 Email

2008-08-04T07:46:00.000-07:00

i am sorry that i didn't email you yesterday! a big old stinking typhoon came through and made it so we couldn't move. we stayed inside all day yesterday becase it was too dangerous to leave. it was so boring i studied chinese for like 5 hours and watched the rain for about 2.

i actually didn't get transferred, i am still in Ping Dong which i am really excited about. Ping Dong is an awesome city, its a lot more modern and clean then my last place fang liao.

Anyways, my new companion is Elder Heder, (picture coming next week), he is from Pleasant Grove and is super cool. I have only met him for about 2 hours so i don't know that much about him.

well last night we thought the typhoon was over but nope. about 3:30 this morning a big old gust of wind pushed in the weather stripping around our air conditioner. water started pouring in. it was so windy that the rain drops were flying into our house sideways. i woke up instanty because i sleep close to the window and by the time i got out of bed and hit the lights i was soaked. we ran around the house and closed all the doors to make it so the wind didn't want to come into our house, but i think these gust were upwards of 80 mph. i have never seen wind like this in my entire life. no joke i saw rain drops flying up instead of down. our apartment building makes a little wind eddie so i looked out the window and saw all this little white things flying up, i took me about 2 minutes to figure out that it wasn't paper, but that it was actually water. how crazy is that? so we stuffed a blanket in to whole where about a foot of weather stripping was missing. i was soaked and so was my bed, so i changed into some pajamas and we went and slept on the couches because all my sheets and mattress were wet. it was terrible, i am so tired, but its a funny story so it was worth it. You would not believe this wind, it would ripe the hair right off your head. if dad walked out in it, he would be as bald as Blain Brown. it might even shine too. i hope blain doesn't read this (sorry blain) :) hahahaha.

there are tree limbs and signs all over the road this morning. so after i dropped off my companion at the train station i was supposed to bike to my district leaders house and hang out with him until our companions came. there house is about 15 minutes from the train station. anyways, it was such a weird feeling riding down the street by myself. well when i got there they weren't there. i was so confused, i pounded on their door and called their phone but nothing. i didn't know what to do, so i biked back to my house which is about 20 minutes away and waited for an hour or so. i cleaned up the mess the typhoon made. anyways, finally my DL called me. i guess his alarm didn't go off, i was a solo missionary for about 2 and a half hours today. so strange. i just hid in my house most of the time because i couldn't really do any thing else.

a couple of questions:

asks Brother Rowland if he has a brother or nephew that served in my mission, because there is a Elder Rowland that served here about 6 months ago that looks a lot like him, they could be brothers. i know Brian Rowland served him, maybe his nephew served here too. it might be hes brother though.

my odometer broke on my bike. i was sad. it actually broke about 2 weeks ago. it made it all the way to 2189.2 km. one day i might by another one. right now i don't really care so much.

i got the 4th of July letters you all sent me today. i havent had a chance to read them, but i am so excited!

right now we have some of the most amazing investigators. they are just so ready to accept the gospel. i hope that they continue to progress.

hahah i almost forgot about sandwiches. we went to this really nice restaurant a couple days ago. kind of like our last big thing as a companionship. anyways, we went to a restaurant called Philadelphia, its an american (almost american) restaurant. its got a really cool baseball theme and stuff. anyways, they didn't have hamburgers so i figured id get a sandwiche. the menu was all in chinese but i got the most of it. i found sandwiches and when the waitress came to take my order i told her i wanted a pork sandwich. she looked at me and was like "don't you want anything else?!" i was like no. just a sandwich, but she insisted that i needed to order something else or else i wouldn't be full. i asked how big the sandwich was and she said it was like the size of a cracker. A CRACKER! what kinda sandwich is as big as a cracker?! if i wanted a cracker i would have order soup with some saltines. it made me laugh. anyways so i guess sandwiches in Taiwan are like desserts. small and hecka expensive. anyways, everyone stared at me while i ate, i think i might be one of maybe 10 americans that have ever eaten at their restaurant, it was fun.

the boleys moved to scottsdale! so amy and jeff might see them every once in a while.

well fans. thats all until next week. love you all.

