Transfer 9 Week 1: Sister Bruno in Taoyuan City with Under Four Months to Go

This week we did Temple Tours again.  We had a really touching experience with 3 members.  2 mothers, and one of their husbands.  They were from Taizhong and came up to Taipei for a tour.  Well, we went up to show them the temple book we have, which maybe one day I'll take pictures of it.  What it is, is pictures that kind of run through a plan of salvation in some ways, so we review plan of salvation with the temple for our members.  Well, we did this for this lady, and when we get to the place with a memorial and a lady laying flowers I usually just explain we will all die one day, then we move on to talk about resurrection and returning to God...the more important parts, but in this tour I felt prompted to mention sometimes people around us die also, then my companion testified about the comfort of knowing we'd be resurrected and return to God, and the lady, since I had talked about death had been sobbing, her husband was patting her...then I testified also about God comforting us and welcoming us home.  I was a little worried, but we just continued on, to show them a movie put out by our Mission called Believe, which talks about how we need to believe in the growth of Taiwan, and the gospel, etc.  It's good and has pictures and music.  At the end, the lady shares with us, that her oldest son recently passed away after suffering for 2 years, and that she felt some comfort in doing this tour, even though sometimes she didn't know what her son was doing.  By the end, there wasn't a dry eye in the room, and Sister Collyer shared her testimony on eternal families.  It was really a faith building tour.  I was glad to be a part of it.  That woman had some strong faith.  She's been through some hard trials. I was glad to see she had such a loving and supportive husband, who could go to the temple with her, and stay by her side in her trials. So yeah.  They were really wonderful and even gave us these onion cakes that were absolutely delicious after the tour.  It was a special experience.

New Cellphone Referral System

Sunday, January 10, 2010 8:00 PM

Hello again from Danshui (or technically I live in Zhuwei, but whatever).This week was quite the interesting week! This area is way different from my other areas, as that we do a LOT of traveling, so instead of finding ourselves booked at the church all day when we are busy, we find ourselves traveling the MRT from Shipai, to Danshui, to Beitou, etc. It's a new type of busy, and I'm getting way better at contacting.

Missionary Letter: What Typhoon?--The Innocence of Missionary Life

Tuesday, August 11, 2009 11:23 PM

Okay, okay...after all the emails I got this week about how you think I'm probably stuck inside and waterlogged and stuff, I better tell you that this week has actually been very good, and we were only put inside for 1 day. Sister Hill left Thursday morning, and I got my new companion, Sister Engela Chen I was only without a companion for maybe 60 seconds, after Sister Hill drove off, Sister Chen arrived...that day it started raining really hard. We started hearing back on Tuesday that a Typhoon was coming in Friday. After our morning studies, Sister Chen and and I went to go eat lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, and while there we got "the call" from our district leader saying he had an announcement...the announcement was that we needed to get enough food and water to last until Monday. So, after eating we had planned on going straight back home for WPS, but we ended up going to the store and buying cleaning supplies and other essentials, cleaning supplies because when a missionary dies, the apartment get trashed with all their goods they didn't want to take home. So we decided if we did have a typhoon day, we'd deep clean. After that we went and had WPS. I was able to tell my new companion about all our investigators and such...then we had an appointment at the church so we grabbed our raincoats, and headed out there..

When we got outside it was pouring pretty hard. My shoes and the bottom of my skirt was sopping wet after only a couple seconds. It took us a lot longer than usual to get to the church, and then once we got there, we were proceeded to get stood up by every appointment we had that night...probably because it was POURING rain, and later when we talked the the appointments they were like, WHY WERE YOU OUT IN THE RAIN? A typhoon was coming, do you think we are crazy? Haha something to that effect. So we spent that night inside the church making phone calls and waiting to see if this appointment or that appointment would show up. The Elders also all showed up at the church, they had appointments scheduled there too that all didn't come, but it's understandable. After only an hour at the church though, Elder Lords got a phone call saying they wanted us to go inside as soon as possible, but no later than 8. So we had an appointment at 7:30...so we waited for our appointment, but she didn't come, so we went back to the apartment at 7:45. We were also told we probably wouldn't leave the next day.

