Jasmine's Baptism

Sunday, December 27, 2009 11:32 PM

This week has been fine, not a whole lot to update on. This week has not exactly been the most productive and we have the lowest numbers of my whole mission, but when I got here my companion was SUPER sick. She felt really bad about being so sick, but the thing about a missionary, is if you go out in the wet and cold when you can't even talk in the first place day after day, it never gets better. Which, is what she'd been doing for 2 weeks and kept getting worse. We went and saw a doctor who put her on a lot of drugs and stuff, and now, a week later, she's a lot better, so next week should be a lot more busy, at least I hope so...I'm not sure what it is, but a lot of times I move to areas that aren't exactly dead, but they are in transitions, so I get there and it's a rare investigator or 2 that are coming to church or progressing.

Speaks at Zone Conference in Chinese

Hello, Hello from Keelung City, Taiwan.  This week has been going really good!  Yesterday we had Zone Conference and it was very touching.  Not even kidding.  I think it was my favorite zone conference with the new President.  President changed his method of people giving talks.  In the past, you were usually called on the phone and told you would give one, then there was one person who was surprised every time and asked to give one on the topic they asked us to prepare.  However, Elder Watson came and did a Zone Conference a couple weeks ago, and he picked names from a hat, and he had anyone on a mission longer than 6 months give their talk in their second language.  Well, this zone conference, we all had an assignment to read one of the four gospels studying how Christ taught, what kind of questions he asked, what revelations we received reading it, and record it in a study journal.  I had the gospel of Mark.  I had just finished Matthew when the call came telling us the assignment, so it was perfect.  The talks were to be on what we learned in the process, or what we learned because we were studying the Savior.  Well, I wasn't expecting to have to give the talk in Chinese, and in my personal opinion, the old language in the Bible is a little more complicated of vocabulary.  So, I was a little scared of being called.  But, well!  I was!  Haha, actually he said "Elder...well, this says Elder Bruno, but we don't have one!  So we will hear from Sister Bruno!"

Jilong Area Expands and Gets New Set of Sisters

Nobody wrote me this week.  I'm still in Jilong with the same companion.  However, there are two extra sisters this transfer and so they decided to put them in Jilong.  Now our area is getting split in half.  It really grew a lot since I first got here with no investigators that could progress, because the only ones willing to progress have parents opposing baptism problems and need to wait 2-4 more years to get baptized, and no people to meet with, so like 10 lessons a week..and it was quite a task to get that...to quite a few people with dates and we had 23 lessons last week.  So this area can handle two more sisters.  It should be a lot of fun to have Sister Phillips who goes home, and her trainee, who is a native Taiwanese, Sister Chen Shuting with us in our apartment.  Sisters are so spread out, it's rare to see other sisters except at zone conference and stuff, now we are the only sisters in the same zone in the entire mission according to my understanding.  How exciting.  President said he knows they are supposed to be here, and I know he is an inspired man, so I'm sure this is going to be super great for our area and we will see many miracles.