Hospitality and Names

3/13/16

You know those charities where you donate like $20 dollars and you can 'adopt' a puffin? You know, they don't actually send it to your house, but you get to name it and they send a picture of a nondescript puffin? I think I'm going to do something similar to that. 20 minutes of scripture reading and you get to give a Taiwanese high school student an English name. I'm mostly kidding, but seriously, if you have this awesome name but are just too scared to actually name your kid it, you can email me and I'm sure someone here would want it. I bring this up because we met this awesome guy on the street, and he didn't have an English name so we gave him the name Charlie. Charlie was actually pretty awesome, and we set a baptismal date with him on the street. The investigators last week named Emma and Joe are super awesome as well, and Emma is scheduled to be baptized on the 26th of this month!!

    Transfers were this week, and I got a new companion! Elder Humphries and my new companion, Elder Karlinsey, actually just traded areas from HuaLian to XinFeng. Elder Karlinsey is super awesome! He only has two transfers left, so I'm going to 'kill' him (be his last companion before he goes home). He is super obedient, and I swear he already knows the area better than I do. It is going to be an awesome two transfers and then I might train after, so I am pretty excited.

    Last night rained like crazy. We didn't know it was going to rain, so we were far from the house and we couldn't buy anything because it was Sunday. We got soaked. It was freezing. We decided to knock doors because we were the only ones crazy enough to be outside in the bitter wind and rain, and we forgot about the hospitality here in Taiwan. The first person that answered made us come in and sit down on his couch (tracking in puddles of water) and then left us there in his front living room while he made us coffee, brought apples, brought cookies, and then made us just plain hot water after we told him we couldn't drink the coffee. He wasn't interested in our message at all, but he literally almost made me shower at his house so I didn't catch a cold. We finally escaped the pit of hospitality, and the very next person did the exact same thing. Who thought the work could be so hard because someone uninterested in our message would keep us at their house for that long. The Taiwanese are so amazing and kind to everyone, and I really hope that when I'm 40 and two rain-soaked foreigners knock on my door that I will be willing to let them ruin my couch. I love you all!

Elder Karlinsey after his first time conquering XinFeng hill

Me, being weird with a coat I found in the missionary closet.

I met this guy named Ko-Chittit or something like that. He is from Laos and lives in the States, so I told him about Boone and he was insistent we take a picture and show Boone! He was awesome!

This is our awesome district, which has just barely changed but that is ok.

the other is a stinking tractor doing something stinky I don't like to our backyard!!! I really hope they are not building a road there or more buildings,

 that is the only good part of our apartment!!!

theme park in ZhuDong, despite being US$30, it was pretty fun. If I had had the choice, I probably wouldn't have gone, but Elder Humphries had his heart set on it so I indulged him.

Miracles and Cockroaches

3/6/16

Ok, I hate this internet cafe. There are so many cockroaches in here. I've squashed a few with my shoe, and several more have crawled over my keyboard. Oh, those are the big ones. The little ones are everywhere too. Despite the horrible cockroaches, we had a pretty cool week. We are finally starting to get some super awesome investigators, and I want to share two of their stories.
    First one is named Emma. We met her in the pouring rain, and she actually stopped to talk with us for a while. We got to meet with her again, and found out she really loves Christ and wants to follow him so bad. She has a friend in another ward, and somehow got a hold of a Gospel Principles book and has already read halfway through it. After our first time meeting, she stopped smoking. She still hasn't smoked another cigarette, and often times avoids going home so she doesn't slip up. She told us during the Plan of Salvation that she wanted to hear every single commandment, so we just taught all the commandments as well. She is so amazing!

The second one is named Xuan Liang. We were eating lunch for about US$1.75, and as we were walking out the door my companion, Elder Humphries, said he needed to listen to the Holy Ghost and talk to the guy sitting behind us. So we did, and of course he was willing to talk to us and of course it was one of his days off so he could come and sit down at a FamilyMart and hear a message. He used to be part of a Christian church, but had some differences of opinion and so he left. One of which was that he thought we should pray to Heavenly Father in Christ's name, not to Christ. What do you know? He was amazing to talk to, and really receptive to our message. He even accepted the invitation to baptism.

These are such amazing people! I am so excited to be here in Taiwan (minus the cockroaches and the ever rising temperatures) serving these people. Transfers are this week, so we will see what happens the next transfer. I love you guys!!!!

pretty awesome beach. super windy and the tide was up so we were only there for 30 min

careful, the gap between train cars is 'gibbous'. What is the point of writing English if half the people speaking English don't even know what that means???!!!???

