Man, I swear there's always less and less time between these Mondays! Next thing you know it'll be up to number 100 then who knows what'll happen next :P It'll be like I'm home or something! Crazy!

But really I have 10.5 weeks before I'm home O.o

But who's counting, right? :P That is, besides you, mom ;)

So this week was really good! Elder Lee and I decided to try something a little different and set a goal for how many people we would successfully set up a time to meet with us (something we did daily anyways), but this goal is for the whole transfer. So we said if we get the goal (even if it's before the transfer ends) then we'll buy ourselves a board game to play at nights! Haha you have to find motivation somehow, right?

Interestingly enough, the day after setting that goal we had 4 people set up with us (more than I'd ever had in this area)! So that was cool :) I'll send a picture, but let me explain one of the guys that set up with us:

So we were meeting with one of the recent converts in the ward and reviewing the lessons (which happens right after baptism) when this group of aboriginal kids walk in to the store we were in and their leader guy is standing there and says "Hey I'm Christian too and I want to learn!" while we were in the middle of talking to our member. So we were kinda not sure what to do because a lot of crazy people say stuff like that to us, so we just kinda ignored them for the moment because they started getting all dressed up to do a performance across the street. I felt like we should just try and talk to the guy in charge of the dancing kids though, and they finished getting ready right when we finished our lesson, so we followed them across the street to a party thing we had no idea about for little kids! So we go over there and watch this guy perform with these little kids and he was going so hard! He was way more into everything than the kids and it was so funny!

So I kept trying to find a way to talk to him and kept feeling like we shouldn't leave until we did, so we waited and watched him perform 3 times before finally being able to talk to him. He told us he has 4 kid's dance studios, has a day job, and then goes and practices one of the like 12 instruments he knows with his band. That's his life, every day. He's a Christian and said that he moved here from the east coast. He and several other Christian aboriginal friends had stopped going to church when they moved over here, and he said "Yeah, some missionaries gave me a Book of Mormon before. I want to learn more, and I want to bring all of my friends back to God! I can meet with you on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. How about we just do all of them?" We were stunned and said "......uhhhh Yeah for sure if that's ok!!!!"

What makes it all better is that his aboriginal name Ga Zao literally means "Cricket". Heh :P

But yeah I was just amazed by this man and his humility and his enthusiasm towards living his life to the fullest as well as his faith in God. Cool guy!

This week we also had the wonderful opportunity to meet with around 12 member families! I can't say this enough, but these members are so crazy awesome! They love us, missionary work in general, helping people, the gospel, each other, etc. etc. and it's just awesome! They are so generous and kind and welcoming to us and all. I've learned a lot from them :)

So I hope everyone else's weeks was as awesome as mine! Have a great one this next week!

This week was pretty crazy! To sum up, Elder Larsen and I were not expecting to move this transfer, and then when the transfer call came out (because of smartphones our mission office sends us a Google drive folder with everyone's names and transfer calls - I can hear all you RMs getting really jealous about that already! :P yeah it's a little different) Elder Larsen was looking through all the names and got to his own and found out he was leaving! Surprise! So he went to 萬大 (WanDa - my second area!) to be with Elder Heaton (he sat next to me in the MTC). So yeah that was crazy! Now my companion is Elder Lee, born in Taiwan but spent all but 6 years of his life in Utah, likes to swim, golf, and party but is surprisingly quiet and keeps to himself. So yeah it's a big change! This is his second area so far and he was with his last companion for 4 months straight, so we're going through an adjustment phase right now I think :P

It's awesome though and just yesterday we set up with almost every member in our ward and all of them said "yeah of course you can come to my house. Why don't you just come for dinner?" It was so awesome to see their automatic kindness and graciousness. So thanks to them and to all members everywhere and your kindness to missionaries! We appreciate it!

Also this week was GENERAL CONFERENCE! It was so freaking cool! This time I decided to take a slightly different approach than normal, which I decided I'm going to do every time from now on because I got sooooo much out of it this time! I decided to write down every time they specifically invite you to do something, and then I'm going to take them and slowly start to try doing each of them. I highly recommend this for everyone! When you do what the prophet or an apostle invites you to do you get blessings, so do them! It's that simple!

So yeah this week was pretty good! I hope everyone else has a great week, and if you would like I'll copy in my notes for what I found each speaker invited us to do for conference (obviously particularly in relation to missionaries and missionary work). Have a good one!

Invitations/Goals

Saturday Morning Session

M. Russell Ballard

• Record the feelings you have from conference

• Receive the word of the prophet because it's as if the Lord Himself is speaking to you

• Have real/sincere faith in Christ

• Don't let the sacrament become routine

• Remember Christ is supreme

• Succor, lift, strengthen, visit, and lift those who need us and God

Brian K. Taylor

• Listen to the Spirit (it will teach us we are children of God)

• Seek to know more of God

• Seek the wil of the Father through the Book of Mormon

Larry Echo Hawk

• Forgive others freely and completely, including ourselves

• Remember and follow the Savior and His forgiveness to all

Lynn G. Robbins

• Don't fear failure, but learn from it

• We must get up every time we fall and fail

Neil L. Andersen

• Follow President Nelson as we would Peter or Moses

• Humbly and worthily seek the deeper assurance that President Nelson is God's prophet, perhaps by reading his talks and learning of him and his life

Saturday Afternoon Session

David A. Bednar

• Be meek

• Put the will of God first

Taylor G. Godoy

• We must use our time wisely

• We must be willing to sacrifice to be successful

• Honor the Savior's Atonement by living each day (for others) even more each day with energy and excitement

Taniela B. Wakolo

• "Keep on the covenant path"

• Perform and receive the ordinances and covenants of the gospel

• Turn away from that and those who appear to have godliness but "deny the power thereof"

• Strictly avoid casualness

Devin G. Durrant

• Teach children the gospel

• Do good and righteous traditions such as FHE and family prayer

• Always be ready to teach our children

• Be an example of the believers

Dale G. Renlund

• We must perform family history

• Help others to do so as well

Priesthood Session

Douglas D. Holmes

• Focus more diligently on our priesthood duties

Russell M. Nelson

• Every man should represent, speak for, and act for Christ to bless others

Ronald A. Rasband

• Prayerfully, joyfully, and willingly accept the priesthood quorum changes

Henry B. Eyring

• Do all we can to obvtain the gift of charity and then use it through the guidance and power of the Spirit to bless all those around us

Dallin H. Oaks

• Never use the word "priesthood" to simply denote "brothers" or "men" in the church

• Remember that titles are not for adornment

• Know that we are on the Lord's errand

• Fathers must magnify the priesthood in their homes

• We all need to be diligent in fulfilling our part in the work of the Lord

Russell M. Nelson

• Serve and sacrifice as priesthood holders in love, faith, and kindness

• Blessings need to be blessings, not simply prayers

• Keep covenants, fast, pray, and serve in and out of the temple righteously

• Seek to meet, understand, love, care for, and learn from those we serve

Sunday Morning Session

Larry Y. Wilson

• Prayers need to be specific and proactive in nature - "what can I do to solve the problem I face?"

• Obey and repent

• Don't simply ask and expect God to take care of things for us - seek proactive guidance

• Don't be afraid to counsel with the Lord "in all your doings"

• We can't simply "do and think what others are doing and thinking"

Reyna L. Aburto

• We must be unified and work together diligently and "with one accord"

• Testify of Christ, minister to each other, and serve lovingly

• Look for and do the Lord's will

• Reach out to others in love

Massimo De Feo

• Forgive and serve and love all those around us as the Savior Himself did

• Love the Lord more than yourself

• Be quick to ask for forgiveness

• Submit peacefully and humbly to the Lord

• Love to listen to the Lord's voice and recognize it

• Love to obey

• Serve others despite our own struggles and pains and needs

• Fill our hearts with the pure love of Christ

Claudio D. Zivic

• Endure

• Always remember and keep in our minds that we must not leave Christ

• Obey

• Attend church

Henry B. Eyring

• Always remember the Savior and keep His commandments

• Remember our feelings and what the Spirit teaches us instead of exact details necessarily

• Humble yourself, pray with faith, obey with exactness, and pray for others

• Pray for those we serve and especially to know how we can help them

• Serve others out of love for the Lord

• Ask for inspiration with real intent and open your heart to the Spirit

Dallin H. Oaks

• Do small and simple daily actions such as prayer/family prayer/scripture study

• Weekly partake of the sacrament after immediate and regular repentance

• Continually "paddle upstream" to avoid the cultural and social currents of degradation attempting to destroy us

• Do these things despite the simpleness of the way

• Seek to always stay on the covenant path

Russell M. Nelson

• Learn to discern and heed the Spirit's voice

• Have complete unity

• Find a private place to pray humbly and fervently and regularly

• Stretch beyound your normal capacity for revelation

• Choose to do the spiritual work required to receive the Holy Ghost

Sunday Afternoon Session

Garrit W. Gong

• Come and see

• Follow the prophet

Ulisses Soares

• Follow the prophet

Jeffry R. Holland

• Be motivated only and purely by the pure love of Christ

Jean B. Bingham

• Live even your mundane daily life as the Savior would

• Focus on needs and do it one by one

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

• We need to know for ourselves if Christ really is the Son of God and truly have the eyes to see Him

• Seek to repent and become more like Him and live His commandments

Gerald Causse

• See the members and truly come to know them

• Help others come unto Christ, don't simply focus on having a nice organization or program

• Take the church with us wherever we g

Quentin L. Cook

• Don't get complacent about family history

• Seek repentance, feel accountable to God, and strictly abstain from sin

• Humble yourself before God with a broken heart/contrite spirit

• Work your absolute hardest and seek to develop Christlike attributes as a missionary

Russell M. Nelson

• Let us all press on!

