Sister Stratford and I are trying to kill the dead stack. How can you kill something that is already dead?, you might ask. Let me explain. The dead stack is old contact cards that are often found in missionary apartments. Missionaries go contact a bunch of people, and use these little cards to write down their name, number, sometimes address. If they're really on the ball, they'll make some more notes on the other side to remember the date, where they met, etc. Often, it is difficult to get in touch with people, or maybe the cards go astray, and somehow or other you end up with stacks of old contact cards. What should theoretically happen is that the missionaries try several times to contact the person. If they try a bunch of times and can't get them, or if the person says they're not interested/too busy, they can write them into a form that lists "potential investigators" (i.e. people that later missionaries could call to see if they would like to meet). Then the cards get ripped up, and the information is condensed and organized. The dead stack happens when cards never make the transition into the potential investigator form. In order to kill the dead stack, you basically have to do what the original missionaries might have done, except it takes a long time because you have all of their cards, plus any contact cards that you fill out yourselves. Thanks to Sister Stratford's super-awesome organization system, we are nearing success. Calling dead stack can be very interesting, especially cards that are a few years old. Most people just say they're too busy; sometimes they say they'll call us back (I would really love for that to happen someday). However, you never know if someone in that stack is looking for the thing you want to give them. One of the women we are currently teaching, who plans on being baptized in Octobor (Zhou Jie Mei), came from the dead stack. Killing the dead stack is just like knocking doors or contacting over the phone, and they're all sort of like a treasure hunt for the people that want to talk to you. Who doesn't like a treasure hunt?
This transfer our mission is focusing on chapter 4 from Preach My Gospel, which is titled something like "How can I learn to recognize and follow spiritual promptings?" (Preach My Gospel is a book produced by the church to help teach missionaries how to study, develop teaching skills, and present the doctrines of the Gospel...basically how to be a missionary. Members who are not full-time missionaries are also encouraged to study from PMG.) This emphasis is just what I need right now. I was studying from chapter 4 the other day, and I saw this statement on the very first page, "God loves you and all His children. He is anxious to support you in your practical and specific challenges." I think it's so great that the omnipotent, omniscient creator of the universe cares about my practical and specific challenges. Because I believe that God wants to guide me in the details of my life, I'm not afraid to pray about all those little things, and to try to apply the principles of the Gospel to any problem, however small. I have a lot more to learn about how to do that, but I think it's a great doctrine.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Blandness and Romance
OK, so blandness and romance are probably the worst words ever to describe my experience so far (virtually nothing is bland, and literally nothing is going on in my love life right now). I saw the phrase on a box of cookies at the house of a family that let us in while we were tracting (knocking doors to find people we could teach). I forget the brand name on the box, but the color scheme and choice of font indicated to me that the company was going for an overall impression of elegance and upper class-ness. I'm not sure how the word "blandness" got mixed in amid the poshititude, but I suppose it won't detract too much for the average Taiwanese person. More importantly, it was a real blessing to be let into this family's home to get to know them and see how our message could meet their needs. We're going back next week.
Last week English class got switched up a bit. Sister Stratford doesn't like teaching children, and I happen to be the English leader in our district, so I switched us with the elders. They are very good-natured, and so were willing enough to oblige. Now my companion and I team teach the middle-level group. There's a local church member (who lives here, but is American) who usually comes to teach the 5 or so upper level students. The middle level is a wide range of abilities, and quite a change from teaching the little friends (in Chinese the direct translation of "little friend" means child), but I like it. I think I mentioned before that we focus on teaching English for an hour, and then do a gospel message for 30 minutes. Sister Stratford introduced a new format that I like a lot: Break the share into three 10-minute segments, and intersperse them throughout the lesson. This integrates the share with the English, and helps keep our students attention throughout the entire hour and a half. My favorite part of last week was our 10-minute segment of teaching a primary song in English to our class. The lesson was on family, so we taught "Love is spoken here", because it's about family prayer. Sister Stratford and I wrote up the words on the whiteboard, explained some of the more difficult words and phrases, and then sang it for them. When we invited them to sing with it, we were surprised by their willingness to do so. Of course there were a lot of mistakes, but as we sang together the Spirit really came in quickly. I know my companion and I both noticed it, and some of our class members did as well; they commented that while we sang, they felt peaceful and happy. Music really is amazing. We sing at almost every teaching appointment, and sometimes we sing for people while we're tracting. It took me a couple days to get used to, but now I really love it because I think songs that are sincerely written and sung to express sincere conviction can always invite those same peaceful, happy feelings.
