Thursday, April 15, 2010

29 June

Hello! I bet you are all wondering where I am this transfer. Surprise! I am still in Tucheng. This will be my 5th transfer in this area and I have been here for more than half a year. That is a long time! My new companion is my trainee's MTC companion, her name is Sister Allen, and she is from Denver and went to BYU-Idaho majoring in computer information systems, or something like that. So she is really smart and we will have a lot of fun. :)

My district leader for the past 4 transfers is going home. Near the end he got really really trunky, and my district made up a new saying: "You can only be trunky on the inside!" It didn't work, though, and I have to say that I occasionally felt trunky too. When I feel trunky, though, I picture myself returning from my mission and sleeping. Anywhere and everywhere. That is the most exciting thing for me to look forward too--sleep! As you can tell, being a missionary has absolutely exhausted me and my sleep disorder is catching up to me too. Our new member, Sister Chen, must have noticed because she gave me these "fish oil" pills that are supposed to help people have lots of energy. They are just straight fish oil, so I thought I would try them. Well, the day after I started taking them I realized that when I sweat I smelled like fish! The fish oil penetrated my body and I gave off this fish odor all the time. It was disgusting! So I stopped taking the pills. But it was really funny the first day or two, when I couldn't figure out what the strange odor was. Don't worry, most of the time I stay awake--although last week I did fall asleep during one of our lessons. It was really awkward. Oh well!

So we teach an English class every Wednesday night. It is a good way for us to serve Taiwanese and also we get a lot of investigators from English class--who start off being interested in English and then come to the church and meet the missionaries and get interested. A lot of our investigators right now are from English class.

Anyway, the class is every wednesday from 7-8:30. Last Wednesday we were teaching and the topic was on friends and forgiveness. We teach a gospel lesson every week and so I just joined the English and gospel lesson together and talked about a friend I had when I was in junior high that threw rocks at me (Mom, you probably remember this story :). I talked about what she did--threw rocks at me--and then had them get into small groups and talk about two questions: why I should forgive her and how I could forgive her. Well, the consensus was that I should throw rocks at her and not forgive her. One person in the class was willing to forgive her if she gave me a gift. So then I talked about why we want to forgive and how it helps our own hearts not be so hard and angry. I tied it into families and how many families have problems because they are not willing to forgive each other. At the end of the lesson I gave everyone who wanted one a copy of the Proclamation--and 10 or 15 people came and got one. It was a really sweet experience to be able to share with these people a gospel lesson and help them know that it could actually change their lives--and then to see such a response with them all wanting a Proclamation! I have never had such a desire (towards the gospel) in my English class before so it was a lot of fun--even if I had to get rocks thrown at me long ago. :)

And finally, this past Saturday we had a ward activity and went out to Sanxia to have a barbeque. I guess barbeques are not very common in Taiwan so it was a big thing. We invited our investigators (and six of them came!) so we went to and supported the ward and helped fellowship our investigators. It was a lot of fun to see how the Taiwanese barbeque. We went down by a river and they started fires in the rocks and then cooked the meet on top of the rocks. They set pots on top of the fires and cooked Taiwanese vegetables in them. And you don't get pictures this week, sorry. But it was really fun and a great way for our investigators to mingle with the members in an unthreatening way.

Well, that is about it. My next preparation day is next Wednesday. Our new mission president gets here on Wednesday and President Nielson and his wife go home, so we are getting ready for lots of big changes. Exciting! Oh, and my sister and her husband took my challenge seriously of setting a date to find someone for the missionaries to teach and they found someone and the missionaries are planning on teaching him on Tuesday! Keep up the hard work--I love to hear about missionary work! Love you all,

Sister White

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