• Frequently and repeatedly and regularly review this conference

• All of God's children are invited to come unto Christ

• Care more deeply for eternal family relations

• Raise your voice in testimony more frequently and powerfully

This week was pretty good!

-范長老

This week was really interesting! We managed to find a ton of people and set up with many of them, but then none of them lived in our area! If they did, they ended up cancelling on us or not setting up another time or something, so we had some fun with all that this week. 

Also many of you have probably seen me start to use Facebook and posting stuff this week. I should say that that's just because our mission is now approved to use Facebook to advertise our English class here, so that's what I'm also using it for. Sadly I'm still not supposed to use it to communicate with family and friends, so that will still have to wait until I go home in June. 

That's actually been working out pretty well, and y'know the nice thing about not having a ton of investigators to worry about is that there's literally nowhere to go but up! Any effort is worthwhile, so it's all good. We're getting along great, our district and zone are awesome, we have a super cool kid we're meeting with that's awesome and considering baptism, we are staying happy, and life is good!

We also just spent the P-Day at my first area with some old companions and old friends, and it was awesome! I hope everyone else had a good week as well, and see ya next time!"

第七十九個星期 (Week 79)

February 26, 2018

So you remember how I said that this past week was transfers and I didn't think I would get transfered but you never know what happens? Well I was transferred! After an 8-hour train ride, I arrived in the land of the Peach Garden (桃園) and I'm companions with Elder Larsen, who Elder Kaufusi trained in my old district when I also trained a new missionary, so I already know him! Fun stuff! He's super awesome, from Centerville Utah, and we're already having a blast!

So this week our freaking awesome investigator Brother Yang (陽弟兄) in TaiDong got baptized!!!! He's so amazing and it was so great that he finally actually did it! Although I didn't get to actually go to his baptism I was able to call in and listen to it and talk to him and it was so amazing!

So yeah I'll forever miss the beautiful east coast, but I love it here on the beautiful west coast again with a ton of fun people (like my old companion Elder Cheney!) and in a great area with a fantastic ward!

So yeah I'm sure I'll have a lot more later when I'm more settled down and we get some more sweet investigators but that's most of it for this week! Talk to you next time!

第七十八個星期 (Week 78)

February 12, 2018

This week went very well! It was a little weird and crazy, but besides that, it was great :

Why is that? Well, on Monday we went to a place called 猴子山 (Monkey Mountain) where we had monkeys climb on us and one got a little too excited to be near me so he decided to bite my elbow (don't worry I had my jacket on so no rabies!) and a couple of them really liked the sisters' blond hair, so that was fun!

Fast forward to that night where we go and visit our investigators the 陽家庭 (Yang Family) who are totally going to get baptized next Saturday!!! Then we decide to go try and knock on their neighbor's door for the first time cus you know why not when the kid that answers the door tells us his dad's possessed by devils and we proceed to watch the most crazy stuff where this guy is moaning and groaning and laughing and talking to himself and dancing around and yelling and hitting stuff and then his coworkers come and try and help cast out the devils through their Daoist ritual thing which involves lighting a giant thing on fire and scattering the live embers on him while his shirt was off and then he keeps scattering the embers on himself and then they scatter some salt around the house and then he keeps doing his weird dance stuff and then suddenly everything's fine and everyone goes home.  Like what? It was so crazy! Everyone was safe though, so there you go I guess.

Then fast forward to Tuesday morning at about 1 AM where a district leader in HuaLian calls us and says "THERE'S A MASSIVE EARTHQUAKE OH MY GOSH" and tells us how they had to evacuate their homes and run to the church or outside in a field during the 6.8 earthquake that hit right there and have been having 4.0+ aftershocks every hour or so for a few days this week.

Then fast forward to Wednesday where we have a sort of average day and our investigator 豐弟兄 (Brother Feng) tells us the only reason he's been willing to do anything is because we keep inviting him and doesn't really want to get baptized :( :( :( :( :( but is still willing to read the Book of Mormon and pray about it and come to church and follow the commandments, so like yay!

Then fast forward to Thursday where we go up to HuaLian and have a ton of aftershock earthquakes and have interviews with our mission president and then go on exchanges with the elders in 玉里 (YuLi - it's an hour south of HuaLian and an hour north of us, so right in the middle) and then head home on Friday.

Then our other investigators are doing good but sometimes have issues (wow big shocker there, right?) but we're working hard and setting good goals and seeing miracles! Sorry I'm about to go to a cool big mountain with the beach right there and it'll be sweet and I hope everyone has a great week! 加油！

第七十九個星期 (Week 79)

February 19, 2018

This week was pretty nuts because - ☄️新年快樂!!!!!☄️ Happy New Years!!! But wait, New Years was 2.5 months ago, you say! Haha, not to the Taiwanese and Chinese people!

That's right, this week started "Chinese/Lunar New Year"! Basically, for all those who didn't get the memo, this means lots and lots and LOTS of firecrackers/fireworks in random places at random times, everyone returns to their parents' homes for a whole week, and lots and lots and LOTS AND LOTS of food! So New Years lasts for a whopping 6 days and the members love us enough to feed us for every meal for all 6 days and they take pride in cooking WAY TOO MUCH FOOD!! So alternating between my stomach being very happy and VERY unhappy (also due to a sudden bought of terrible diarrhea and stomach aches two days ago), this week has been awesome!

Also, our investigator Brother Yang passed his baptismal interview!!!!!!! He will be baptized this Saturday!!!!! He has changed SO MUCH like you have no idea. He always tells us insane stories of his youth and some...Interesting things he would do to his workers and other people and now is the nicest, funniest, humble guy ever. Sadly his wife was supposed to also have her interview at the same time but just kinda...Didn't show up...? So we're still investigating that part.

Also a positive note is how we still had several investigators come to church despite being in different places and doing different stuff for the new years! 

So yeah this week is transfers and we're expecting not to be transferred but y'know we'll see, and Happy New Years! Today we have to run around and help people clean and clean or own apartment and stuff so not really anything fun to report from today sadly. I hope everyone's week was awesome and I'll send more next time!

This week was awesome!

We had a good time hanging out and playing soccer last P-Day and then met this super cool kid that was playing with us and then started meeting with us this week and has the most deep thoughts I've ever seen from someone so young (he's like 16) and he texted us this week and said that after he tried praying for one of the first times he had "deep feelings" and kept thanking us for helping him come to know Heavenly Father. He's so cool!

Then this week we ran into a family who had had missionaries talk to them before, and then we went back yesterday and they let us in and said that they're totally chill with letting us come back and share more any time we want!

Then we met with our investigator Adam who is SOOO COOOOOOL!! He hadn't met with us for a super long time (like once in 4 months) but when he met again this past week he said that he is still super committed to his baptismal date on the 20th of this month and found out everything he had to do and learn and scheduled it all out right there and said he's willing to do whatever it takes! So in two days we shared all of the commandments and he literally has no concerns whatsoever! It's so amazing!

We also have been meeting with a great guy named Feng Dixiong (Brother Feng/ 豐弟兄) who is improving so much! He fasted with us yesterday and had a cool experience and is also pretty much done with all the lessons and is just waiting for his date and figuring out if he really believes everything for himself right now.

Then our longtime investigator 陽弟兄 (Brother Yang) finally came back to church after having a not great experience there last time and LOVED it! He and his wife have been debating if they want to be baptized or not for a few months now, but now he's totally on board! It's so cool!

So yeah life is great! I hope everyone also had a great week and I'll talk to you next time!

ddI'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. I'm a great place for you to tell your story and let your visitors know a little more about you.

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all!

FROM LAST WEEK:

Merry Christmas! 

-范長老

This week was was fun and crazy and actually probably not as crazy as last week having a crazy drunk guy with a gun but still a great week! This week we were still with Elder Turpin being in a tripanionship with us because he was going to train and his new companion had visa problems, but then we got the call on Wednesday night that he had to buy train tickets ASAP to go up to the mission office to pick up his new companion on Thursday and then we met him up there the next day for MLC (Missionary Leadership Council), which was awesome! It was so cool to be gathered with all of the zone leaders and sister training leaders and the assistants to the president and then President and Sister Jergensen! We talked about a lot and it was so inspiring to see everyone there counseling together with such cool feedback. It made me realize how much President Jergensen and God trusts 20 year old kids to go out and try and be missionaries and just how much he helps us along the way. Super cool!

So yeah now it's just me and Elder Cheney together down here in the boonies, which is great too! We're starting to try and light the area on fire and go hard and we're having so much fun while we're doing it! We went out to an area my companion had never really been to before yesterday and we passed this house with a couple kids playing basketball in the house so we swung over and knocked on their door to find not just a couple kids, but a giant family with 3 kids and probably 12 grandkids! They were super happy to see us and super nice, so they gave us some oranges and though they were on their way out they said we could come back and they want to come to our English class and our ward's Christmas party! 

Then there was this cool guy in his house working on some cabinets and stuff and he went to our church 10 years ago and said he'd love to come check it out again, and then his kids all ran out and absolutely love us!

And then right after them we were talking about the need to talk to everyone when we ran into a guy on his bike who has been to our church before and said that he was super impressed by us and especially our definition of faith, which we said requires action to gain a result which he really liked after we shared a scripture with him. It was so cool!