Elder Craig Anderson

Email July 8, 2008

2008-07-10T10:15:00.000-07:00

i am in the mission office on Preparation DAY! what a pain :)! its not so bad actually, i am just glad that i am able to help. the office's computer situation is one of the worst i have ever seen. i have handle headaches that have involved over 100 computers, but this is a new beast. its a chinese beast. and its angry. jk

its extremely complicated. you know me and how i like my computers. my room is a different story, but if its electronic i like a nice logic flow. i have been trying to get their emails working, the church decided to switch over to the New Outlook 2007, a little early i think, but o well. i am doing my best to try and get it all up and running for them. they only have about 9 computers, but its tough. especially since i have been out of the loop for over half a year when it comes to computer stuff.

this week was great. nothing to special happened. just the same thing. riding around in the hot hot heat trying not to get bit by rabid old ladies. just kidding. i love it. our investigators are doing great and i really feel that i am starting to have an effect in building up the lords kindom here in taiwan.

my testimony grows everyday. its amazing. i feel like everything is so much more clear and simple than it used to be. this is by far my favorite transfer so far. i am loving it. i am so sorry for the brief email today, but i really got to get back to work on these computers. i love you all so much, i will email you again next week.

love craig

July 1, 2008 picture

2008-07-06T09:29:00.000-07:00

July 1, 2008 Email

2008-07-06T09:26:00.000-07:00

i had a really cool experience this week. lately i have been thinking that i have lost that edge that i had when i first got here. when i first got here i seemed to notice everything, every little detail, but lately i feel like i have just gotten used to everything. i dont want to get used to everything. anyways, my companion and i were hunting down some less active members, we turned down this dark alley way to try and find the Zhen Family's house. There were about 30 people in the alley way, smoking and drinking and playing chinese chess. all the apartments open up in to the street and its really dark because the building are tall and there are rain guards that block out all the light, plus it was at night. anyways the zhen family wasn't home so my companion wrote them a little note and placed it on their door. as we were getting ready to leave out of the corner of my eye i saw a man about 30 yards down the alley, acting kind of strangely, he had started walking down the alley, but when he saw us he stopped and walked the other way. i knew it was our member. i told my companion, hey that guy is brother zhen. and he was like ya ya whatever you dont know. but i told him, i promise you that is him. so he was like fine go talk to him. we caught up to him and my companion looked at me like, see its not him we dont even know what he looks like, but i said to the guy "Hey are you brother zhen?" and the man was like ya. my companions face just dropped. it was hilarious i almost busted out laughing. we talked to brother zhen for a second and we could tell he didnt want to talk to us so we just told him that we missed him at church and wanted him to come back and that we still cared about him. anyways, afterwards my companion was like how in the heck did you know that was our member? there were a ton of people in that alley and it was dark and noisy. how did you know? i just laughed and said i got skills. anyways that made me feel better because i thought i was becoming dull. dont worry though i am still sharp. hahaha

well i love you guys, life is good. i am having a blast and know that i am supposed to be here. love ya

the picture of the week is of a lost dog poster. i dont think these dogs are lost, i think they got eaten. i think some old man turned them into hot dogs. if you can see the flyer very well the person is offering 10000 taiwanese dollars for them, which is about 300 USD. i think someone just made themselves a 300 dollar hot dog. that got to be the most expensive hot dog ever. hahaha. i am actually not sure what happened to the dogs i am just kidding, but maybe...