Last week English class got switched up a bit. Sister Stratford doesn't like teaching children, and I happen to be the English leader in our district, so I switched us with the elders. They are very good-natured, and so were willing enough to oblige. Now my companion and I team teach the middle-level group. There's a local church member (who lives here, but is American) who usually comes to teach the 5 or so upper level students. The middle level is a wide range of abilities, and quite a change from teaching the little friends (in Chinese the direct translation of "little friend" means child), but I like it. I think I mentioned before that we focus on teaching English for an hour, and then do a gospel message for 30 minutes. Sister Stratford introduced a new format that I like a lot: Break the share into three 10-minute segments, and intersperse them throughout the lesson. This integrates the share with the English, and helps keep our students attention throughout the entire hour and a half. My favorite part of last week was our 10-minute segment of teaching a primary song in English to our class. The lesson was on family, so we taught "Love is spoken here", because it's about family prayer. Sister Stratford and I wrote up the words on the whiteboard, explained some of the more difficult words and phrases, and then sang it for them. When we invited them to sing with it, we were surprised by their willingness to do so. Of course there were a lot of mistakes, but as we sang together the Spirit really came in quickly. I know my companion and I both noticed it, and some of our class members did as well; they commented that while we sang, they felt peaceful and happy. Music really is amazing. We sing at almost every teaching appointment, and sometimes we sing for people while we're tracting. It took me a couple days to get used to, but now I really love it because I think songs that are sincerely written and sung to express sincere conviction can always invite those same peaceful, happy feelings.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Transcribed tape of the lost 9/3 email
Dad had asked me a few questions in one of his letters about my daily life: just the routine of being a missionary in my first area in Taiwan.
What is my apartment like? Do other sister missionaries share with me or is it just me and Sister Lin?
It’s just me and Sister Lin in Chao Zhou. It’s not a big enough area to have more than a companionship of sister missionaries in one apartment, but there are some areas of the mission that are big enough that one apartment will have maybe two companionships of sisters in it.
Our apartment’s really quite large. It has an area for eating and an area for sitting and an area for studying, a bedroom, a kitchen, a room with a clothesline in it for our clothes to dry on, and we each have our own bathroom, which is cushy. We have a washing machine on our deck in back, and every preparation day we can wash our clothes there and hang them up on the clothesline.
Our kitchen has pretty much all the normal things, except we don’t have an oven. We have a toaster oven. And we don’t have a dishwasher. I’m pretty sure that Taiwanese draining systems aren’t equipped to deal with the kind of food particles that might end up in a dishwasher or down a garbage disposal, because we don’t have a disposal either, and we put all our food waste in bags in the freezer. Every night around 6:30, trash trucks come into our neighborhood, and they play this one song really loudly, so you know it’s the trash truck. Then if you want to take your trash out, you have to go find the truck, like go wait for it on the corner, and put it in the back. And then a recycling truck comes a couple of times a week, and it’s the same: you just take your recycling down. So we just keep our food trash in the refrigerator until then, probably because if we didn’t there’d be a lot of bugs, like fruit flies and more cockroaches. I say “more” because there are already some cockroaches, but not that many. I’ve only really seen maybe two bigger ones since I got here.
We also have an air conditioner in our bedroom which we are allowed to turn on between 9:30 pm and 6:30 am, so we can sleep with it on and the door closed. So nights are not hot, which is really nice. And we have a water filter on our kitchen tap, because you can’t drink the tap water.