So yeah that and many miracles down here in what we like to call Paradise! It's a good time :D

Last P-Day we went to a driving range (my first time! :O) which was super fun. I did find out I am not too good and golfing though! :D Really fun, just really hard. Then we biked up to a Buddhist temple and the view over part of the valley was SO NICE! It was awesome! Today I'm going up to my old area in 花蓮 (HuaLian) and we're going on a hike through the forested mountains to find some aboriginal stuff, so I'm super psyched! I love it here so much! :D

I hope you all have a great week and I'll talk to you next week! 加油！

Hello hello all! This week was one of those weeks to be remembered. Because! This week was transfer week and me and Elder Bates were finishing up with training, so we knew something was going to happen. Little did I know that not only was I moving, but I moved down to the south-eastern border/corner of the mission and the island!! I'm back on the beautiful east coast and loving life! I'm in 台東 (TaiDong) and I'm the zone leader over all of 台東 and my old area on the east coast, 花蓮 (HuaLian)! We figured out that since our zone is the entire east coast, it's actually bigger than the rest of our mission combined! You might say that there's not a ton of people here :D I'm so happy! My companions name is Elder Cheney and he came out to Taiwan at the same time as me so already met each other and he is so awesome! He's such a stud and loves the work and going hard and is hilarious to boot! We're getting along, to say the least :D

And it get better! Since an elder in our district, Elder Turpin, was supposed to train a new missionary and the new ones haven't come yet we are in a tripanionship until they come. Our area is now from the border of our mission up about 100 kilometers. Elder Turpin was just in TouFen, my old area, with Elder Hogge, my MTC companion, who was actually re-trained by Elder Cheney when he came back to Taiwan. So it's just super fun and weird all together down here!

Here's the by far highlight of the week and maybe one of the highlights of my whole mission. Did it get your attention? Good! So we had a lesson like an hour up a mountain and they weren't there so Elder Cheney says 'well let's go knock 2 doors before we head down, so we go up to an LAs house nearby and when they weren't home we go next door and ask if they know them. The wife gives us the classic Taiwanese wave that says 'no thank you go away' and the super drunk husband starts yelling something in the aboriginal language and then leans down to open up a chest. As a joke, I say 'He's going to pull out a gun'. AND THEN HE DID! It was nuts! He pulls out a freaking 4.5 footlong shotgun and starts walking towards us and still yelling something in the aboriginal language. We start kinda freaking out and start trying to leave and he sets the gun against the door and starts walking towards us and we're like "No no no we'll come back later sorry to bother we have to leave now!" He walks up to Elder Cheney and says "No need for another time. First eat with me!", Then proceeds to grab his arm in a vice grip and literally DRAG HIM INTO HIS HOUSE. Elder Turpin and I don't know what to do so we just kinda follow and try talking him down and say we really do have to leave and really have already eaten, which the wife was actually super cool about and helped us with, so the husband finally says ok ok you can go and Elder Turpin says "well can we say a prayer with you first?" And in the most sarcastic drunk voice the guy says "Can you stay and eat first?" So we have to go back through it and say we have to leave and finally are on our way out and the guy chuckles to himself and says "Heh, the foreigners get all scared when I pull out a gun!" Some background too, guns are ILLEGAL IN TAIWAN!

So obviously I'm loving life over here! Everything's awesome and so much fun! I hope I have some more fun stories next week, but this week might've taken all or them out of us for the next little while!

Recently I've been working on developing charity, patience, faith, hope, and humility. Ever since we taught our investigator a couple weeks ago about developing Christlike attributes, especially those of faith, hope, and charity, I committed him and myself to praying for those with "all the energy of soul" as Moroni exhorts us to do in the scriptures. As I have done so, and reading in Preach My Gospel where it says "Humility is giving thanks to God and recognizing His hand in your life", I have seen an enormous difference come into my life and a profound gratitude for several blessings that I enjoy.  Life is awesome!

Such as: this week we met with some new investigators as we are continuing to try to use as many different ways to find as possible. We hit a little bit of a road block with not many new ideas, but we decided to go for it anyways and were blessed with more people to teach. We are meeting with several investigators who are studying at a college in our area from the Pacific Islands, and while we didn't realize it at first the 3 different investigators we were teaching all actually live in the same building on the same floor!  So we set them all up for the same time and asked referrals in all of our lessons.  We are now teaching 6 of them at the same time, 2 of which were just walking by and our investigators called them over and said "Hey come here! Listen to the word of God!" One of them turned out to have a brother going on a mission for our church in a few months and said he was willing to "throw himself into any chance he has to meet God again" and set a date to be baptized.  Now the funny part was that our investigator who already has a baptismal date came down when we got there and looked at us and was kinda snickering to himself and said "Hey, man!  Yeah, man, I'm like, sorry man, I just like, man, didn't know you were coming, like, y'know, this early man...  Yeah, it's just like, sorry man, I'm just, hehe, you know, man?"  We were super confused and this guy walks by and says "Don't listen to anything he says - he's drunk!"  Our investigator said "yeah, y'know man, we just had like a test yesterday and so, man, like we just started drinking a little for celebration.... I'm just so, like..... fed up, y'know man?"  My companion looks at me and says "Yeah I'm lost" and I say "Yeah me too", kinda figure it out, and send him back upstairs so he can grab the other guys to come down to meet with us.  Turns out at least 1 and maybe 2 of them were pretty drunk too.  Suuuuper funny though!  Gotta love college students, right?

On a happier note, we also set a goal as a district (the 8 missionaries near us) for how many new investigators our district would find from Thursday district meeting to Sunday night. We set a goal of 14, but by district meeting we only had 4 as a district. Our companionship had nobody set up either. However, we all prayed in faith and for each other and worked hard, and we not only achieved the goal but got an extra one as well!  And having nobody set up we still got 3.  I know that God is blessing us for our efforts :)  In the words of our district leader, it was "pretty legit!"

This week had some more ups and downs!  It's was pretty good overall though, and here's the rundown:

第六十八個星期 (Week 68)

October 30, 2017

Hello hello everyone!

This week we continued to work hard, and despite getting the usual few 放鴿子 (Literally "release pigeons" - it means getting stood up) and empty church commits, we are still seeing the miracles and working hard! We have found that our current problem is getting people to church and helping our investigators consistently meet with us, and so in the last few weeks we have tried to implement a follow up system of following up with our investigators at the end of the night, when we used to have that time set apart for calling potential investigators. We now call the potentials at the end of dinner when they are more likely to pick up, as before at the end of the night they often were already asleep or on the way to their home. We think this will help a lot because you can't baptize investigators that don't meet with you or come to church!

However, this week, we did have someone come to church - he was a self contact from 2 weeks ago who said he just wanted to get baptized. We said yeah we can help with that! He has many problems and many questions, and is currently a little unwilling to change his mind on many things (such as the problem that being angry and fighting people and hitting people is totally fine because he's justified in it) and being constantly drunk/smoking, but we're working on it! We also met with someone who has met missionaries everywhere they've been and basically talks like a member and has the same views on life as a member but just feels like he can't make the change. He's making great progress though, and we're excited!

We have started a 21 day prayer and fast with our ward for the month of November (so it starts on Wednesday and goes until 11/21), where at least one person in the ward is fasting every day for 21 days while everybody is reading their scriptures and praying for us and for missionary opportunities while we visit every member and do a missionary plan with them. We began meeting with the elders quorum president this week and he has already given the other elders in our ward a referral and he wants to meet with us every two weeks to discuss his plans (and feed us too!), so we're really excited!

As usual, we've also seen some funny English stuff around - there was a T-shirt that said "Teddy Bear - Let Me Remember", but it looked like it should be something with like a really touching quote about families or something on it, and then there was a bucket that we saw that said "Plimates Waterproofing", but it was a big picture of a monkey (so it was supposed to be Primates, not Plimates...a ha.....).  Yeah we take joy in the little things here.

On Friday it was awesome!  We had 6 lessons that day and were running around like crazy to try and get places on time, which was so much fun!  I want to have that every day!  But then, as it came to pass, on Saturday we had 0 lessons so we decided to go exploring!  So we found a bunch of weird stuff - like a drink shop in the middle of nowhere right next to a freeway that only sold grass jelly (weird black jello type stuff they put in drinks here) and had a giant warehouse attached to it so it could ship out said grass jelly.  Why?  Why not!

So yeah I had a good week, I don't know about you guys!  I hope it was great over there though, and have another great one!  Talk to you next week!

-- 

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

So our P-Day got changed to tomorrow (but to make sure you guys don't freak out we have to email for a bit :) ) so I might not have much time.  It got changed because there's a follow up meeting for training companionships (like me!), so yeah I thought I'd email this first just in case I didn't have time!

So this week was really awesome!  While this week our investigators have been really bad about actually meeting with us, we got 4 new ones!  We've been struggling with getting new investigators, and so we worked really really hard to hit our goals, and we did!  We started measuring how many times we talk to people on the street, and how many of those are actually about the gospel with an invitation of some kind, how many of them were on the way to something else, and how many people actually set up/accepted our invitation.  It's worked out great!  We found out we weren't talking to nearly as many people, and while not many people actually set up, we had an awesome miracle last night of actually hitting the goal!  We had had 2 new investigators by Sunday, then randomly someone called with a referral that they had just met with, so we set up with them and they became a new investigator on the spot, and then someone had come to church that day but literally ran out because he had to go to work so we didn't have a chance to set up so we called him and he did too, so another new investigator!  It was so awesome!

The guy that came to church was a self-contact from a week and a half ago and said to us then and then asked a member at church "I just want to get baptized, how do I do it?  What's the fastest possible time I can get baptized??  I want to change myself because I know I'm not doing the best things with my life."  So cool!!!  We know he has a drinking and smoking problem, at the very least, but probably....a lot more than that...  Oh well!  Work in progress!