;) love yall

Elder Anderson

Pictures June 25, 2008

2008-06-26T07:27:00.000-07:00

June 25, 2008

2008-06-26T07:25:00.001-07:00

hey everybody,

Ping Tung is stinking awesome! It is pretty big and the church members here are awesome. My companion is Elder Chen Wei Yang he is from Central Taiwan and he is awesome. We get along pretty good, occassionally we will come across some cultural differences, but for the most part its all good. He teaches me Chinese, my chinese has gotten so much better in the past 10 days its ridiculous. I feel like i can actually speak chinese now. i can't say everything, but i can always get my point across. Elder Chen has been helping me a lot with just express myself the way i want. i have pronunciation and tones down pretty good, so i will ask him how to say something and then he will tell me. its so convenient because the dictionaries dont have ways to say things they just have words. His english is really good, he has been studying it for 7 years so its way good.

i felt like i was going to get a native companion a couple weeks ago. i just knew i would get one and sure enough i did. i didn't think he would speak such good english, but i am glad he does because he can tell me how to say the chinese equivalent of what i want to say.

ping Tung is huge compared to my last area. they have a big old night market that we go to to contact people and its just awesome.

so yesterday i was riding down the street and i looked over and i saw an indoor swimming pool. and then i saw a bunch of old men sitting around the swimming pool with fishing pools. it was an indoor fish pong. i laughed for like 5 minutes, its was so cute. all these little old men in their lawn chairs, sitting inside an air conditioned building fishing. maybe i have just lived in utah for too long so i am just used to having nature right out the front door, but that doesn't count as fishing. i want to get a picture of it.

speaking of pictures here are a couple. they are all from me and fang liao, but the last one is of my new companion elder chen. he is a goof as i am sure you can tell from the picture. he is a little immmature, but thats because he is only 18. in taiwan since they have mandatory military service, the church will let them go when they are 18, so he is here and is probably one of if not the youngest missionary in the world.

i had to speak in church last sunday. you always have to when you move to a new area. believe it or not i made the congregation laugh, who would have ever thought that i could be funny in chinese. i am not sure if they were laughing at me or with me, but who cares they laughed.

it was really funny in priesthood i got up and introduced myself and the teacher asked me what my name was. my name is Zhang (which is a last name, but their first names are last) and he said "o that is the same as me." so jokingly i told him that "maybe we have the same ancestors." the whole roomed burst into laughter, because obviously my chinese last name has no heritage it is just a name.

anyways thats been my life for the past week. i hope you like the pictures.

the first pick is me picking mangoes, the second is fang liao with the fishing boats and the mountains, the third is the stinking huge spiders we found in the mountains, that no joke were bigger than my head. and just to let you know they are extremely poisonous even the natives are scared of them. one of the members from the fang liao branch took us into the mountains to take pictures of them. and the last picture is of elder chen.

love you all
craig

i own the computers in ping tung, haha :) i can send pictures a lot now so i will try every week.

June 14, 2008 Email

2008-06-16T05:59:00.001-07:00

hey everyone,

i totally forgot to tell you about my up coming move. i didn't know where i was moving until 3 days ago, so i wouldnt have been able to tell you about anyways. but it is monday here and i normally email you on wednesday, so it will be 10 days until i can email again.

i just arrived in me new area about 1 hour ago. it is called Ping Tung, its pronounced Ping Dong. wow, its awesome. it is still raining like crazy, but the city is really neat. lots of cool shops and what nots. it is also very clean, which is a welcome change. my last area was really dirty, it had open sewers and stuff, which was really gross. i always teased my last companion that if i got really mad at him i just might push him into it. so there is really much to tell you about my new area because i dont really know it yet.

my new companion is awesome. his name is Chen Wei Yang. and he is taiwanese! but his english is really really good, which should make it really easy. we talk in a mixture of chinese and english, standard chinglish. but he is a way fun guy, i think we are going to get a long great, and i think my chinese is going to improve tons too.

well since i emailed you all earlier there isn't much to tell you about. i packed up all my stuff and moved, i was a little sad to move from my last area because i really started to love the branch, but i am so excited that i have a native companion. i am going to make his ears bleed with chinese language questions.