All the floors are hard. It seems like every home that I can remember being in had hard floors, except I think the mission home has some carpet. But I’m pretty sure the mission home is nicer than the average Taiwanese dwelling place.
In Taiwanese homes, you take off your shoes when you come in the door, put them just outside or just inside, and then you don’t wear them in the house. We have little sandals that we wear around the house–most people do–called “tuō xié”.
How often do we have district meetings and how many are in our district?
We have district meetings once a week, and our district has four missionaries in it. Besides Sister Lin and me there’s a companionship of elders (two elders). So every week we have a meeting for an hour and a half, and we just talk about principles of missionary work. We do training, or we’ll talk about a teaching skill and then practice, a role play or something. We’ll talk about the needs of our investigators (the people that we’re teaching the gospel to). I really enjoy district meetings. We have the meetings in Chinese.
I really like them because I think that things like district meeting and zone meeting (every six weeks) and just having personal study time every day, things like that kind of give me a chance to sort of spiritually recharge and remember what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. I think just the chance to think about the underlying principles–the foundation–of what we’re trying to accomplish is important for anything, including missionary work.
And I’m also thinking about the story in the Book of Mormon in Alma 15 where Alma and Amulek are basically missionary companions, and they’ve been teaching people together, and they’ve had some really dramatic and traumatic experiences. Amulek, especially, had just recently been through some kind of drastic life changes, described in verse 16. Then it says that after he made sure that the Church was established in the area where they had been working, Alma took Amulek “and took him to his own house, and did administer unto him in his tribulations, and strengthened him in the Lord.” I haven’t gone to my companion’s house recently to have her minister unto my tribulations, but sometimes everyone needs that time, not just missionaries. And I’m glad that the system that the Lord has established for missionary work has things built in to allow a chance to recharge and to remember and just to build up our own relationship with him and with other missionaries.
What do you eat, and who fixes the food? Where do you buy it?
So far, I eat most of my meals at home. For breakfast I usually just have cereal or sometimes this kind of wrap thing that I like to put an egg and cucumber and some mayo stuff into , and it’s pretty good. Or sometimes for breakfast or for other meals we’ll have mantou. It’s steamed bread that comes in lots of different varieties. I personally like a kind that has vegetables and meat inside or one with blueberries. There are also plain ones that you can eat like that or make into a sandwich.
Sometimes my companion will make some kind of fried rice or a soup or something. Actually, I really like everything that she’s ever made, so that’s been nice.
If we eat outside, we might eat rice or noodles or eat at one of the buffet places that have lots of different vegetables and maybe some fried rice or white rice (I really like this kind of rice that has beans mixed into it), and different meat and things. They charge you based on how much you get.
Every week we go to a grocery store and to a traditional market. At the traditional market we basically buy produce and meat, and then everything else we buy at the supermarket.
What is my apartment like? Do other sister missionaries share with me or is it just me and Sister Lin?
It’s just me and Sister Lin in Chao Zhou. It’s not a big enough area to have more than a companionship of sister missionaries in one apartment, but there are some areas of the mission that are big enough that one apartment will have maybe two companionships of sisters in it.
Our apartment’s really quite large. It has an area for eating and an area for sitting and an area for studying, a bedroom, a kitchen, a room with a clothesline in it for our clothes to dry on, and we each have our own bathroom, which is cushy. We have a washing machine on our deck in back, and every preparation day we can wash our clothes there and hang them up on the clothesline.
