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.