i have been soaked for the past 3 days. its awesome, i feel like i am swimming. i love the rain, it keeps everything cool. when there is no rain, i get tired really easy because the heat just sucks all the energy out of me. i am definitely a cold weather dweller.

i know this email is early and that i didn't warn you so dont worry about not emailing me this week, it was my fault. i will email you again in 10 days. bye bye love yall

Elder Craig Anderson

June 11, 2008 Email

2008-06-11T07:19:00.001-07:00

well the internet cafe we are in, is kicking my butt. i cant use the usb, i get booted off the email server all the time. wow, asian computers dont like me, once i started reading these characters though i am gonna own em hahaha

well this week was a good week. good and hot. it was 39 degrees celcius a couple days ago. my arms are like black from the tan. we went 78km (48 miles) on our bikes on monday. thats pretty far. so far i have biked 1483.4km (922 miles) this transfer. not bad eh? i still am not in shape though because i eat some much of the delicious food over here.

so this week, i dog tried to bite me in the leg as we were biking, but i horsed kicked it in the face. hahaha that will teach them to chase white guys wearing business attire. the dogs hear are like rats so i didn't feel bad.

it was a hot week this week. there wasn't any rain so everything was just scorching.

well i am running out of funny stories, i needed to start taking notes through out the week of things i want to tell you all. we haven't got to teach many lessons this week, actually i think we only taught 2, that is pretty standard for taiwan. most of our time is spent just trying to find people to teach. we also spend a lot of time trying to get less active members to come back to church, so we try and find them and let them know that we still care about them and want them to come back.

i saw a centipide that was about 10 inches long! i didnt have my camera, but i almost wet my pants it was so big. scary creeping stinking thing. ewww. i am starting to get over the fear of bugs though. taiwan will do that do you in a hurry. they have some of the weirdest creepy crawlies. i am just glad that i didn't go to thailand or vietnam i hear they have even scary bugs.

chinese characters are coming good. i dont know how to type them on the computer yet, but once i figure it out, i will write you all a letter in chinese. that probably won't be for a long time though. there are about 3000 characters that you have to learn to be a fluent reader and i just finished about 700 hundred of them yesterday. once you know the characters supposedly the language gets a lot easier and things make more sense so i am looking forward to that.

i dont sweat a lot, but in taiwan my radiator has been working extra hard. my skin was raining yesterday, literally, i walked into our house for lunch and i was dripping all over the floor, my companion is worse. its so gross. we cant turn on the AC either because its to expensive, we can only turn it on at night when we got to sleep.

my next email will be more fun i promise. love you all.

June 4, 2008 Email

2008-06-05T07:05:00.001-07:00

It has been pouring buckets of rain. Never in my life have I seen rain like this. Its like the blizzard of rain storms, you can not see more than 50 yards a head of you. And from what i hear from the locals this storm wasn't even that bad.

3 days ago we decided to go visit this little tiny village in the mountains, it was lightly drizzling when we started off. The village is about 1 hour and a half away from our house. about 45 minutes into the ride the rain started to pick up. we had our rain gear on so no biggy. anyways, as we headed into this canyon to get to the village, we took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in a little river, we pedaled through it for about 50 yards and then we decided that this probably wasn't the way so we headed back. the water was about 1 foot or deeper and everytime i pedaled my foot would get immersed entirely in water.

as we headed up the slope to get out of this little ravine think. there were things floating by us. mind you we are pedaling up hill and as we pedal up, boxes and cans and cups and mangoes were floating by us it was crazy.

we were joking about how we broke the no swimming rule, because it seriously felt like we were swimming on our bikes. it wasn't dangerous so dont worry it was just amazing.

i am out of time love ya all by

craig

May 27, 2008 Email

2008-05-28T06:29:00.001-07:00

i can't believe how fast my mission is going! i feel like i have already told you all everything. This week was weird. We had a big Zone Conference which was fun. We got to go see other missionaries! Me and my companion are the only missionaires for about 30 kilometers in each direction. The only time we see other missionairies is on Sunday when we have Church.