The next day was Typhoon day. We were told we couldn't leave the apartment, so to be honest, I'm not even sure how awful it was during the actual typhoon, the wind was really extremely loud, to the point of what I would call wailing... and the streets were deserted and it would pour really hard heavy rain on and off. We live on the 9th floor, so we just could hear the wind rushing through our patio in the back of the apartment. So yeah, we spent that day inside cleaning and talking. It wasn't too awful.

The rest of the week it's just been very rainy, but nothing so awful that we weren't allowed to go out in it. Not a lot of people showed up to church and we had to travel to other people's apartments to see investigators because everyone said we were crazy and weren't willing to go out themselves, but they let us come over.

As for the state of Zhongli, there was a little debris and I know the rain hit pretty hard for a couple days straight because the locks on our bikes are completely rusted and we probably need to go buy new ones because it's hard to lock and unlock them, and when we went out the next morning, bikes and the motor scooters everyone rides here were strewn across the ground. But there is nothing really to help anyone with. Everything was cleaned up in a couple hours because they have really good road service and stuff here. Someone, not sure who, even cleared up the fallen branches at the church. I've heard that it was really awful in the south, but that's not our mission, thus why our mission president really wouldn't have a reason to publish anything to our parents. None of us suffered through anything dangerous. Two of our investigators asked us why bad things happen to good people, like those in the south, so we knew the typhoon must have been worse in the south, but we don't watch the news or anything, so we aren't even aware of the extent to how bad it is. You'd have to ask Taizhong missionaries about how the service opportunities are down there. Up here in Zhongli, after Sunday night, people started showing back up to appointments and the rain is a lot lighter. So the only really affect was that we had really small numbers last week, but Rita got baptized!!!! It was last Wednesday night, so I probably mentioned it was happening. She got confirmed Sunday, and it was just really awesome. The Elders investigator Jenny got baptized Sunday too. Zhongli 1st ward has been seeing a lot of success. It makes me feel a little bad because we don't have much to show for our other ward, we are so busy with our investigators in the 1st and always finding more that live in Zhongli because every day we are riding our bikes here and that's who we contact, and we live in Zhongli...then we hardly ever get out to pingjhen and even further out there, so we don't meet people out there...but the Elders are doing a great job there and they should have a baptism soon here too, so I'm excited for Zhongli 2nd ward, but I hope to find some investigators out there so it doesn't seem so sad on our progress records for them every week. I'd like to get to know the 2nd ward better. I know a lot in the 1st because I always need peike's from that ward. So yeah, I think my companion and I are going to try diligently to get some time to get out to pingjhen at least once or twice a week.

In companion news, I really love my new companion a lot. She is really funny and we have a lot of good laughs so far. I'm excited to be with her, it is a little stressful at times because I have a LOT of responsibilities, being the one who has been in Zhongli 3 transfers, so I've been making a lot of phone calls, doing the progress records in Chinese characters, making plans for the day, etc, but I'm glad to have her because she can lead the lessons and teach me the words I don't know that she uses. She's been a lot of help and she's amazing at getting to know names, especially of people who I don't know their names but it would look bad to ask since i've been here so long...so I'm getting to know a lot more names since she's been here! This week has been good! I'm safe! Pray for the people in the south...

1 minute left, I have a lot more I could have written about, but I'm out of time, maybe one day you can read my diary entries. Haha...

Bye!

Fu jiemei

Missionary Letter: Shenme Shenme (Taizhung Missionaries Now Transfered to Taipei Mission)

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 11:21 PM

So one of our Elders this week said it's really easy to set up the computer to type out pinyin instead of bopomofo so I can write in Chinese characters, but unfortunately I must have lost a lot of computer savvy because I can't figure out how to change the Chinese typing system on this computer. It sure doesn't help that it's all in Chinese...haha.

