Wednesday, May 27, 2015

May 27, 2015 - I Was Spit Upon!

Well, that was a pretty anticlimactic email. I don't know exactly why you all sent me one sentence emails (I assume time was short? Or you don't love me?), but I would have thought in the next 2 or 3 days you would have reconsidered and sent more ( Or you don't love me?). It's fine. I'm not bitter.

This has been a pretty cool week. We were really busy last week with some Zone Leader stuff. We meet with the Stake Presidency every month or so, and discuss all the ward's needs and all the recent converts (RC) and such. Lots of paperwork to fill out from every ward. Let me explain why paperwork is so hard here. Everyone has a Chinese name, which we missionaries usually know as a sound nice and neatly coded in our Romanization system. But for official purposes, that Romanization is 不得 (not allowed). There is a specific British ping yam or Romanization that the government uses that doesn't actually describe the sound at all (just like Kowloon Tong is not close at all to the Chinese name) but is basically randomly decided at birth and can usually be guessed, unless the person is from Mainland originally in which case it reflects the Mandarin pronunciation which will be totally unfamiliar to us. Difficulty one.

Difficulty two is that we need not only the English name but the Chinese characters, which many missionaries don't know how to write, which are difficult to look up, and which may have multiple different characters for the same sound. There's a little girl who's an RC in our ward with the name 靜 Ching, but there are 3 Chings with the same sound and the same meaning.

Then add in that we need to find confirmation dates and priesthood ordination dates and home teachers and ages for each one, and that Elder Little and I have to collect all of them from a whole zone of very young missionaries, and it gets tricky. But honestly I love it; it's oddly fun to struggle through.

Our tri-panionship is now broken up; Elder Busby is training a native named Elder Chan, who is hilariously paranoid about eating left-over food because he's sure it will make us sick.

Other news, we had an awesome day on Monday. It was Buddha's birthday, so everyone was free, we met with two kids to eat lunch together and they opened up with "So what's the difference between your church and other churches?". We found them because I had bumped into one of them on 3 different occasions, and he felt like there was some real fate working there.

We've been planning our next Zone Training recently, which is going much smoother than last time, though we still take a long time to plan. Honestly our Zone is struggling with new investigators, so we're working on how to fix it.

And last but not least, I was spit upon! Yes, just like it says in the scriptures! I walked up to talk to an old man in a train station and he shouted something (probably profanity) and then spit upon me (though luckily it was blocked by my umbrella). He probably meant to insult me; I was rather honored by it. The scriptures take on a whole new meaning. I just need to be stoned now.

Mom,

The weather this week has been pretty crazy. It has rained more than Utah will in a whole year, I can guarantee. I don't know why, but people here are really scared of rain. And everyone always just says, "Hey, it's raining!" even when it's really obvious. So we do as well. It rained "Black Rain" on Tuesday, which means that it's big enough to flood things and close businesses. But the warning got canceled pretty quickly and we weren't where the action was.

Dad,

So our investigator A Chung who changed his name to A Lai just keeps standing us up and being flaky, so we're not scheduling him this week to see if he'll find us on his own or not. The Chi family is doing okay, but Brother Chi was feeling pretty stressed out because of how many commandments there are, and by the pace we were teaching. We had a really good lesson where we just listened, understood him, answered some questions, and resolved his concerns. Really sweet lesson.

This week we also taught a cool part member family, and last week one of our RC's, A Yung, brought both her kids to church, and we taught one of them last night. So things are going well, but we definitely need some more people progressing towards baptism.

Joseph,

Your comment reminds me of Omni 1:9.

David,

Make a water feature in the court yard and call it de_water.feature.SUPERBOSS

Rebecca,

Congratulations on making Dance Company. I don't know exactly what that entails but I do know that I saw them perform in many an assembly Though I don't understand dance, I do understand hard work And excellence It's a habit, not an event This is one sentence because there are no periods!

Abby,

I suppose the birthday party planning you sent me last time was so accurate and complete that there was no need for the typical detail rich Abby report.

One last message for 大家, which being translated is big family, or everyone.

We're about to go to the temple. I'm not the best example of temple worship because before my mission when I had lots of opportunities to go, I squandered them. And I feel there is still a lot I can do to recognize and receive all the blessing of the temple now. But I do know that it is a great blessing to have a temple on the earth. I look forward today to taking my questions and concerns and having a place to meditate and ponder about them. It's just a chance to put down my problems, serve another, and have spiritual rest. Go to the temple often and together if you can, and just enjoy the atmosphere. It's a free gift to us.

Elder Morrell

No comments:

Post a Comment