Transfer Time!

April 16, 2012

In answer to your question to when I'll get transferred, I've been transferred already!  To Oakland again!  I feel like I'm just doing a big circuit of the bay area haha.  It's kind of a bummer to be leaving Chinatown but I'm excited for the new area.  My companion is Elder Liu from Taiwan who's a really great missionary and likes to use a bunch of Chinese idioms when he talks which is a good learning opportunity for me haha.  The work here has been going pretty slow though lately.  We've only got 1 investigator basically who is preparing to be baptized on the 28th.  But I have a lot of faith that we can find and baptize a whole bunch more.  Also, the weather here is wayyyy nicer.  I don't need to wear a jacket and sweaters all the time anymore!!! We're actually in the Oakland North area which is really huge.  We cover Berkeley, Hercules, Richmond, Concord... basically a third of the mission.  It seems like the branch here is pretty weak.  I hope we can help strengthen it here.

We took a picture of my last Sunday in Chinatown.  It was pretty epic.  We had a whole bunch of people come to church.  Pretty cool cause most of them are people that we baptized there and the rest were basically investigators we had found. I'll bring it back with me since I'll likely be too lazy to print it out and mail it over at this point haha.  Elder Brown and I did a lot of finding this week since we didn't have a whole lot of investigators as most of them were baptized last week.  We passed out like a billion English class flyers and had a whole bunch of new people show up to English class on Saturday and then church on Sunday. 

That is a pretty sweet article.  It really does pretty much get the gist of missionary work.  The play is coming to San Francisco in November I think... maybe we can find some time to come back and see it!!!  Although I don't know that we'll be able to get tickets.  Aunt Annette was lobbying to have us come back to the bay area on our way to Taiwan and hang out for a day or two.  Might be a pretty good idea actually.  I'm really excited to go to Taiwan actually!  Elder Liu's from TaiZhong.  I asked him if he knew Joel and showed him a picture.  He didn't... But that's ok.

In any case, that's awesome news about Jordan's mission call.  I just looked at he mission boundary map on lds.org and it seems like it's right smack dab in the middle of the state.  That'll be pretty sweet for her. 

Thanks for the package of nuts and stuff mom!  It was and is perfect!  Ever since being companions with Elder Brown, I haven't really eaten too much or possibly any junk food or candy.  It's definitely made a difference.  My pants feel a lot looser than they used to.  I've definitely gotten a ton better at running as well.  I used to run like 2 miles and be beat but now I can run like 4 and still have energy to keep going.  I think it's hard to tell as companions with Elder Brown though since he's so fast and I don't ever seem to be able to close the gap.

Anyhow, I guess that's about it this week.  I'm sure I'll have many exciting adventures about Oakland next week.  We cover west Oakland in the new area which is the most "luan" part... although I'm not sure how many Chinese people there are that would dare live there.  Generally they stay away from places populated with those of african descent.

Love you guys!  Thanks for all your love and support!

-Ian

No Rain on Our Parade (or BBQ)

Herroww!!!

Yeah conference was pretty good although we had a ridiculously busy weekend. We decided to host a barbecue on Saturday afternoon between sessions from like 3-5 at the chapel up here in downtown. So we invited a lot of people and it rained that morning. We were like "dang it... Chinese people hate the rain..." However, miraculously, it cleared up about an hour or 2 before our event was to begin and was bright and sunny the whole time and then it started raining again about an hour or 2 after we finished. Pretty SWEET.... MOM.... Aiya. I can't stop using that expression in my writing for some reason. I'm going to go back to college and sprinkle it throughout all my essays haha. Anyhow, we had a very successful BBQ. We expected maybe like 20 or 30 people but we ended up with 40!!! All these high schoolers brought their friends and we met a ton of new potential investigators. Elder Brown and I got this really ghetto grill from the sunset chapel and brought it over in our car. Unfortunately the top grill was missing so we grabbed some oven racks and bbq'd on them. Very successful activity.

Then we had Annie Liang's baptism yesterday between the morning and afternoon sessions and we were running around getting the program done and making sure there was going to be water in the font and so on and so forth so we missed part of the first session and then couldn't really focus too well on the whole thing since we had a ton of stuff going on. Quite crazy. It went really well however. She bore her testimony at the end and talked about how her mom had expressly told her when they got to the States that she could participate in church but could never get baptized so when we gave her the baptismal record to be signed by her mom she was really nervous and prayed a lot that her mom would let her be baptized. So when she finally asked her mom, her mom was like "umm... ok. For you I think it'd be alright". Annie said her mom could see the change that had occurred in her in the past few weeks and therefore agreed to her joining the church. It was a really great testimony.

We have 4 investigators lined up to be baptized on Sunday and hopefully everything will go smoothly. Elder Brown and I will likely have to baptize Alice's mom together since she's half-paralyzed but she's definitely willing and ready to go. We also have Duona, Vincent, and Sister Shen who are lined up and seem pretty ready to go. They all made it to sessions of conference at one point or another (we borrowed a projector from the branch president and broadcasted a session after English class here in Chinatown) and so they seem to still be doing pretty well. It's kind of hard to describe any of these people in intricate detail because of how many people we're teaching at the moment. We found loads of referrals this last week and will hopefully get even more in the coming weeks. President Pearce (the branch president) said success is like mcDonalds french fries. You can eat them when they're hot but you can't let 'em cool down haha. I'd say he's about right.

Anyways, so you finally got your long-coveted macbook pro. Sounds fancy! In fact I'm currently typing on a macbook pro as well. Apple is taking over the world!!! The Dell's not such a dinosaur! Unless you made it one!!! It just looks like one compared to mac, which puts everything in a shiny case and then makes it cost a lot more money. Which seems to work pretty well for them...

That's interesting that missionaries there are counting the number of Book of Mormons they have handed out. We don't really use that to indicate anything. Although the play 'The Book of Mormon" is coming to San Francisco so now there are pictures of a dancing missionary on all the busses... can't remember if I told you about that already. But in any case, it's kind of funny.

Yeah President Wade pretty much gave us a no-go for the whole YMCA thing. Which is a bummer cause I'm sure we could make it work. Oh well... I guess he's the inspired one and stuff so I'm sure he knows what he's doing. Sometimes I think we could do more here even as some kind of youth leaders rather than a missionary though haha.

Yeah I agree about Romney being President. You really can't please very many people as President of this country. I feel like everyone expects everything when there's only so much one person can do. Sounds like Obama's health care gig has been kind of a headache from start to finish... I'd comment more but I don't really understand very much about it. Not sure why that should keep me from voicing a firm opinion since it doesn't seem to hinder the rest of the American population but... I guess I'm not supposed to talk about that kind of stuff anyway.

So.. I guess that's it for this week. Thanks for your emails and support! Love you!

-Ian