Our kitchen has pretty much all the normal things, except we don’t have an oven. We have a toaster oven. And we don’t have a dishwasher. I’m pretty sure that Taiwanese draining systems aren’t equipped to deal with the kind of food particles that might end up in a dishwasher or down a garbage disposal, because we don’t have a disposal either, and we put all our food waste in bags in the freezer. Every night around 6:30, trash trucks come into our neighborhood, and they play this one song really loudly, so you know it’s the trash truck. Then if you want to take your trash out, you have to go find the truck, like go wait for it on the corner, and put it in the back. And then a recycling truck comes a couple of times a week, and it’s the same: you just take your recycling down. So we just keep our food trash in the refrigerator until then, probably because if we didn’t there’d be a lot of bugs, like fruit flies and more cockroaches. I say “more” because there are already some cockroaches, but not that many. I’ve only really seen maybe two bigger ones since I got here.
We also have an air conditioner in our bedroom which we are allowed to turn on between 9:30 pm and 6:30 am, so we can sleep with it on and the door closed. So nights are not hot, which is really nice. And we have a water filter on our kitchen tap, because you can’t drink the tap water.
All the floors are hard. It seems like every home that I can remember being in had hard floors, except I think the mission home has some carpet. But I’m pretty sure the mission home is nicer than the average Taiwanese dwelling place.
In Taiwanese homes, you take off your shoes when you come in the door, put them just outside or just inside, and then you don’t wear them in the house. We have little sandals that we wear around the house–most people do–called “tuō xié”.
How often do we have district meetings and how many are in our district?
We have district meetings once a week, and our district has four missionaries in it. Besides Sister Lin and me there’s a companionship of elders (two elders). So every week we have a meeting for an hour and a half, and we just talk about principles of missionary work. We do training, or we’ll talk about a teaching skill and then practice, a role play or something. We’ll talk about the needs of our investigators (the people that we’re teaching the gospel to). I really enjoy district meetings. We have the meetings in Chinese.
I really like them because I think that things like district meeting and zone meeting (every six weeks) and just having personal study time every day, things like that kind of give me a chance to sort of spiritually recharge and remember what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. I think just the chance to think about the underlying principles–the foundation–of what we’re trying to accomplish is important for anything, including missionary work.
And I’m also thinking about the story in the Book of Mormon in Alma 15 where Alma and Amulek are basically missionary companions, and they’ve been teaching people together, and they’ve had some really dramatic and traumatic experiences. Amulek, especially, had just recently been through some kind of drastic life changes, described in verse 16. Then it says that after he made sure that the Church was established in the area where they had been working, Alma took Amulek “and took him to his own house, and did administer unto him in his tribulations, and strengthened him in the Lord.” I haven’t gone to my companion’s house recently to have her minister unto my tribulations, but sometimes everyone needs that time, not just missionaries. And I’m glad that the system that the Lord has established for missionary work has things built in to allow a chance to recharge and to remember and just to build up our own relationship with him and with other missionaries.
What do you eat, and who fixes the food? Where do you buy it?
So far, I eat most of my meals at home. For breakfast I usually just have cereal or sometimes this kind of wrap thing that I like to put an egg and cucumber and some mayo stuff into , and it’s pretty good. Or sometimes for breakfast or for other meals we’ll have mantou. It’s steamed bread that comes in lots of different varieties. I personally like a kind that has vegetables and meat inside or one with blueberries. There are also plain ones that you can eat like that or make into a sandwich.
Sometimes my companion will make some kind of fried rice or a soup or something. Actually, I really like everything that she’s ever made, so that’s been nice.
If we eat outside, we might eat rice or noodles or eat at one of the buffet places that have lots of different vegetables and maybe some fried rice or white rice (I really like this kind of rice that has beans mixed into it), and different meat and things. They charge you based on how much you get.