We met with another self-contact from that same day, actually, and he was soooo cool as well!  We went to lunch with him and he sat down and said "so, uh, do you want to tell me about your church stuff, or what?  Why is your church different from everyone else?  How do I know which church is true?"  To everybody who has ever been a missionary, you're probably as excited about that as we were, because that's what every missionary ever wants to hear!  It was awesome!  He loved it and we're meeting with him again.  So cool!

So yeah it's a good week and some great stuff going on!  That's pretty much the summary of it, but we're really excited for the rest of the week!  Have a great one, everyone!

-- 

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

This week we had interviews with President Jergensen, which are always amazing!  We talked a lot about how to help our ward out to try and get them more unified and interested in missionary work, so we're excited because we're starting a 21 day prayer thing with our ward and it'll be so awesome!

So this week we had a few days of absolutely nothing.  They were totally dry, nobody wanted to talk to us, every single person that we felt prompted to talk to or felt like we had a good contact with said "no!"  Then the rain hit and it just made it worse!  Zao gao le (Oh no!) to the max!  So the whole time we were trying to stay positive and then think of what to do to improve, and honestly couldn't think of much besides just go out and try some more, which kept not working.  We tried member work, we tried visiting people, we tried notes, we tried calls, we tried talking to people more indoors, we tried it all and nothing worked!  A lot of fangs, and then a lot of people not answering.

But then!  We decided to go out again on Friday and got a couple ok contacts in, then all of a sudden that day we had 4 self-contacts!  It was nuts!  Then we set 2 baptismal dates, one on Friday and one on Saturday, and it was awesome!  I know that it was literally all from God because we had absolutely nothing to do with those people.  I know God was strengthening us so that we could just keep going.  It was amazing to see the Lord's hand so clearly when we had so little to do with it.

So yeah I'm out of time but loving life and I'll talk more next week!  Have a great week everyone!

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

First off, here's a message from the mission president to us about Christmas packages for anybody who wants to know:

CHRISTMAS GIFTS

Please tell your parents that if they are planning to send you a Christmas package to have it arrive in Taiwan anytime November 15 to December 10. You will be able to pick up the packages during our Christmas zone conferences that start on December 19. If the packages don’t arrive on time, you probably won’t see them until January.

So this week was pretty cool!  We had what's called "中秋節", or the "Mid-Autumn Festival", which is basically where everybody goes to their homes and barbecues right in front of their house on the streets (really really good! :) ) and eats moon cakes (really not that good, sadly :( ), and gets drunk together (really really sad :(, but still pretty funny).  So, to celebrate, our ward put on a barbecue activity where we went up into this park that I had absolutely no idea was right behind our chapel in the forests on the mountain right there and barbecued!  It was super fun and we had some investigators come with us, then we headed back to have English class, and while we were worried we wouldn't have anyone there we still had 12 students, the most we'd had in about 6 weeks!  So that was super cool!

So I forgot to say - last week for P-Day we went out to a big park in a place right up the mountain from us called 林口 (they share a ward with us), and played frisbee in the burning hot sun for 3 hours.  It was super fun!  :D  Then we rode bikes down the hill, which was one of the scariest and yet funnest experiences of my life it was soooo steep!!  We were going downhill faster than cars for about 15 minutes it was nuts!!!  So that was fun.

Today we're going to a mountain over to the north of the island and hiking part of it, so that'll be fun!  At some point we want to go back to the place that Elder Jensen and I went to in winter time called 鶯歌 which is where they cell a ton of super cool ceramics where I bought an ocarina, so that'll be fun when we go.

But, most importantly, this week was General Conference!!  Sooooooooo good!  There were so many things that were so good for me to hear and some amazing ones for investigators too!!  Some of my favorites were both of President Uchtdorf's, Elder Pingree's, Elder Nelson, and the one about "being one" (I can't remember who it was), but they were all soooo good!  If you haven't seen it, somehow, please go watch it!!  All of it!!  Then do it!!  All of it!!  It's so good.

This week we met again with our nicely-progressing friends 高天逸, 黃聖恩, and Nick 楊, and finally got in contact with an investigator from a while ago 郭韋!  It was so cool to see their faith and commitment to Christ and desire to learn more!  My companion and I are having some concerns with trying to actually contact and meet with some of our investigators, so we came up with a follow-up system to see when we're contacting them and what invitations we give them so they can keep progressing!  We're excited.

So yeah that's about it for this week.  I hope everyone at home is still doing good, and thanks as always for the emails of support/news/etc, and have a great one!  More next week!

-- 

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

Hello everyone, after a not-very-long emailing hiatus of 5 whole days!  I know you've all missed me :)  (I know especially you, mom!)

First off, one of the many reasons I love Taiwan: this was on a T-shirt worn by the most shriveled up old dude I have ever seen: "PARTY ANIMAL - WHAT SHE WEARS?"  That's the summary of this past year, folks :)

This week has seen many miracles!  A huge one was finding 4 new investigators!! We also have some more set up this next week, and everything should be good to get even more.  One of the new investigators is a referral from Temple Square to Philedelphia to Danshui (in northern Taibei) to us, who texted us out of the blue a few weeks ago and, due to scheduling problems, was finally only able to meet with us this past week. He texted us telling us that he wanted to confess to God, and when we met with him he said that he is "willing to do anything to change" from a mistake he once made. We taught him about repentance, how to do it, why we do it, and Jesus Christ's role because he didn't really understand how that worked. Now he knows he needs to rely on Christ and was in tears throughout the lesson as we were sharing how to be free of that guilt and stuff. Obviously, I'm pretty confident he'll baptized on his date at the end of this month!  So exciting!

Another enormous miracle was our investigator Huang Sheng En, who hasn't been able to come to church despite already meeting with missionaries for 6 months because of work. Then after starting school, his time has been minimal. 2 weeks ago we invited him to fast with us to soften his boss's heart to allow him to go to church, because he had already asked his boss in the past but his boss said he'd look but probably not. We thought that he hadn't fasted with us because we started on a different day than we met with him and he didn't respond to our text that day to remind him. It turns out he did fast with us after all, and now his boss has found somebody to replace him on Sundays! He said it will take a few weeks to get it all worked out, but it was an enormous miracle!! Then we had fast Sunday again yesterday, so we did a fast of gratitude with him for the great miracle God has given.  So cool!!

One of our other new investigators, a guy from Vietnam who's been in Taiwan for about 9 years as a factory worker named A Bu, or Bô in Vietnamese, is super cool as well!  He said that he had a religion in Vietnam but he wants to come to know God and Christ because of us!  Super cool.

So that was this week in a nutshell!  I hope everyone else had a great one, and I'll send more on the flipside.  加油！

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

 Soooooo yeah I'm 20 now.  That's weird.  In the very apt words of my trainer more than a year ago: "You just don't know how fast it goes!"  So true!  The past year (and 20) have blown by soooo fast, it's ridiculous!

Thanks for all of the birthday wishes and news and support!  Special shout out to Ryan, the other James's, Uli, the Relief Society, the Primary, everyone in the ward on that poster, the Moores, obviously everyone in the fam, and everyone else for writing a letter in the big package my mom sent me!  Thanks everyone!

This week we were finally able to set another baptismal date with our Japanese investigator's referral friend Steve who said that he really wants to get baptized, and that's after he gave up alcohol and tea and coffee the day we taught him the word of wisdom despite having a somewhat serious problem with all of them.  After some confusion, he finally got the Book of Mormon in Japanese, and he's reading it consistently, in addition to praying and going to church.  He said he wants to be baptized in Taiwan, despite our older investigator still saying he wants to wait until going home to Japan despite having almost finished the lessons and saying he knows it's true.  Oh well.  Still in progress!

To try and become "PMG missionaries" I've started reading through PMG from the beginning.  As I go, I'm doing a brutally honest self-review and see really what I'm doing and not doing, and then putting a sticky note in it and writing down what I can improve on.  I'm starting to try and apply each sticky note as I go, but at the end I'm going to take out every sticky and make a goal for each one on how to improve.  I know this is more of a long-term project, but I've already found tons and tons of things I can do to improve.  Basically every page has at least one, usually 3 or more things that I can do or do better, which is great to kind of see which areas I really need to change when in the past I was kind of lacking direction and it was easy to tell myself I was doing pretty good with being a "PMG missionary".  It's helped a lot!  It turns out I'm not as great of a missionary as I liked to tell myself!  Haha a good lesson in humility on the way, right?

We also had our ooooolld (in many senses of the word) investigator 林純青 show back up at church and say he wanted to meet again after taking care of his mom in the hospital for the last 4 weeks and never being able to meet!  We got a text from our long-time-no-see 15 year-old investigator saying that after his grandma passed away last week he really wants to come to church and "talk about things", and then a potential that was referred to us called us and said that he wants to meet with us because he has some guilt and he wants to repent.  So cool!  There's some great things happening over here!  Also our RC 謝帛泰 got confirmed this past Sunday, and he texted us to tell us that it was warm that day so we needed to be careful and make sure we stayed cool because he was worried about us.  Just from that he's changed soooo much even since I've met him!!

Today we're headed off to some "gondolas" up in Taibei somewhere that are supposed to be cool and take you up to the top of a mountain somewhere and then we're off to the temple.  So yeah, great stuff!

I hope everyone has a great week!  加油加油！！  More on Monday.

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

This has been one of the slowest, yet fastest, and overall craziest weeks of my mission!  So nuts!  Because guess what?  On Monday we had a fun P-Day, went to central Taibei and played basketball for 3 hours and then board games for another 4.  Then Tuesday night Elder Zhang and I are walking around and we get a call from the APs.  For Elder Zhang.  Then they just tell him "oh hey we were just saying hi and checking up".  And I was freaking out because they call on the Tuesday night before transfers to tell people when they're training.  So then another member friend calls me and says "Elder Van De Graaff.  Are you willing to train this transfer?"  And I found out he was sitting next to the APs and they called and then tried to misdirect me by talking to my companion and then having him call me.  So ruuuude!  Hahaha it was pretty funny but yeah I'm training a new missionary!