Halting Chinese and Almost Baptism

2/28/16

What a week of finding. Hour after hour, day after day. We had so many lessons this last week that just cancelled or stood us up. It turned out to be a really frustrating week, but rewarding nonetheless. We found an awesome investigator named Emma who attended the wrong church but then wanted to meet with us after it was over. We sat down with her at a McDonalds, and she told us about how she had already read half of the Gospel Principles handbook (who knows where she got it from) and really wanted to follow Christ. She accepted the invitation to be baptized, but we still have to work out a date with her.

     This last Saturday, every companionship in our district had a baptism! Every companionship, that is, except ours. Our investigator who was scheduled to be baptized on Saturday, Ivan, met with us two days before and said he didn't want to be baptized. He wouldn't really share with us why, but he said he has some other things he wants to get done before he gets baptized. It was so disappointing to be sitting in the audience watching all the other companionships baptize their converts, but I can't complain too much. Watching three awesome people enter the waters of baptism and covenant with their Heavenly Father made for an epic Saturday evening.

    Before the actual baptisms, each missionary introduced their investigator. I sat there listening to their awesome Chinese and soaking it all in, and then realized just how awesome what we are doing is. From my perspective, their Chinese was awesome. From everyone else in the room's perspective, it was barely passable. Here are these white people from half a world away stumbling through Chinese vocabulary and grammar, and they are standing right next to someone who had enough patience to let them get their point across and then even believe them enough to make a commitment that will change the whole rest of their lives. Wow. It truly is a testament to the workings of the Holy Ghost and the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. If someone from Peru came and tried to get me to read Twilight and give up chocolate in halting English I don't think I would blink twice before I slammed the door. All my love and prayers!!!

Here is a picture of a Taiwanese grave. There are whole mountainsides covered in these!

my dinner party last night. There are a bunch of Filipinos in XinFeng, and those are some of the members that attend the English ward in Zhubei. One is named Fyde and he is teaching me some Tagalog!!

Weird Emails and the Temple

2/21/16

    Sorry this email is coming in on a weird day, this week we get to go to the temple! That means we have our preparation day on Wednesday instead of Monday, and we don't have studies. So, here I am at four in the morning in a creepy and dirty internet cafe with a surprising amount of college students playing the famous Taiwan computer game--League of Legends.

     Last week was Guo Nian. Wow. How to describe it. So, in ancient China, a huge monster would come out at the beginning of each new year (according to the lunar calendar) and eat tons of people. To defend themselves, people would light firecrackers, make lots of noise, and hang red paper on the three sides of their front door. In addition, they would dress all fancy and eat lots of food every night because, you know, it might be your last meal on earth. If someone ever congratulates you during the New Years and you don't know why, it is because you survived the monster through the night. Yep. Imagine a whole week of that and that was pretty much it. Firecrackers start around 6 in the morning and you hear them all through the day every day of the week. Hey, someone even tried to throw one at me while I was biking, but I think he was very drunk so he missed.

    One thing I have been thinking about this last week is the faith of the people here in Taiwan. Sometimes I find myself questioning the members here: "why can't you just drop everything and do missionary work? why can't you all just come to sacrament meeting every week? you didn't know our church was different from the Catholic church?" If everyone had perfect faith, none of those questions would be a problem. Those three questions are rather easy for me to do, seeing that I am a missionary and grew up in the church. The members here in Taiwan though, have a kind of faith that I don't have. They are pioneers. Many of them are the only members in their work, in their school, among their friends, even among their family. I really thought about what great faith that takes alone, setting aside the fact that most members here can fulfill those three questions better than I can. These people are laying a foundation of faith for future generations to build off of, just like those brave pioneers who crossed the plains. This led me to examine my own faith and how I could step up to be as brave as these people in Taiwan. A line came to mind, quoted by our dear prophet Thomas S Monson in that army mormon message, "Dare to be a Mormon, dare to stand alone. Dare to have a purpose firm, dare to make it known." I love you all!!!

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First off, I don't have much to write about. It's only been five days since my last email, and nothing has really happened in that time. Funny enough, because I am in a different time zone (almost a half day earlier than Utah) all the missionary emails I get are the week after. Ya, I guess you could say I'm pretty much out of date in every sense of the term. Not only that, but because last week we emailed on Wednesday, I had two weeks worth of emails in my inbox then and no weeks worth of emails now. Confusing, but either way I don't have much to talk about. 
    Cultural thing: everyone in Taiwan has crash cams. The majority wear go-pros on the top of their helmets or have other cameras clipped to the dashboard of their cars. The cameras are set to 'record everything while I'm driving mode' so that if they are involved in a crash they have evidence. This has quite an interesting side-effect: news footage in Taiwan is pretty epic. Us missionaries aren't allowed to watch TV, but one can't help occasionally noticing people get hit by cars, doing front flips, and then walking away from it. They catch everything on film.

