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
Showing posts with label investigators. Show all posts
Showing posts with label investigators. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Sept 3, 2008 Email
Aquariums and Ant Attacks
today we are going to an aquarium. I am so excited, it is supposed to be like the most awesome aquarium. Anyways, because we are going a long ways, we got permission to come email early. so my email is a couple hours early today.
Anyways, Brother Hong who was going to get baptized this Saturday has to wait a little while. He still has some problems with drinking tea and beer and stuff. so he agreed that we delay it a little until he has completely over come this problem. He is such a nice little man. He is a bout 45 unmarried and is a veteranarian. You can just really see his loving spirit from the way he talks about the animals he works with. I learned a new word from him yesterday. CHAOYINBO. which means ultrasonic waves. its the noise that dolphins and whales make. he had a heck of a time trying to explain it to me though. hahaha... he kept trying to make the noise and i didnt know what the heck he was doing. finally he just told me its how dolphins communicate and i knew what he meant. sometimes when people are trying to explain words, if they just used it in a sentence or explained it rather than acting it out, it would be a lot easier.
Hahaha... i remember in my first area there was this member who would try and do like sign language with me. But his sign language was terrible and he expected me to understand. LOL. he was a little different. anyways, i love chinese. that new word chao yin bo. when you break it down it makes so much sense. chao means exceed, yin means sound and bo means broadcast. so it is exceed sound broadcast. Chinese is the most amazing language in the world. every word is composed of 2 or 3 characters and then from those characters you have a meaning. so sometimes in lessons when we use a church word that isn't known to the general public we just write the characters out for them and that is basically like the equivalent of looking it up in the dictionary. almost.
we will be getting our move calls on friday. i hope i get to stay here. there are so many good investigators and i just love this place. the members are awesome and i have made so many good friends here. My chinese has improved so much here too. i love this place! Getting ready for the move call is always an exciting time because you don't know what is going to be your next assignment. you could stay you could go, you could get a new companion, you could train a new missionary. all sorts of exciting things. it always makes me a little nervous. I am safe from being called into the Mission office though, they call in those Elders a week early. wheeww that was a close one. i dont doubt though at sometime i will have to go serve in the office.
this week i felt like such an awesome missionary, just teaching lessons right and left and meeting new people and setting a time to meet with. i used to hesitate a couple months ago, but now i will say without any hesitations that i speak chinese. of course its not perfect but its at a point that i feel comfortable.
anyways, we have a lot of people on our ward list that no one has seen for a long time, so we have been trying to go and visit them, we have met a lot of them and have found out whats been going on in their lives, but there were others that the addresses were just impossible to find. they also dont have phone numbers so there is no way to get a hold of them. i was thinking about this a couple days ago, and i the spirit whispered an idea to me. Send them postcards! we dont think that some of these addresses even exist so we sent out about 10 post cards yesterday with our return address on them. if the cards come back to us then that means that the address doesnt exist and therefore we can cross that address off so future missionaries dont waste time trying to find it. it was a major break through. we told our zone leaders about it and they have been so excited telling everyone how to find out if addresses exist or not. its gonna be a huge time saver in the future.
well the never ending battle against the 8 leged foe continues. everyday i see a new kind of spider i have never seen before. there was a crazy flying spider that i saw yesterday. YIKES! how scary! not to mention the eternal battle between my rice and the platoon of ants that continually persist in their full scale invasion of my rice bag. they breached the hule this week and made it all the way into the heart of my bag. it is a big bag of rice about 10 pounds so i cant just through it away. i decided to bring out the nuclear bomb of my arsenal so i placed the big bag with those little suckers inside the freezer. hahaha who is laughing now ants. i hope they like being turned into little ant popsicles. my rice survived! the ants have been defeated. the only bad thing is that my rice has all this little black dots in it now. dont worry i wash it out and the ants wash away but the rice stays. i hope i get a young companion next move and then i will just tell him that the rice that i buy comes with a little pepper in it for flavor. ;)
well i got to go look at some fish swim around in a glass container. hope you all are doing well and are praying and reading your scriptures EVERY day.
love ya,
Elder Craig Anderson
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
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Email May 7, 2008
first off let me just say that i stinking love mangos. we have been giving so many mangos it is ridiculous! I eat like 4 a day. They are good. They aren't like the mangos we have in the states, they are like perfect. juicy, crunchy, mmmmm...
Hahaha... anyways. Fang Liao is pretty sweet! It is really small and we have to bike like 40 minutes to get to all the other cities around us. All those cities are pretty small too. This week the odometer on my bike reads 414.3 kilometers. So in 1 week we biked about 200 or so km. That is about as much biking as i did in 2 weeks in my last area.
We do a lot of biking. Usually about 4 hours a day of straight biking. We are planning a trip to go down and visit the very southern tip of the island. See if we can do some contacting down there. Anyways that trip is probably going to be about 7 hours of biking. Needless to say i am getting into shape in a hurry. My legs are so tired!!! It is fun though.
Missionary work is a bit different down here. We can't really go contact as much because first everyone speaks Taiyu and we dont and secondly because they have already been contacted by us and won't answer the door. Oh well. So what we try and do is just find a lot of service opportunities that we can help out in the community.
We taught some awesome lessons the other day to this young guy named ricky. He is about 24 and is one of the most amazing architects i have ever seen. He built this house for his grandma that is styled after a traditional japanes house, but is super modern and just amazing. Anyways, we taught a lesson that he just totally understood. He was just absorbing it. We taught him about the Book of Mormon and how it has changed our lives and how it can change his. He seemed to totally understand the period after Christ's death when his disciples died off and there was no one left with God's authority on the earth. We showed him the scripture in the Bible where it talks about christ laying his hands on his disciples heads and setting them apart to do missionary work. And then he turned to us and asked us "Have you been set apart by the laying on of hands?" and we were like "Yes." Everything just seemed to click for him. An awesome guy!
The only bummer with him is that he has to go in to the Army for a year. Over here all the young men have to spend a year in the army. Anyways we are trying to help him develop a really strong testimony of Christ before he goes so that he won't forget all about it when he is in the military.
He is probably our best investigator right now. There is another family that we are teaching they are also doing really well. Their daughter who is 16 wants to get baptized, but the parents are quite sure. So we have been teaching them as a family. The dad is loving it, he loves having us come over and talk about the scriptures. The mom is indonesian and is a little confused sometimes because her chinese isn't the best and neither is ours. Anyways, this Saturday we are going to go help them on their mango farm so that they don't have to work on Sunday and can come to church.
I love this place it is so cool and the people are really nice as long as you don't try and preach to them. Haha kinda makes my job hard.
gotta go love yall
oh ya i have gotten 1 letter so far, so i think you have labeled them all correctly, it takes usually about 10 days for them to get to me. sometimes a little longer especially now because we live in the boonies
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
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
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
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