But first!  Then on Wednesday it was all pretty normal.  Elder Zhang moved to 淡水 (DanShui), which is up bordering the cost in the north of Taibei.  We had English class and all that, all normal.  Then on Wednesday we find out that all of the new missionaries had some visa problems, so since Elder Kaufusi and I are both training we were companions.  Until Saturday!  So we had to then balance our two areas for 2 days.  Also his trainer was going home this week so he surprise! came down with us for a day, then he went home.  So then we head up to Taibei on Saturday and have an awesome meeting with President Jergensen and the other trainers/trainees.  Then I got my companion!  I'm still waiting for them to send me a good picture, but his name is Elder Bates from Saratoga Springs, Utah, straight out of Westlake High School.  He plays football and baseball and we're having a blast!

So we found out our investigator Xie Dixiong totally quit smoking!  Just in time for his baptism this Saturday!!  We're so excited!!  He has changed soooo much in the last month.  He has conquered his depression, smoking, and all other problems and addictions.  The Atonement of Jesus Christ is so real folks!  It has totally changed his life.

Then on Sunday night we went to 輔大 (FuDa), the big Catholic college in our area, to go finding for a bit.  And holy miracles out the wazzooo!!  We got 5 people set up and the miracles were insaaaane!  Training really does bring crazy awesome miracles.  I'm totally out of time right now and I still need to email the mission president about said miracles, but it's been a crazy, hectic, and awesome week!  More from the craziness next week!  Have a great one, guys!

-- 

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

Man, the numbers at the top of these emails are getting awfully high!  This past week was my 60th week on a mission, which means on this past Wednesday I have been in the beautiful land of Taiwan for officially 1 year.  1 year ago on Wednesday I stepped off of a plane, met my mission president, and changed my life forever.  The next afternoon I walked out of the 台北金華街 chapel right next to the temple with my trainer, Elder Holloway, and took a train down to 竹北 to begin my work in the mission field and try to change people's lives no matter the cost so that they can have the chance to have true eternal happiness and live with God and their families forever.  Yeah it's been quite a year, huh?

Well on a less somber note, this week was pretty good!  We had an interesting week with several dropped investigators, literally 8 of our progressing (and/or baptismal date) investigators having a family member in the hospital they have to take care of or had to leave the country for one reason or another, and thus nobody able to come to church - except our sweet new investigator 郭韋 (Guo Wei) who loved church and wants to learn more and keep meeting with us!  So that was an awesome miracle!  Also yesterday the way to and from church was bright, sunny, and literally no clouds in the sky.  Fast forward to when we head back home to make dinner.  Suddenly clouds.  Fast forward to about 15 minutes into dinner when we need to head out to meet a new investigator.  POURING RAIN LIKE YOU'VE NEVER SEEN IN YOUR LIFE!  Oh my gosh it was even worse than the typhoon(s) that I've seen here!  It was insane!  By the time we actually got to the lesson (about 15 minutes away) my shoes were literally filled to the brim with water, and thankfully Taiwan frequently experiences this problem so they know how to make rain gear, so only my pants got wrecked by the water.  I wish I had a chance to take a picture because it was so crazy.  There was about 2 feet of water on the roads, so when we had a chance we walked our bikes underneath a long area with a kind of roof over the street.  However whenever we had to step back onto the street we walked in water that was literally up to my lower calf.  So crazy!  So much fun.

To quote a good friend of mine who is currently the Central Taibei Zone Leader, here was his email for this week that I believe accurately sums up the mission experience here in Taiwan (and especially Taibei) for all those who aren't lucky enough to have it themselves:

"Riding a BICYCLE in Taibei, Taiwan is an unforgettable experience. 

On Thursday evening, we were arranged to eat dinner at the office of a member in our ward who was inviting a non-member to eat with us. 

His office is withing spitting distance of the Taibei 101. The road that directly connects our chapel with the 101 is called XinYi Road. It is a one way, 4 lane corridor of madness that cuts dead center through the wealthiest, gaudiest part of Taibei City. Add heavy wind and a light sprinkling of rain and rush hour traffic, and you've got our travel conditions.

Alrighty, Brother Wu. This referral had better be good.

The missionary white handbook states on page 47:

"If you ride a bicycle, learn bicycle safety rules, use caution, obey all traffic rules, and use proper hand signals. Avoid riding after dark, in heavy traffic, or in bad weather."

THAT IS EVERY DAY IN TAIWAN."

We're having fun, staying safe, and loving life.  Because my companion and I have a ton of left over cash (unlike the rest of our district), we have decided to spend as much of that money as possible in buying mangoes!  So, much to my delight, we had "mango day" today and bought 4 mangoes this morning for the wonderful price of 110 元, or approximately $3.50 USD.  I love Taiwan so much!!!

Today we're headed out to a hike that looks over most of Taibei and is right next to the Taibei 101, so that should be fun.  Thanks everyone for the emails of news, encouragement, etc, and I'll talk to you next week!  加油 everyone!

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

This week went pretty well!  We have been meeting with more and more people all the time, which is super awesome!  On Saturday we met with a 20 year-old guy named 黃聖恩 (Huang Sheng En), who's super cool.  He had been meeting with them before but that was the first chance I had to talk to him.  He set a baptismal date and committed to talk to him boss about letting him get Sundays off for church, which is awesome!  He was pretty hesitant about that part, but then we talked about it and the importance of obedience and how he already believed that commandments were a good thing and from God so really he just needed to go and do like Nephi and he committed!  So that was sweet.

Also the 15 year-old kid we met with last week and set a baptismal date on the first lesson named Harry is progressing super fast, but since he's going to mainland China this week he couldn't come to church and he can't meet with us this week :(  But we met with his friend Jim and set a baptismal date with him too!  But then 3 days later he told us that he had no interest in meeting and doesn't want to get baptized after all :(  New investigator baptismal date to dropped all in 3 days :(  But that's ok!  He'll come around eventually.  He's super cool.

This past week we've been trying to think of a new finding idea to try every day, and it's been pretty fun!  We have tried everything from quoting a famous song called "帥到分手", or "So handsome you broke up with your girlfriend" and telling people that they're that handsome to focusing on families to talking about Father's Day to using the Book of Mormon in every contact to asking people if they want to help us with an experiment to open the Book of Mormon to a random page and tell us what they learn to inviting to chapel tours to asking "questions of the soul" to focusing on talking to people at stoplights to setting up a stand and passing out copies of the Book of Mormon.  It's been fun!  I like it better this way because it makes life more interesting that walking around and saying the same 3 sentences that don't work the best anyways.  We're trying to figure out some of the best ideas at the best times and places, and it's a lot of fun!

Also in other news there's a huuuuge worldwide sports competition like the Olympics but with specifically colleges in the neighboring area to ours, so the US sent a team to compete in soccer.  It just so happens the whole US delegation is from BYU, so they all came to church on Sunday and they sent 2 players to each ward in the area, so 2 of them came to our ward.  So, because they speak no Chinese that meant surprise I translated the whole meeting for them as well as one of their sacrament talks!  Surprise!  So that was pretty fun.

A great T-Shirt I saw - "All I Do Is Lin, Lin, Lin"

A great bakery that we passed - "Ble Bakery" - it looks like you would say "Bleh!" like it was super gross.  Then not 2 minutes later we passed a guy that spat out all of the juice from his betel nut (which looks just like they're puking out blood, by the way), so we had a good laugh about that all night.  Ble!

Last P-Day was a little interesting because my companion's bike kinda exploded and it was unfixable, so we actually fixed up the spare bike we had and he got permission to be able to just take it for free and we sold his bike for parts at a recycling shop for... ready?  66元, or a whopping $2 USD!  Yep folks, you buy a bike for $300 and sell it for $2 here.

So today we're going to go play kickball with the district and eat some food, so it'll be fun!

So that was our week in a nutshell!  I hope everyone has a great one this upcoming week and thanks again for all the emails of help/support/news/etc, and I'll talk to you all next week!

This Saturday one of my English class students is going to get baptized and she asked me to baptize her!  Surprise!  I don't even really know her, but y'know it's a good honor.  So yeah that's awesome! 

-Elder Van De Graaff   -范長老

Elder Van De Graaff/張's Pictures for Mission Video

 This was another great week here in Taibei!  We saw some really cool miracles so here's the breakdown:

第五十八個星期 (Week 58)

August 6, 2017

So, some fun stories of how weird being back in the big city is:

A T-shirt that says "Eap ect of my hfart", worn by a young girl trying look pretty

Another shirt worn by a 30 year-old guy trying to look buff but not "Sexy Dancer"

A hat worn by a 10 year-old kid that says "Sexy Baby"

Someone just got arrested in the internet cafe we're in as I'm typing this

At church a sister talking about how her dad is so fat he couldn't clean his own feet so he asked her to do it, and was totally serious and stuff in saying how fat he was and how nasty his feet were - soooo weird!

Randomly going to YiLan, the eastern part of the island (not as far south as Hualian though) for a ward activity

Having a special needs girl literally pushing her face between the seats so she could see me better and kept saying my name and whispering about me and then walking up to me at every opportunity and saying "You're scary!  You're amazing.  Hi!  Hi!  Do you remember me?  I don't think we've met!  Hi!  You're scary!" Over and over and over again for literally 12 hours straight.