Every week we go to a grocery store and to a traditional market. At the traditional market we basically buy produce and meat, and then everything else we buy at the supermarket.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
New Companions, Tasty Food, and Searching Spirits
Well, today is a very exciting day for me. Even as I type my new companion is sitting next to me. I am still in Chaozhou, but Sister Lin has gone to a different area (Fengshan), and Sister Stratford has come to join me. Sister Stratford is reputed to be awesome. I met her at zone conference a few weeks ago, and my impression was also awesomeness. She trained two of my friends from the MTC, so hopefully she knows how to handle green, clueless missionaries (I still include myself in that category). It was sad to see Sister Lin go, but I know our mission president, along with his wife and assistants, prays and ponders deeply over how to rearrange missionaries. I know that Sister Stratford (Xia Jie Mei--her Chinese name) will be a great blessing to me. I've done my best to prepare for her to come, writing down names and numbers, studying a map, setting up appointments, etc. I know I'll forget where a lot of stuff is, but I'm sure the Lord won't let my human memory get in the way of his work too much.
Sister Lin and I had dinner with one of our investigators on Saturday night. There's some kind of Moon Day next week, and this dinner had something to do with that. We didn't end up having as much time to eat as Zhaojun probably hoped we could (our rules say that for meal appointments we should only stay for an hour), but it was great while we could be there. Zhaojun has a two-year-old daughter who loves to get into absolutely everything. She wants everything she can't have, which is especially fun when there are things like raw meat and hot grills sitting within reachable distance. Zhaojun's husband made some really amazing soup for us. The broth was made by cooking vegetables together, and maybe adding some spices. There was cabbage, corn, fish in several forms, and all cooked to happy perfection. *happy sigh* It's great to eat with a family, because I think everyone kicks back a little and you get to know them in a different way.
Sister Lin gave me a very sage-sounding piece of advice before she left. It probably came out sounding that way in large part because of her flawed English. Regardless (irregardless?) of the fact that I don't exactly know what she meant when she said it, it made me stop and think. She said: "Keep your searching spirit." Now, she may have meant, "Keep searching for the Spirit," but I'm going with the interpretation that I should keep my spirit searching for good things (which include the Holy Ghost). I guess I feel like I've found the source of the answers to my most basic and important questions in my faith, but that doesn't mean I've found out what all those answers are yet. I think there are so many things to learn, from the general (How can I fill my heart with love?) to the very specific (How can I help Mr. and Mrs. Sun get over their alcohol problem?). I suppose one could get worn out looking for answers all the time, but I think it would be a mistake to give in to that. I guess I believe that anyone who earnestly searches for truth long enough, willing to act on it, will ultimately find it.
Sister Lin and I had dinner with one of our investigators on Saturday night. There's some kind of Moon Day next week, and this dinner had something to do with that. We didn't end up having as much time to eat as Zhaojun probably hoped we could (our rules say that for meal appointments we should only stay for an hour), but it was great while we could be there. Zhaojun has a two-year-old daughter who loves to get into absolutely everything. She wants everything she can't have, which is especially fun when there are things like raw meat and hot grills sitting within reachable distance. Zhaojun's husband made some really amazing soup for us. The broth was made by cooking vegetables together, and maybe adding some spices. There was cabbage, corn, fish in several forms, and all cooked to happy perfection. *happy sigh* It's great to eat with a family, because I think everyone kicks back a little and you get to know them in a different way.
Sister Lin gave me a very sage-sounding piece of advice before she left. It probably came out sounding that way in large part because of her flawed English. Regardless (irregardless?) of the fact that I don't exactly know what she meant when she said it, it made me stop and think. She said: "Keep your searching spirit." Now, she may have meant, "Keep searching for the Spirit," but I'm going with the interpretation that I should keep my spirit searching for good things (which include the Holy Ghost). I guess I feel like I've found the source of the answers to my most basic and important questions in my faith, but that doesn't mean I've found out what all those answers are yet. I think there are so many things to learn, from the general (How can I fill my heart with love?) to the very specific (How can I help Mr. and Mrs. Sun get over their alcohol problem?). I suppose one could get worn out looking for answers all the time, but I think it would be a mistake to give in to that. I guess I believe that anyone who earnestly searches for truth long enough, willing to act on it, will ultimately find it.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Alas!
Through an unfortunate series of events, I wrote an email that then got lost. Usually I'll copy before I send, but today I just forgot. I am well, everything is as it should be.
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