I take that back, i met some other missionaries yesterday from Finland. They were from the Presbyterian Church i think. Really nice people! They are a bit older probably about 60 and their English, wasn't that good so we talked in what i coined FinChinglish. It was so weird! Such nice people though, the wife was a little stand-offish, but i talked with the husband for a couple minutes and just introduced my self and asked if there was anything we could help them with. I am not sure they entirely understood. I was with Elder Kitterman who came on island the same time as me, so my real companion was up in Dong Gang on exchanges. It was fun though meeting other christians here, sometimes i feel like we are the only ones.

that was the only fun thing that happened this week. everything else was just standard. o i forgot about that. Yesterday, we saw flocks of cars heading to all the gas stations. There were lines for gas that were over a mile long! My companion, Elder Mcdonald, and i got really worried that something was going on that we didn't know about. I felt like something big had happened and we were out of the loop.

Later on that night we found out the today the government levied a tax on gas so it is going up about 10 cents, but people were freaking out. I was a little on edge, especially because i wasn't sure what was going on.

well i love you all, i will try and be more entertaining next week.

peace
craig

May 20, 2008 Email

2008-05-21T07:37:00.000-07:00

holy smokes! i can't believe it has already been another week. it was a pretty standard week here. We had exchanges twice, though which was kind of cool. Two older Elders came to my area and so i was the senoir companion which was fun. I got to decide what we did. Plus it was fun showing someone around our area. I didn't feel like such a newbie.

Chinese is coming great! I feel like i improve a little everyday, i can basically get any point acrossed that i want. And i almost always understand what is going on in a conversation. Except yesterday when this guy started talking about water wells, i sure as heck didn't know the word for that, but i learned it yesterday after i asked him what it was.

My chinese is still pretty bad, but i can get by. Last Wednesday was pretty funny. We were getting ready to teach our english class, so we were setting up and everything. I realized that we only had 1 chair so we walked over to the front desk of this city hall building. I went to ask the secretary if we could use this spare chair. so i said "Women ke bu keyi jie yong nage yezi?" She looked at me really strange and was like "What?" So the word for chair and coconut are very close. So what i actually asked the lady is "whether or not i could use her coconut", we all had a good laugh about that one. It is so easy to make a mistake in chinese when you speak. All the words are so similar, and then you have tones which is even more intense. I hate tones :)

Well the young man that we have been teaching that is preparing to go into the army, leaves in about 2 weeks. we are really working hard to try and get him studying the scriptures everyday. we figure if we can help him get a testimony of jesus christ before he leaves, he will make it through the army and still be interested when he comes out. I am glad that America doesn't force all young men to go into the army for a year, i wouldn't wanna do that. There army is pretty sissy though. Seriously, though they work in like Retirement Centers for their army service. Very few of them actually do combat stuff, and the ones that do it is so weak. We always see them on the roads and we cheer them on, and they cheer us on. The soldiers usually have backpacks and are hiking and then we pass them on our bikes. We yell to them "Jia you," which i guess if you had to translate it means "hang in there." Kinda doesn't translate but ya.

No pictures today! i have the same old mean lady. she is lazy. if these computers weren't all in chinese i would, fix it myself, but i can't read the characters yet. I just started studying them, so i only recognize about 400. There are 3000 i have to learn before you can read fluently.

Mangoes are still spilling out our ears! People will give us mangoes, boxes of mangoes. We were cleaning up the street doing service work 4 days ago and this guy basically pulled us into his shop and made us sit and eat ice cream with him. Then he gave us a big old bag full of mangoes and told us that we work to hard. Thats a compliment over here. Anyways, he is our friend now.