In Yilan a little baby screaming and then our ward member saying "oh his voice is so loud, he'll be a great singer some day with vocal chords like that!"

Having a sacrament meeting about Father's Day with tons of performances (like me performing after being told the night before)

Going to a new member fireside and performing again with 4 days notice and seeing like 25 old friends I haven't seen in more than 6 months

Doing 『帥到分手』contacting - "You're so handsome you broke up" - and having it work stupidly well on the streets; a kid told us "no I'm so handsome I fall over all the time, so not really".

The city is fun!  The following is some excerpts from my email to the mission president because they're about to kick me off the computer in 2 minutes, so that's all the time I have!  I'll send more next week!  Have a great week everyone!

I realized this week that my contacts are extremely repetitive and not tailored to the person.  I realized that this is a problem I've had for most of my mission, and that I need to change!  So I set a goal to make every contact unique, although of course if so prompted I should share on the same Bang, but the cloud and bridge should obviously be more fit to the person I'm talking to.  With such a simple change of attitude of looking for something that sets the person apart I have seen an amazing improvement to my contacts and within hours of realizing that I found 2 people that set up with us!

I also loved this past district meeting - Elder Vatcher came and gave a great insight on something he calls "Ego-Busting".  That's where you find the things that you fear doing and specifically try harder to proactively do those things.  He said he's terrified of giving talks in Chinese, so he's volunteered to give a talk any time they need one, and this next week he's giving a 30 minute talk.  So I decided to do an "Ego-Busting Of The Day", where I find what I'm afraid or nervous about and try my hardest that day to specifically do that as well as I can.  For example I realized I was a little nervous about talking to people during meals/study times, so I tried that day to specifically do that and we found someone to set up with us!  At church I realized I'm not good at talking to every member or that good at really meeting members, so I made an effort that day to talk to as many members as possible and we set up with nearly half of the ward that lives in our area!  It was amazing.

Another wonderful miracle was when we were walking down the street and found a guy sitting down by his motorcycle.  We started talking and found out he is under 30 and has a wife and 1 year-old daughter and loves them very much.  We shared about family, and during the Bang his wife came up and was still friendly to us and we shared with her as well and they were interested!  Individual contacts are amazing and bring miracles!

Our ward mission leader is also wonderful!  This week in xie tiao hui we talked about ways to improve, and we somehow started talking about previous success with finding with members.  He said "So what you're saying is you want to find with members.  What if I helped you find a member family every week to go finding with you?"  We were stunned and said "of course!"  Then he said "how many member families would be ideal in 1 week?"  We said "Realistically 2 per week for an hour each time would be best" and he said "Alright here are some people who could probably do it, start calling them this week and setting them up and I'll start a sign-up sheet for people to do it in the upcoming weeks.  Let's do it as fast as possible!"  So we're starting with the bishop tonight and hope to set up the entire ward to help us go finding!  If you share ideas in xie tiao hui and are proactive, members will respond very well!  We're really excited about the help this will bring to our ward!

-- 

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

This past week was pretty crazy because - drumroll please - I moved!!  That's right folks, I left Hualian after only 1 short transfer there because Elder Sproul got the training call!  So I'm back up here in Taibei after more than 6 months out of it and it's nuts!  I'm in the western part of Taibei (actually "New Taibei City"), in a place called DanFeng in the district of XinZhuang (新北市新莊區丹鳳), so it's pretty nuts!  I'm companions with a Taiwanese elder who's on his 3rd transfer (he just finished being trained) and he speaks literally 0 English.  So it's 100% Chinese from here on out!  It's honestly pretty weird to switch back to English randomly, like to teach this Japanese investigator that we have, or to talk to other missionaries, after 4 days of speaking only Chinese.  Craaaazy stuff!  His name is 張長老 (Elder Zhang), he's pretty quiet, is 24 (he just got out of the mandatory military Taiwan has, and graduated college in industrial management), but super nice.  I'm really sad to have left Hualian - truly a gorgeous, wonderful place - but I'm happy to be here and try out yet another new thing!  I feel like in Hualian I really was able to find out who I was and make some awesome changes to not only who I am as a missionary but as a person as well.  Good stuff!

So in Taibei there are just people...everywhere.  Literally no stop to the flood of people.  Like at stop lights there are about 45 motorcycles that pull out.  Every time.  Talking to people is a huuuuge change after Hualian because there they love to talk to you for like 30 minutes but here it's like pulling teeth out with scissors to get them to talk for more than 5.  So yeah I'm kinda mentally, physically, and linguistically drained all the time, but it's fun!  Also the whole area is a humongous hill.  Like the whole place is a giant hill.  So that's fun.

Sorry I don't really have pictures this week - it's been a little too nuts what with the typhoon and moving and whatnot, but I promise I'll have something good for you next week!  Today we're going to go to the Costco in our area with our district and then go bowling, so it should be fun!  Sorry not much time to email more, but I'm doing good and going to have a great transfer!  I hope everyone has a great week!

-- 

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

So this week was pretty cool!  First off, last Monday we went to Taroko Gorge!!!  If you didn't know it's known as the most beautiful places in the country and, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen in my life.  Soooo pretty!! Don't worry, I'll make sure to send lots of pictures.

A great picture of our awesome funny ward mission leader, another picture of that beautiful college campus, a great little notebook I found, and then some random fireworks that just started going off one night, then the amazing and freaking beautiful/bright moon last night! Loves ya lots and more!​

第五十四個星期 (Week 54)

July 10 2017

This week was super awesome!  Like really super awesome!  Here's why:

On Tuesday we had a fantastic zone conference (I got to see so many friends in Taidong which is the farthest part of our mission on the east coast like Elder Lawrence and his new trainee!) where we talked about teaching simply and quickly with power, which has totally changed everything!  Our lessons are waaay better, our contacts are so much better than they used to be (like no comparison), and everything is just going better!  That night as we tried to implement it we got 2 people to set up and 1 person to commit to church and another person to commit to the YSA FHE and it was sweet!  Everything has started going a little better and the Spirit is just stronger and stronger in everything that we're doing!  It's so great!

Then I had an epiphany moment where I realized that I spent the whole last year observing people and their strengths and things they were working on, etc, and letting things get the better of me while I was being kind of a passive missionary where I would let others take the lead on things and sometimes wait for others to tell me what to do.  So I decided I was done with that!  I want to take this next year that I have left and not only keep learning and observing (which I even prided myself on this past year), but actually applying and doing!  I think this will help me finally turn myself into an ok missionary with an ok attitude and stuff going "pretty well" to finally being the kind of missionary and person I want to be and do everything I can to help people.  It was awesome and I feel a huuuuge change in everything as I felt that and I just want to work so much harder and do so much more, especially taking the initiative on everything.  It was awesome!

Here's a very accurate quote from my companion about this week: "Can I just say that I am sick of dogs? The dogs in the more rural parts of our area are the worst! They travel in packs and they are so (wow I cannot come up with the translation for the word that I want to use)... they are punks. 

So Hualian has the prettiest clouds that anyone will ever see ever in there entire lives ever. They look absolutely unreal! Not only are they insanely gorgeous, but they often have lightning arcing through them. At least once a week there is an electric storm. It doesn't rain, just lightning. Its incredible! "

So yeah this week was pretty fun, as you can see!  We've had people contact us, instead of the other way around, miracle church attendance, 2 families of 6 and 10 say that we could come back and teach their whole family, miracle set-ups, and so much more!  Really a great week.  Things are constantly looking up in the future!  I hope everyone has a great week as well this next one and I'll talk to you then!

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

We really are on the downhill slope now, huh!  53 weeks already - it's insane!  Sometimes I still feel like I'm in training and have no clue what's going on, and then I realize that I'm supposed to know what's going on now and it's sad.  Not really, but it's just so crazy how fast it's been!

So this week was pretty awesome, and here's what happened:

On Tuesday I went on exchanges with an Elder Johnson in Fenglin, an area so out of the way that Elder Johnson (who's been there for 4 transfers, or around 6 months) knows literally everyone that lives in the entire county.  Like we were biking down the road and he pulled over to say hi to this random kid that he knew named Ian and asked him how his brother was, then while they were walking away ran into another guy he knew that he asked how his mom was, then pointed out how he knew that the bright green car parked there was owned by a lady that he knew and he still knows how to get to her house, and then that night we ran into a lady that he was super upset by because he mistakenly thought she was the lady who sold lunch boxes, but she was actually the lady 2 doors down from that that sold drinks and he knew both of their names....yeah it's really small down there.  So much fun and soooooo beautiful though!  We also met with a super drunk guy there that asked us about 8 times what the difference between Jehovah and Heavenly Father was and how they were totally the same person.  He actually came to church, suprisingly enough, and in Gospel Doctrines he actually asked the exact same question, and Elder Johnson and I just looked at each other and laughed really hard.  Fun stuff.

This week we also met a man while I was pulling out money from an ATM in a FamilyMart.  Although he was pretty socially awkward and has an odd interest in being near students, he came to our basketball activity on Friday, where we then set him up and invited him to church 2 days later, which he came to, and also invited him from there to the YSA FHE Hualian has every Sunday night and he came that night as well!  It was awesome!  He's in his mid-20s and although he really is pretty awkward, he was extremely willing to just come over for all of that time and is now good friends with an awesome member who started proactively making friends with him during church and is suddenly progressing a lot!

