Tuesday, November 26, 2013

ELDER RICHARDSON: NOV 3, 2013

ELDER RICHARDSON WEEKLY LETTER
NOVEMBER 3, 2013

Well it was quite a week! 

I spent Tuesday morning to Saturday night in Taidong. Taidong is way down south on the east coast of Taiwan. It took about 6 hours on the train each way to get there. I was companions with Elder Teshima, a missionary who used to be companions with my trainer Elder Pratt here in Neihu.

Taidong is WAY different than Taibei. Taidong is a lot more rural, and there were a lot of aboriginal people there. The houses are much more spread out, and there were fewer people. Almost everybody we talked to already knew who the missionaries were, and most had talked with them before which is very different from Neihu. Taidong also has a lot more Christians. Most of the people with aboriginal heritage are Baptist or Presbyterian. It was interesting to hear some the same arguments I heard in America but just in Chinese. 

We witnessed a lot of miracles this past week. We spent 8 hours a day knocking on doors. We were assigned a rather small area of the city, so we ended up knocking most of the doors in our area. We definitely found some amazing people for those missionaries to teach. Many of the people we found had been looking for the gospel and we were blessed to introduce it to them. It's a little sad that we won't get to see them being taught and hopefully getting baptized, but I'm glad that we could help the TaiDong missionaries find them!

Halloween kind of came without me noticing. I didn't realize it was Halloween until we saw some sort of trick-or-treating thing in the downtown of TaiDong. It was funny because a lady asked us if we were going to join them, I guess because we were dressed so "weird!"

Yesterday, we got to attend the baptismal service for one of the other elders' investigators. It was really cool, because this was a guy that Elder Pratt and I contacted on the street on my third day in Taiwan! Elder Pratt and I started teaching him, and then we handed him off to Elder Deal and Elder Morgan when they moved here about two months ago. It was awesome to attend his baptism!

Some other random things:

-I got my hair cut after email last Monday, and I didn't really explain what I wanted well enough, so she cut it pretty "Taiwanese" which just means it's pretty short on the sides and longer on the top. Not to worry, it's still missionary standard, it's just a little different!

-It was cool to see the ocean on the train ride down to Taidong! I've also sent some pictures of the mountains as we were riding down.

-We knocked on one house that had both Buddha and Mary statues sitting on shelves right next to each other.

-I tried Yogofresh for the first time, and it was DELICIOUS. It's basically a vanilla yogurt at the consistency of milk and sweeter. It's amazing.

-Last week for P-Day, we went to a National Geographic exhibit that was in Taibei. It was way cool!

-On Saturday, we taught an old Christian couple who was blind, and they showed us their scriptures that were in Chinese Braille. I didn't understand how it worked, but it was pretty legit.

Well, that's about it for this week.
Add Oil!
Elder Richardson
田長老

No comments:

Post a Comment