But yeah, sorry this week is going to have to be a fast email, because we have to catch the bus that comes in 20 minutes to Taipei...So I have like 12 minutes to type this. This week was pretty cool. It was our first zone conference with President Grimley. Zhongli still doesn't have the chance to interview with him until next Monday, so to be honest I don't know much about the Grimley's besides the get to know you thing they did where he talked about how everything good that happened to him, all sorts of blessings, started from his mission. I can't remember if I already said that or not. But Zone Conference was pretty good. I have to admit, it was different from being with the Nielson's but not a bad different. They added Xinchu to our mission, and so there were 24 more people in our zone conference than before. It was fun to see them. Quite a few of them are dying this transfer. I think it would be really weird to be part of the Taizhong mission, then all of a sudden part of the Taipei mission. But it was still really great because I got to meet 4 new sisters and they are really friendly and nice. It was exciting to have them. At Zone Conference we discussed being Unified. Baptism was talked about a lot too. We practiced the invitation they wanted us to be extending in English and Chinese. So that's good, because now I know a specific invitation that is powerful and I can use in our teaching. Before zone conference, what me and my companion just changed depending on who it was and such, but now we ask what is in the Preach My Gospel, and I've just seen how it is more powerful. The next day at District Meeting we further perfected it. Elder Kasey Lords (there, i'm including first names for dad when I know them...haha, i just don't know how to spell their names, so i'm guessing) played inny-minny-miny-mo (however you spell that too!) to pair us up. We did it 3 times, the first you accepted the commitment, the second you just didn't have time on the date, and the third you needed a question resolved before you were willing. Elder Dennis Mauldwin and I did it together, and I just seriously felt the power in the invitation a lot stronger than when we had extended invitations before. I was actually one of our real investigators, and it was nice to see how he resolved her concern. My companion did it with E. Lords and she was another investigator of ours. So we talked about it and think we have a pretty good idea of how to re-extend the commitment to our investigators in a powerful way, and more ideas now to resolve their concerns, so it was a really good activity...even though I honestly don't like roleplays...but I admit, they are useful.

In other news, this week was really quite the experience! I don't know if I've written a lot about Yvonne these last couple weeks...she had a baptism date of the 12th, which was her husbands birthday...but then that date passed, and a few of her dates had passed, and we didn't feel like it was right to try to re-extend a commitment at the time, so we asked her to pray about her need to be baptized, and that we would set-up a baptism for her whenever she was ready...and she just needed to call us and we'd get things together. She said she needed to have a serious discussion with her husband, so we encouraged her to do that. That week and the next, we kept following up on her prayer and if she discussed it with her husband. We felt a little annoying because she finally just said she'd call us back when she did it...so we thought we'd give her a little bit of time, since she told us she was going to go south for 2 weeks, and we thought that would be a good time to think about it since she said she still wasn't ready yet. But we made sure to leave cards that said to jiayou and not give up...then Friday morning there was a miracle! She called us that morning and said she wanted to be baptized on the weekend before she had to go south. And so we were SO excited. We asked her what changed her mind and she talked about how she had wanted to stop feeding her 2 year old breast milk, but she'd scream and cry every night when her mom tried to give her a bottle instead..and it hurt her heart to hear her baby scream and cry like that, so she prayed to Heavenly Father to give her child wisdom to know that both her milk, and the bottle milk were good. Then, in the next couple days she told Piao piao, that she was going to give her the milk in a bottle that night, hao bu hao? and her daughter was like...hao. She accepted it, and didn't cry. And she knew Heavenly Father really was there, and answered her prayers, and she needed to be baptized. But Sister Amy Hill and I were going on exchanges, and I was staying in the area, so we set up the interview with President Zeng for her, and Sister Hill went down to Bade. That day was crazy crazy. I was calling all the missionaries to invite their investigators and one of them to play the piano, the ward mission leader to set things up, all our investigators to invite them...and I'd never made a phone call in my life before...the senior companion always has the phone...but when the senior companion leaves the area, the junior is senior for 24 hours...so I had the phone and a million calls to make. It was so crazy hectic! So yeah, we had a baptism on Saturday and she got confirmed Sunday! And I had a really fun experience being with a native Taiwanese companion for a day...we really spoke a lot of Chingish. haha. So yeah, this week was a miracle. We had 10 people at church, less than last week but still a ton, and the afternoon investigators got to see Yvonne confirmed, and I'm really happy for her! We've known she's been ready for a long time, and it was a really exciting experience. Zhongli is a great place!

Okay, have to go, we are going to miss the bus if we don't run! bye!