We tried this week to do something that someone taught me last transfer on what he called the "Power Hour".  It's where you pop in to a member's house unexpected and spend 5 minutes with them.  During that time you explain how you are going to find around their area for the next hour and would like them to help pray for you.  You pray with them at the beginning, and invite them to continue praying for you continually throughout that hour while you find.  You work hard in that hour (as I guess every hour should be) and then come back and report what miracles you've seen in that hour to the member.  It helps build the faith of the member tremendously to see how missionary work actually happens and the miracles that can come from working hard and the member's support and prayers without giving the member any stress whatsoever.  We tried it with the primary president this week, who is an amazingly strong member and peike despite none of her family being members because her husband is opposed to their children being baptized.  It was amazing!  We got 2 set-ups, a church commit, and a commit to come to that YSA FHE the next night.  When we reported to her she was so happy and said "Wow, the power of prayer!"  It went so well!

What I came up with is that we will also try as we continue to do the Power Hour with our ward is the "Reverse Power Hour", where you set up a return appointment with the member and tell them that you will start with a prayer and will continue to pray for them for the next hour.  You then work with them for that hour and help them come up with a missionary plan of who to share the gospel with and remind them of the miracles that can come from consistent prayer that they saw from the original Power Hour and, if possible, help them to do some of the missionary work right there with you in that hour.  We're going to try to do it with our entire ward, if possible.  It'll be awesome and it gets the members so pumped on missionary work, it's awesome!

Last week for P-Day we went out to the coast and played volleyball and frisbee, which was super fun and SOOO PRETTY oh man it was awesome.  Don't worry, I'll attach pictures!  Today we're going to go to yet another all you can eat BBQ with our amazing ward mission leader Yangkai (who's actually also our Elders Quorum President and stake YSA representative and a gospel doctrines teacher....yeah poor guy) and hang out the rest of the day.  It'll be awesome!  I hope everyone has a great week and thanks as always for the fun emails and news/support/etc.  Talk to you next week!

Photos:  So there's everything in here from where we played volleyball to some awesome clouds to this random house that looks like an evil villain lives there to the Cai family that came all the way from TouFen (they're RCs from there) just to see me here and Elder Lawrence in TaiDong (right below Hualian) to the amazing college campus that's technically in our area but is actually like a 20 minute train ride and a 1 hour bike ride and this kid we met there who's super sweet and said "hey do you like instruments?" and we said "um yeah" and then he started playing that!  Oh yeah and also the mountains are still beautiful.  Great week!

-- 

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

I counted backwards and realized that since I've been gone for one WHOLE YEAR this week I miss-counted a week somewhere in there, so this was WEEK fifty two!!!  I hit my year mark this past week and it's insane how fast it's gone and yet how much has happened this year!  I've been loving life here so much and it's so weird and sad to think that it's already halfway done!

Well, enough sad thoughts - here was this week!

This week (and this transfer, because we're whitewashing), we made a goal to explore our area and to really know it while finding on the way to find the best places to find, etc. So we found a cluster of buildings waaaaay up on a mountain and said "alright, we're going there this week!" We biked for over an hour to get there, and hadn't had a ton of success on the way. We got up there and found a place to eat, and there was nobody else in the restaurant because there was nobody within probably a mile radius besides some tourists going boating. We started talking to the lady at the restaurant, and she said she wanted to hear us pray. We prayed over the food and we started learning about her and her life, and she told us how her father had recently passed away and he was very Catholic, so hearing people pray over their food made her remember all of the good memories of her father. We began sharing about the plan of salvation and the restoration of the true gospel, and despite me having to go and talk to a very drunk man so he wouldn't interrupt the lesson my companion was able to continue talking to her and overcome her concerns to set up a time to go back tomorrow!

That drunk guy was actually super funny - we had talked to someone else up there and Elder Sproul found a snake outside underneath a table and the guy and his wife were freaking out and the wife was saying "It kills people it kills people!" and the husband ran out and grabbed this long claw thing and reached under the table and grabbed the snake.  Elder Sproul and I had no idea what was happening or what to do, so we just kinda stood there in awe while the guy took it out and was about to throw it off the cliff right outside his house when this other guy walked up and started talking to the first guy.  When the first guy walked back, he had no snake and said that he gave it to the other guy.  The other guy (who was shirtless) was walking away with the snake around his neck and the first guy said "yeah I gave it to him because he want to take it home and eat it.  This happens a lot."  Then the guy who took the snake and ate it was the drunk guy that walked up and called out to me and said "take a picture with me!"  So we did after Elder Sproul was done talking to the lady.

Also on that trip way out there I learned how to ride a bike with no hands!  It was weird, it literally just happened all of a sudden.

We went out exploring again and we found this weird futuristic insanely expensive house with grass on it next to a huge abandoned apartment building that says "self-serve tours!", and right next to those was a huge empty parking lot with a bunch of people playing with RC planes that were SO INTENSE it was insane!!  I'll send some of those pictures too.  Totally nuts!

On Saturday, we had a baptism!!  And, we met him on Friday right before his baptismal interview!!  He's so cool though - his name's Lin Zhi Hong, or Ren (as in the Ren inside Lorenzo), and he's so awesome!  Elder Alexander, the one who did his baptismal interview, said he was the most prepared person he'd ever met.  It was so sweet.  Yay baptism!

Last night we had set up a chapel tour with a family that the previous elders had been teaching and considered dropping them because of their simple unwillingness to come to church because of dumb excuses. We had a good first lesson with them and set up this chapel tour, which was a huge first step to getting them to church. We asked the primary president to help us with it because the bishop's wife (who had helped out before) was unavailable, and it was AMAZING! We prepped her a little bit before the lesson with some information about the family and some basic hopes we had for her. The father of the family passed away less than a year ago, and the Vietnamese mother was left to take care of the three children by herself while trying to work on a farm to support them. The primary president was a fantastic help, shared about family history for a solid ten minutes because they were so interested and wanted to learn more, was able to connect very deeply to this mother and her children, invited them to church which the children committed to (the mother is working), and she helped commit them to coming to activities for each of their respective ages (relief society, Young Single Adult, young womens, and primary). It was such a miracle! This family that was on the verge of being dropped is now committed to church and the son, who was already a baptismal date, is now looking forward to his baptism and we resolved many of his concerns. Amazing members can change investigator's lives!

So that was this week in a nutshell.  Last P-Day we actually didn't go to the beach, we ended up going to this BEAUTIFUL place in the very bottom of our area (about a one and a half hour car ride) with a member from Taibei and the senior couple down here, and today we're actually going to the beach.

I hope everyone has a fantastic week, and I'll talk to you all next week!  

-- 

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老 

I have left the bus station!!  And, I have gone to the place in the mission known as "paradise" because of how freaking gorgeous it is here!!!  I went to 花蓮 (Hualian), and it's soooo pretty here!  I only have a tiny part of the actual city in my area, so literally the whole place is fields and farms and it's amazing!  My companion and I, Elder Sproul (24 from Ogden Utah - so old because he was in the military for 6 years before coming; also he was in the military language department learning Chinese, but he only did it for a bit and forgot most of what he learned - so his Chinese is good, but not quite perfect yet :P), are both new to the area because we "Whitewashed" in.  We did that because they closed down the zone leaders here in Hualian and combined us with the Taidong Zone (farther south), and we came into the old zone leader area so we both had to be new because the previous people here went 1. to be the Taidong zone leader and 2. to go off and finish his mission in Taibei.  So it's crazy and we don't have any idea what's happening, but it's so much fun and nuts and we're just trying to find places to go eat!

 Hello hello hello again for another episode from the bus station!!!  I hope everyone is doing great this week, and thanks as usual for the emails of news, etc.

So this week we had some fun eating cheesecake at our awesome ward missionary activity!  We've been having a cooking/baking activity every month to have nonmembers sign up on Facebook to come and learn how to cook/bake things for free, which is cool!  This past activity on Saturday we had 8 people come and we got a guy to set up to meet with us from it, which is awesome!

We also met with a super cool new investigator named Vincent who has literally 100% English, which is super cool.  He's really funny and chill and he works in the military police, which is actually really boring but also really intense.  He said if he's on call then he can't sleep in a bed, he's only allowed to sleep in a chair so he can wake up easier to get to work faster if there's an emergency.  So that sucks.  But he's awesome and we're friends now and he agreed to come to church and bring his 2 daughters!  He even asked us when church was!

Surprisingly not even that much special stuff happened out of the ordinary this week.  We lost 4 baptismal date investigators because they didn't make their date, so that's super sad, but everything else is going awesome!  We've got lots of potential people to put on a date and working hard and having fun!

I hope everything goes awesome for everyone back at the homestead, and I'm going to the beach to party it up with a bunch of missionaries I haven't seen in forever, so I'll get back to it next week!  加油加油！！

So this week was great!  We found some cool people on the street, but what was really great was that we set our investigators Jeremy and Blair (the ones that are dating and maybe living together) back on a baptismal date and they're doing great!  The only problem is that now they have to come to church every week and Blair is leaving the country and has to go to these classes every Sunday morning until 1 and church goes from 9-12, sooooo....  That's awkward.  They're awesome though and are so willing to try and keep commitments, and they're so funny!  We also started meeting with their friend John at the same, and he showed up to church unexpectedly this week too!  So that was cool.

