November 14, 2011

Hello everyone!!

This past week has been such an amazing week! My companion and I have been studying the language very very hard. My companion Elder Bray has been such a great teacher. His Chinese is absolutely phenomenal, and every day we use an hour where he will teach me Chinese and help me learn at a faster rate. Within a 1 hour time limit I learn 30 new characters (so i will be able to read them an know the meanings), then I memorize 20 new words, then I learn a new teaching principle and practice teaching it. Sometimes it feels like my head is about to explode afterward but it has been helping so much! I have seen a huge improvement within just the past two weeks! Our district is now starting to settle in and adjust to the new boundaries, and the work is still going strong. This week between the two companionship's we set a new record of number of investigators that came to church. We had 12 investigators come! 2 of them were the other companionship's investigators and 9 of them were mine and elder Bray's companionship!!! It was pretty intense making sure everyone was taken care of and to make sure we had lessons scheduled before they all left.

This week we had a special meeting with our mission president, he had all of the Asian speaking missionaries go to the mission home and we discussed each language program and helped him to understand more of the background and the best ways to go about the work for those areas. We had to create a plan for the next 5 years, on how we can maintain 5 Chinese speaking elders within the mission at all times....it took a lot of work to figure out when misisonaries would leave and when they need to be replaced and when we could order new ones....it took quite a while, but it looks like we have it all figured out now. The thing that shocked me is most of that plan didn't even affect me at all because I will be gone before it starts taking place...crazy....more like....scary.

Anyway, this week we taught two new investigators that we knocked into on Halloween night. It was such great lesson and the wife wanted to go to church! And she did! but after the lesson we found out that she was actually good friends with a member in our branch! Her husband had to be one of my favorite people I have met on my mission, but his problem is just the fact of how busy he is. He is a nurse and is working pretty much all day long every day. We are planning to set up a time where we can teach him again as well. Elder Bray and I have been working really hard and it seems that the branch loves the foreigner companionship (it is what they call it, even though we aren't the foreigners here ;). We have about 2 baptismal dates set right now with two investigators and we are helping them to reach the goal they have set! We are excited! Elder Bray and I have been thinking of new ideas that we can use to help investigators progress and to gain new investigators. We recently had an idea to bring Elder Bray's ukulele to a dinner and then for the message we shared Elder Bray played the ukulele and I sang "I believe in Christ" in Chinese (we made our own arrangement of the song) they absolutely loved it, so later that night did the same thing at one of our investigators house and they loved it :), after we had a really great lesson. I am loving it down here, and I am so happy I was able to come back to the Chinese branch and work with the Chinese people again. I love you all!!! I would love to hear from you! Until next week!