     The temple was, as usual, amazing. I don't know if there is anywhere in the world where I feel more peace and contentment. The hours right before were completely action packed: waking up at 4 to do emails, literally running onto the train just in time, enduring a splitting headache, etc. The time that I had in the temple was really the opposite. It let me just catch my breath for a moment. It is one of the few times that us as missionaries can just sit and not worry about a thing in the world. What a blessing to have a temple just an hour away, and what a blessing to be able to help people prepare to go there for themselves. This work is incredible and I am so happy I get to be a part of it. I love you all!

 the reflection of the Taipei Temple in the marble of JinHua Jie Chapel. So cool!

The boy in the blue is christian, the boy in the red asked us if we wanted to do something that is definitely against mission rules and then sat down with us and heard a lesson, and the little little boy ducking his head (you can see his arm on the left) is just this random kid that came up and sat with us while we were talking and kept throwing leaves at my head (during the prayer as well).  

One of my first guo nian dinners. I don't know if you can see the food, but it was pretty crazy

These are all Green World. I went halfway across the world to see cacti (It's a zoo)

The infamous hill

views from the top of our apartment building. Beautiful, although most days you can't see half of that due to smog.

Guo Nian

 2/7/15

 The infamous Taiwanese Guo Nian (Chinese New Year) is finally here. Members quite literally have to provide meals for missionaries because all the stores are closed. Meals with members are a little bit out of the normal. Yesterday after the one hour long combined church, we ate bitter cabbage, pig ear (not the mushroom mind you), squid meatballs, boiled goose skin off the bone, and drank vinegar fruit juice. Don't worry, it all tasted worse than it sounds. Oh, and people have not stopped lighting off firecrackers since yesterday morning. I'm portraying it in a bad light, but Guo Nian is actually super fun and it's pretty exciting to bike all around town yelling at everyone "Happy New Year!" and hear them all yell it back.

   Have I ever mentioned how cold it is in Taiwan? Oh it is so stinking cold. It is such a different cold than in Utah. It just soaks through your clothes, and then when the wind blows it just freezes your heart deeper than Anna (Awnah?) in Frozen. Also, we had a pretty decent (6.5) earthquake here a few days ago. It was in the middle of the night though, so I didn't feel anything. Tipped over a few buildings near the epicenter down in Tainan, the southern portion of Taiwan. Not too many people were injured or killed, but keep them in your prayers.

   I had something fairly interesting happen Saturday afternoon. We were just in the middle of a 6 hour stint of finding, and we contacted this group of guys that were smoking (which unfortunately is very common) and one of them held out a box of cigarettes to me and asked if I wanted one. It was a super easy no, but it made me think. I've been casually offered plenty of drugs on the mission, but that was probably the first time in my life someone held out and offered a cigarette to the point of where I only had to reach out and say yes. I am so grateful for the gospel standards I have and the faith I have developed to make that decision without blinking an eye. I thought about how different a situation that would have been without the gospel, and it just made me so grateful. I have seen so many lives ruined from this horrible stuff, and every time I see someone smoke I am so grateful for the guideposts of commandments that keep us safe throughout our day to day lives. What a blessing. Alright, there are cockroaches crawling all over my keyboard in this internet cafe so I better go, but Happy New Year! I love you all!!!

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That is so crazy! Two referrals from Utah? That is absolutely unheard of! I am so excited to meet these two people! Don't worry about the earthquake. Hardly a hiccup really. It is so common here. The only big news was those buildings that fell down in the south. They were mentioned in a few talks in church, but other than that life is just as normal as ever up here in the north. It was in the middle of the night. I'm actually super disappointed I didn't feel anything! Ya, so there is no cleanup up here. The only cleanup we are doing is our bowls for the New Year. Absolutely disgusting food yesterday, but I've heard the meals are normally amazing and every missionary gains so much weight. My companion, Elder Humphries, is super excited because he says we can get fat off of Guo Nian and then after work super super hard and get yolked. Ya, he is a pretty interesting guy. I really love the way he does street contacting. It makes the Taiwanese a little uncomfortable, but it is super friendly and he just gets along with them super well. He offends others pretty easily with the way he talks, but he doesn't really mean it. Makes for some funny situations every once in a while. Our area right now has virtually no investigators, so we are finding almost all day every day. It gets incredibly boring, so a lot of the struggle is how to make it fun, but every once in a while we get an awesome contact that just totally makes it worthwhile. Ya. So hey, what is this new personality thing from Pixar? I heard it was really good, was it? Also, I know you are all super busy and things, but if you get a spare moment you should send me some awesome poems! I have found poetry takes on a lot more meaning on a mission, and a few of them to read would be awesome. Not too many, and not those cheesy ones about missionary work. Just good solid ones. Also, a lot of missionaries love sharing these talks, one of which is a Ricciardi Letter. I'm curious if it is true or if it is just one of those folklore things. Don't spend too much time. I love you guys!!!! You are the best!!!!

