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 language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Email Aug 27, 2008
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
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
Thursday, June 26, 2008
June 25, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
May 20, 2008 Email
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
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
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
April 29, 2008 Email
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
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
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Email April 15, 2008
another great week in Taiwan. We had a little bit of success this week. We challenged a man who has been investigating the church for about 6 months to baptizim and he accepted. We told him everything that he needed to start doing and he has gone a week and obeyed all of his commitments. That is amazing! he reorganized his work schedule so he could come to church, we have a hard enough time getting members to do that. I hope that the awesome spirit that he has will continue with him for the rest of his life.
As with most investigators he was entirely oblivious to Christianic ideas. for example he thought that moses was jesus. we have sorted out most of his doctrinal issues. Unfortunately i am going to be transferred before he gets baptized, but i will here about him from other missionaries.
Apart fromt that success it was kind of a tough week. I am having a really hard time speaking. I can usually understand most of what people are saying, but when i go to speak the words just aren't there. over here too there are some people that have some really bad accents. If you think people slurring and mumbling in spanish is bad, try listening to them in chinese. Basically all the words sound the same. I think i told you all already, but there are only 404 noises that are made in the chinese language. Most of them sound like gong chong zhong jiang zhang chen zhen shen, so confusing sometimes. In english we have a ton of sounds like 10000 or something ridiculous.
I really feel like i should be progressing faster in the language, that is one of my goals this week is just to talk as much stinking chinese as i can even if people don't understand me.
This week we also faced a lot of rejection. People lie to your face a lot here and that really bugs me. Especially old ladies. Some are way nice, but usually they don't want us talking to their family members who are church members so they lie to us and tell us that this isn't where he lives and that they don't know who he is. Of course when we ask them what their last name is it is the same as the person we are looking for. Who would have thought?
yes it is really hot and humid here. and yes i definitely like the cold and dry better. o well though i am here. I here it is going to get a lot hotter too. Like really hot. Like hot hot. Like 100 F degrees somedays. on those days though we aren't supposed to bike to hard. and we need to drink a lot of water.
Ya i do have to pay to use the computer, but is is only like 50 cents for an hour so don't worry about sending a lot of snail mail. And the reason i gave you the mission home address is because thats where all our mail goes first and then they send it out to us. We do that so mail doesn't come to the write address after the missionary has already moved.
I am so excited to see pics of my new little niece. There is so much i want to tell you about, but i am going to be in taiwan for a while so a lot of it can wait. I attached a pic of me chillin at the beach. Of course we can't go in the water, but we went and played frisbee and put our feet in the water and that was kind of fun.
I will try and take some more pics and stuff this week, like of me on my wicked cool bicycle.
Oh ya we went to the retirement home again and did a play this time. It was hilarious, i was a villan and elder schwartz was a hero and elder britt was the damzel in distress and my companion was the narrator. it was so good, we had a sword fight and we chased each other around and fought like right next to the old people. That kind of overdramatic stuff is huge here. the old people laughed and laughed they thought it was great. the plot of the play was lame because we made it up and we don't really know a lot of fairytale vocab, but it was good.
Well i am doing good. Whenever i get down or discouraged i just think about all of you and that helps me remember that right now i am a missionary, but i used to be a real person too hahaha. Seriously though, it is tough somedays you don't even feel like human because people like run away from you and look at you weird and yell at you.
So funny story, we went to dinner with a member and an investigator the other day and the investigator brought her 7 year old daughter. all of the sudden the little girl just started crying and was like trying to hide. She was really scared of white people ha. And then when the investigator started speaking english with us the little girl just got so scared that she started crying. so that was pretty funny. the mom talked her back to her senses and then the little girl liked us and thought we were funny.
there arent very many white people here. i have met 2 so far and they have both been named Joe. Both are super nice, but not necessarily anxious to sit down and talk with us. One i think might, but i haven't run into him in a while to ask. My companion is scared to talk to white people because he forgot how to be normal. He tried the other day and he said hello and how are you like a taiwanese person. So the new rule is that I get to contact all the white people we see.
An even funnier story is that i went up to this white guy the other day and started talking to him. i introduced myself and he got this really confused look on his face. And then i asked him in english if he spoke english and of course he didn't. he was from germany so i quickly told him that i spoke a little german, obviously not enough to convey the gospel message, but i told him that we were from a church and that our church is in germany too. that was about all i could say, we both laughed at the language barrier and i wished him a good day and said goodbye. how terrrible is that? i thought he would have been one of the few people that i could have talked to, but nope. O well, soon i will be able to talk to chinese people, that will be awesome. well i love you all.
peace
elder anderson
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