Funny story, people here like to yell out random English phrases that they know. Sometimes good phrases sometimes bad. Anyways, we theorized that if you yell out anything to a Taiwanese person and smile and wave they will yell it back at you and smile and wave. in order to apply the scientific method to this hypothesis of ours, i gave it a try. On my bike the other day i saw this old man that we often see. I got my smile ready, waved my hand and said "Alabama," he looked right back at me smiled and yelled "Alabaamma." It made me laugh. Now we often yell out randon states and stuff just to see if people will yell them back. I am going to give mississippi a shot. ;)

Taiwan is awesome! You just got to do the work, but have fun while you do it. Missionary work is hard. People are mean, its hot, and it smells. But with the right attitude it is the most fun thing i have ever done. Some days are tough and i just want to sleep for 10 hours. It is weird, i never thought of sleeping as a temptation hahaha. I know that what i am doing is the more important than anything i could be doing. It is amazing hearing the conversion stories of the members here. Some of them were the skum of the earth before, but now they are converted to the gospel of Jesus Christ and their entire lifes and their families lifes have been changed.

sorry if this hurts your head to read. I am sure my grammar is terrible, learning chinese will do that. plus i have a headache right now, from all the annoying little computer games people are playing all around me. I wish they would wear headphones.

peace

Email May 14, 2008

2008-05-14T06:47:00.000-07:00

it seems like i just talked to you all the other day hahaha... well its only been a day since i talked to you so nothing new has happened. I was going to email you some pictures today, but the lady at the internet cafe is too lazy to come set it up on my computer. Maybe next week a different lady will do it for me. People lie a lot over here, hahaha... i asked her if i could do it today and should told me "meiyou banfa" which means its not possible to do it. She must think i am retarded or something because my companion has used it here before. o well. i am a little frustrated with her though.

well there really isn't anything i have to write about today, i miss you all a ton, but i love my mission. i love the language and the culture (somedays).

one thing i forgot to tell you about on the phone was that they think it is wicked cool that i am indian (native american). no one ever believes that i am from the US and then they ask where my ancestors are from and i always tell them europe and i have a lot of native american blood in me too. They think it is really cool! A lot of people in this area are whats called yuanzhumin which just means aborignee. They have darker skin and usually speak another aboriginee language. They are all really nice and most of them are christian so we talk with them a lot. Several of our members down here are aborignees, and they feel like they have a special connection with me because i look more like them then most elders.

o i have a cool story. Last night we had a lesson setup but they cancelled, so we decided to go do a little bit of contacting in the street. We really aren't supposed to knock on peoples doors because everyone has already been contacted. So what we decided to do was just walk down streets and if people had their doors open then we would just pop in and say hello. Our area has been over knocked like crazy and people are starting to get annoyed so this works out great. Anyways while we were doing this we came across this lady who was about 60. She was way nice and invited us in and cut up some fruit and brought it out to us. We got to talking with her and found out that she was Jehovah's Witness. She is awesome! She has a ton of the Bible memorized, but she has a hard time understanding the meaning, so we talked about that for a little while. And then she starts telling us how she met with some missionaries about a year ago and they talked to her all about our church, but she had a hard time understanding them because they were so new. Then she starts going off about how interested she was but she just couldn't grasp what they were saying. Long story short we talked to her for about an hour and she wants us to come back on Saturday. Her knowledge of the Bible is awesome, she rocks. She said one of the coolest things i think i have heard anyone say over here. she basically said "it doesn't matter if you are white are black, or christian or muslim or buddhist, we are all children of God, no matter what religion or race you are." I thought that was awesome because thats what we believe too. I think people sometimes assume that missionaries hate other churches and discriminate and stuff, but this lady understood that we just want to help everybody get to know the Gospel of Jesus Christ even better. One of the most awesome people i have met so far.

well sorry not much to report. i love you all a ton.