The Xin Feng Hill

1/29/15

  I got transferred last week over to the northwestern half of the island in a place called XinZhu (Taiwanese pinyin: HsinChu). My new companion is Elder Humphries of Bountiful, Utah! Kind of crazy my companion is from that close. Oh, and we had a baptism this last Saturday! Nothing like moving into a new area and having a baptism! Her name is Polly, but I don't know much else about her because I only got to talk to her at the baptism. Between the church and our apartment is the infamous XinFeng hill. I had heard rumors, but never experienced the horribleness. I knew it was one of the biggest hills in the mission, but I didn't realize we had to go up and down it almost every day and yesterday twice. My legs are literally noodles. Don't worry, next week they will be legs of titanium steel.

     Sidenote: Playboy in Taiwan is actually a shoe store. Who would have thought? Playboy, DON'T LOOK! Oh wait, no you can look it's only a shoe store. I am very tempted to buy a pair of their really cozy slippers and see what my mission president thinks.

     Belowthesidenote: Wedding rings for women in Taiwan are worn on the right hand. The third finger while engaged, and the fourth finger while married. They wear it on the right so when they hold hands with their significant other (who wears it on the left) the rings are right next to each other. We found this out from a lady thinking about divorcing her husband. Go figure.

     The worldwide mission conference last week was amazing!!! I loved it so so so much! I wish I could watch it again and again. It was really cool to here their inspired words, and I'm excited to start working on applying it all in my mission. One thing they really talked about was member missionary work. Missionary work is most effective when members and missionaries work together. The majority of baptisms throughout the world are from member referrals, so keep it up back home! You're doin' a great job! I love you all!!

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Question (probably for Dad): is the rain actually acid rain and will it actually make my hair fall out? Literally everyone is convinced it will, and I need to know if I have to take drastic measures to preserve my luscious hair. People go crazy at you if your hair is exposed to the rain and I want to know if they are justified in turning my world upside down due to a lack of proper protective hair covering.

 I'm sorry, but as for the who I am teaching category, I'm not 100% sure yet. New area, so I don't really know anybody yet. Next week. Frustrations? Everyone here thinks all religions are the same and that it is just an emotional support. The WORST perspective anyone could have. Religion is just like yoga is in America. People go do it to relieve stress right? That is exactly how they treat religion. "Oh ya! I love religion! I can just go on Sundays and get rid of all my stress!" NO! They cannot physically accept the fact that religion is so much more than just a 'scapegoat' and that our church is VERY different from other churches. It is so stinking frustration trying to explain it to someone on the street. 

I'm still getting to know the members here, but they are so amazing. Some of them have the perspective that I just mentioned and it is horrible, but there are some real powerhouses. I don't know about my favorite thing as a missionary. There are so many amazing things that I love. One of the best though is going to bed at night. Like, not kidding. After a day of hard work and before another day of hard work, it feels so incredible to finally let your head hit the pillow at the end of the day. On the street, we get quite a mix of reactions. About 2 in 20 are completely rude (ok not completely) and straight up ignore us and walk away with angry faces, 1 in 20 is completely willing to listen to our message, and the remaining 17 make up some lame excuse not to talk to us, about 10 of which will make the lame excuse and then kind of chat with us for a bit after they realize we are actually pretty nice and fun people. That is pretty much the composition of our street finding. I love seeing people all the way down the street dive into an old dingy store full of drugs or something to avoid us though. Pretty funny. Well, that is the majority of it. I love you Dad, Mom, Sarah, Mary, and Christian!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

a beautiful Danshui for probably the last time

we got a picture with the rebel exercise lady!!!! She was so awesome!! If I haven't told you about her remind me to next week.

our exercise crew

 me outside of the gigantic XinZhu chapel with Elder Humphries