Elder Anderson

Email May 7, 2008

2008-05-07T10:32:00.001-07:00

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

Email May 7, 2008

2008-05-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

April 29, 2008 Email

2008-04-30T06:40:00.000-07:00

1st transfer is over! this morning i got up at like 5 and headed to the train station to go to a little tiny tiny tini tini tiny so small town called fang liao.

the way there i was by myself for about an hour, the first hour of the ride i was with another Elder, but the last hour i was all alone. it was kinda weird not having another missionary to talk to.

i got to fang liao about 15 minutes ago and we headed here to come email. So far i haven't got to see much of the town, but i here it is super small. i love small! its gonna be so awesome. there is just a little branch down here and i think our area spans over like 50 kilometers. i am not quite sure yet since i haven;t really seen any of it. i saw a little on the train, it is all rice fields and coconut trees.

well last week was quite a special week. Elder Richard G. Scott of the Quorum of the 12 Apostles came and spoke to our mission. We had to take a train from Tainan (my old area) to kaohsiung (the mission headquaters) to go see him. It was an awesome talk. it wasn't actually a talk, it was more like a conversation between him and 120 missionaries. He is such an inspired man.

Anyway, of course what do you think happens to his laptop just as he goes to start? ..... It crashes! I was sitting a little towards the back and i saw it happen, but i figured i would just let them handle it. But President Hsu wouldn't stand for that. About 10 seconds after it had crashed, he jumped up and in front of Elder Scott and everybody, he was like "Elder Anderson, where ever you are can you come help us?" I was a little nervous, but i ran up to the front and fiddle with it for a minute, no luck, they had the wrong adapter so the battery wouldn't work. Anyways, long story short, they went and grabbed another computer and i helped them set that up and get Elder Scotts presentation working. How cool is that though I got to fix on of the 12 Apostles computer?!

I have done a lot of fixing of computers here so far. That was like the first thing President had me do when I got to Taiwan was help them with some computer problems they were having in the Mission office. I almost got transferred into the Mission Office this transfer. But i barely escaped, it was a close one. President Hsu called me and asked me if i wanted to do work in Microsoft Excel, and I told him i knew how to, but i wasn't like the master of Excel, so he let me off the hook. It would have been tough to be stuck in the office for the 2nd transfer.

I don't think i have told you all my full chinese name yet. It is Zhang zhi yue. Zhang is just a last name and doesn't really have a meaning, but Zhi means ambition, and Yue means Tall Mountain, so that is kind of cool.

Taiwan is so crazy. it is probably one of the most unique places in the world. it has a little of so many cultures. it is a little japanese, a lot of america, and of course chinese. Taiwan also has a special feature that comes equipped on all of the streets and roads here. I call it the 10 "foot rule." Because you can't go 10 feet without smelling something new. There are a lot of smells, some good, and some very very nasty. hahaha what can you do?

So i got an odometer for my bike about 2 weeks ago today. In my last area we didn't bike much, but in the last 2 weeks we biked 207.1 kilometers. In my new area, i will be biking A LOT more. I was in the city, but now i am in the country. It is the most rural part of the mission.

The work continues on. In Tainan we're working with this young man that was about 24 and helping him to get ready for baptism. We helped him to set a goal so that he could slowly become a little better. Changing doesn't happen over night, so we have been working with him to turn his life around, he is a good kid.

I am officially no longer a greenie. I have a new companion and i am no longer with my trainer. Sometimes i wasn't sure if i was the trainee or if he was. He was a goof, good guy though. I am excited to be with somebody new, it will be fun to work with people of all sorts of personalities.

Sorry no pictures this week, i just tried and the USB ports arent working and i don't have time to switch, i am gonna try and send a package maybe in a couple weeks and i will put my pictures in there.

Well i am loving it out here, somedays are really tough and you just want to sleep for like 20 hours, but usually it is great. I think the people will be a little nicer in this smaller town, maybe.

2 days ago i made a phone call to a member to set up a time for him to come help us visit some members, and i understood everything and he understood everythin. It felt awesome! Usually, i have a hard time understanding people on the phone, it is just really hard, but i stinking did it. So cool, people understand me usually when i talk, i don't always understand them, especially if they start talking about vocab i haven't learned yet. It is coming! I am getting more and more comfortable everyday.

Well i love you all. hope everyone is doing great!

Peace