Speaking of really cool miracles, we had 14 people commited for church this week, and 7 of them actually came!  That's awesome!  Our mission's "standard of excellence" for church is 3, and we more than doubled it!  It was super cool.  We also got our investigator Frank to come, which is huuuuuge!  He keeps rejecting a baptismal date because he doesn't get why it's necessary and jsut kind of said "eh, naah".  When we asked him why he kept meeting with us, he said "well, because I like you guys. I get a great feeling when I'm around you and everything just seems so simple and easy for you."  We explained about that and how it really is so simple and easy, and how if you pray you get an answer and if you read scriptures you learn things and if you go to church you can take the sacrament and can have that good feeling more and have God testify to you even more.  He sat there for a minute, and finally said "wow that makes sense!"  Then we invited him to church, which he had declined several times, and he said yes!  And then he didn't come that week (this was all last week), and when we met with him this week we talked to him about it and he said "I was too scared to come because there were too many people when I went a year ago, and that's really uncomfortable."  We said "Well if we're next to you does that help?"  And he said "Yeah, that would be fine.  Ok, I'll really come this week."  And then he did!  It was awesome.  When we asked him if he liked it, he said he felt really really special and LOVED it.  I asked which part, and he said the sacrament because he felt so good for some reason as he took it.  So cool!!

This week it RAINED SOOOOOO HAAAAARD!!!!  Seriously the biggest rain of my life!  I don't know if you remember like 2 months ago when Elder Lawrence and I talked about the "wettest rain of our life"?  This was SO MUCH MORE RAIN than that!  It's actually so much that it's broken records of the most rain FOR FOREVER at this time of year!  It's so much rain that it actually flooded the entire north and south and east and parts of the west where we're at, but thankfully it's a lot better here than the other places.  We got hit a lot harder than the areas right above us (新竹 and 桃園, namely) because we're right in the middle of the island on the west coast, but it's not too bad.  If you look at the last picture I sent that's the rain hitting the ground so hard it looks like the whole ground has little bubbles or bumps on it.  Also that video is us getting ready to ROLL OUT!  Fun fact, our district name is the "Auto-Bots" because we were originally the "洗禮 Bots" (Baptism bots), but nobody liked that so here we are.  Great times biking in the rain though!  My companion used to live in the rainiest part of the island (i.e. one of the rainiest parts of the world) and kept saying how much he loved the rain and was screaming for joy as we biked around and couldn't even see because of how hard the rain was.  Fun times :D

So all those pictures are from when we went to the GORGEOUS NanZhuang (南庄) last P-Day (sorry there's so many, I took a lot more!) with the Zhunan (竹南) elders and one of their members.  Today we're about to head out to 竹南 and eat at this burger place that sells burgers that are bigger than my face (I think I've mentioned that before) - I'm so excited!  Then we're going over to a board game shop to play board games for a few hours, which will be a lot of fun!  So that's about all this week, folks.  Thanks again for all the letters of support and news, and I look forward to talking with you all again next week at the bus station!

And (probably) one of my last weeks at the bus station comes and goes once again!

Sorry about last week!  Don't worry, I have some time this week, and I'll try to give a good re-cap.  Here goes!

 Happy Mothers Day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah I got to Skype with my family today and it was swweeeet!  I'm like completely out of time right now because we're going to go to buy some super sweet indestructible pants (like the ones I got months ago, except those ones....destructed) and I don't have time to email aaaah yep pretty much.  So this week was super awesome the new comp is still sweet and the work is progressing and loving life a ton!  Thanks for everyone's support and everything, as always, and I'll send a lot more next week!!

-- 

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

Wooow transfers came and went and some BIG changes happened!  So Elder Lawrence and I finished off the transfer strong with 7 people with a baptismal date (which is super awesome!) and a lot of super awesome progressing investigators!  Ironically, they're all from our English class, so when English class came on Wednesday we see like all of our investigators every week.  And it was a teary farewell indeed!  For - you probably didn't guess it - Elder Lawrence!!  I stayed here in TouFen!!  Another 6 weeks in the bus station here I come!

So our district got craaaazy this transfer!  For some background, last transfer we had:

Me/Elder Lawrence and Sister Olsen/Sister Zhu (a Taiwanese sister) in TouFen.  Sister Olsen is the same age on the mission as me and Elder Lawrence, which is not too long, and Sister Zhu just came out of training.  Then Sister Calderwood (also out here as long as us)/Sister Pillar (only one transfer older than us) and Elder Butler/Elder Falck in ZhuNan (both about to go home in the next few months).  So now there's Me (now I'm District Leader and the "English Unit Leader" - basically just in charge of our English Class)/Elder James (he's going home not this transfer but next) and Sister Zhu/Sister Menzie (she's also going home next transfer) in TouFen, and Sister Calderwood's training Sister Tu (another Taiwanese sister) and the other elders stayed together.  So our district got suuuuper old (Elder Butler is going home with Sister Menzie and Elder James and Elder Falck is going home the next transfer after that).

So yeah!  Crazy stuff!  Elder James, if you couldn't tell, is my new companion and he's amazing!  He actually moved out of Zhubei (my first area) when I got there, so I heard a lot about him then from his previous companion Elder Anderson.  He's from Highland Utah (not in Salt Lake but out a ways) and he's really good at basketball and even better at Ultimate Frisbee, awesome at finding new investigators, got a great heart, speaks some Taiwanese and Hakkanese, loves to learn and push harder and harder and it's awesome!  He just came down from Taibei where he was just a zone leader, so lucky me, right?

This week we didn't meet with a lot of new investigators, mostly because of transfers and moving and stuff, but last night we met with a super cool Filipino named Joton who said he wants to meet with us so that he can learn how to become a preacher.  We started just talking to him and he has AMAZING faith in Christ, and then we started sharing the first lesson with him about Joseph Smith.  We explained that we believe that God, Christ, and the Spirit are different beings and how we know that through Joseph Smith and he said "oh ok, cool!"  By the way, he's suuuuper Catholic and the Holy Trinity being one person is a very central concept to Catholic doctrine.  At the end of the lesson we asked if he had any questions and he said "no, but thank you so much for explaining about God and Christ and the Holy Ghost being different - now I finally understand!"  So he just totally changed his entire believe that he's had from childhood.  So that was cool.  He's super awesome and wants to learn and just hear more about Christ.

So yeah!  Being district leader is pretty fun but there's so much random little stuff that I have to take care of every day now.  The way I've thought about it is that being District Leader is similar to being bishop, zone leader is like stake president, and AP is like an apostle and the mission president is like the prophet :D  It's pretty fun, but it's kinda tiring having to make a ton of calls every night and help fix problems and stuff and having to keep track of 50 different things a day but it's a great time.  When I wasn't DL the last 2 transfers I felt like I just didn't know the district that well, so it's a good time to get to know them and really help them out.  Loving it!

We went finding a lot this past week to try and get some new investigators, and Elder James is super good at it!  Elder Lawrence and I (mostly just me) struggled a lot to get people to actually set up, so it's awesome to learn from Elder James.  We already got that guy Joton and just randomly gave a chapel tour (as much as we can in a bus station :D) to a guy who set up a time this week to meet!

So yeah, loving life and hoping things continue looking up and up and still just hoping I can grow enough myself to catch up with the rest of the district.  Because everyone's been here for so long and there are now 2 native Taiwanese in the district everyone's Chinese is suddenly way better than mine!  It's good though and it helps push me even harder as well.

I hope everything's well at home, especially with school ending here the next few weeks for everyone!  It's gone soooooo fast from over here!  Have a great week and 加油！！

Sorry I forgot to mention!  We're going to an escape room today in a few minutes, and it sounds super fun!  I've never done one but it should be great!  I'm psyched!

 各位親愛的家人跟朋友們，大家好！  Good luck with that one, Google Translate!  Ha!

So this past week was a great one!  On Wednesday night after we got back from the temple, we had English class, as always, and it was a blast.  2 weeks ago I had 15 students in my intermediate class, and it was awesome!  I average about 8 or so every week, but then I had 2 new students and had every person I've ever taught all show up on the same day and it was crazy!  This past week I had the usual 8 but it was an awesome class.  Every week we're supposed to have a "Spiritual share" (wow, missionaries sharing about the church??  Whaaaat??), and for the last 2 transfers my spiritual shares have been so lame!  So last week I decided to stop being lame and do a really good one, and I shared about the Book of Mormon because we talked about learning and school and stuff.  I asked them why they went to so much effort to learn things that might not be useful at all in the next 5, 10,15, 20, or more years.  They were stumped!  The Taiwanese culture is to study study study study study and study some more, and they usually don't really think about why they do it most of the time.  Then I told them how learning was awesome and great and stuff but in the Book of Mormon is information that changes who we really are and can help us now, tomorrow, next year, and forever.  They were blown away!  It was so awesome.  Afterwards I had our former investigator Roger (he's baptized Presbyterian and uninterested in our church) come up and ask if I was talking about the Bible, and when I re-explained that it was a different book but had the same purpose of helping us draw closer to Christ and understand more about Him and God, he was like "that's so awesome!"  I asked if he wanted one and he said he really did!  Then it turns out I didn't have one on me, so he said he would get it when he came to church on Sunday!  Then it turns out he didn't come on Sunday.... But he'll come to English class again so I can give it to him then.  It was so awesome!

So last week I forgot to mention how there's this super....interesting person that keeps wandering up to the church at the most random times.  She came to the sister's baptism last week and grabbed my tie and said "hey there, do you want your tie?"  And then I looked at her (obviously really confused and weirded out) and said "um the one I'm wearing right now?"  And she said "yeah!"  And I said "ummmmm yes" and she said "Oh.  Do you want your clothes?"  And I said "the ones I'm wearing?"  And she said "Yeah!"  And I said "ummmm yes" and she said "Oh.  But I have reeeaally nice clothes I can give you!  Let me go grab them!"  And I said "No no no nonononono please nooooooo that's really not necessary!"  And she was like ":(  Really?  But they're super nice!"  And I said "Nooooooo I do not want your clothes lady!"  Then she came to my English class (she speaks literally 0 English - she didn't understand when I asked what her name was), and she told me that her name was Milk.  As in the liquid that comes from cows.  I love the bus station!!

Then we met with a new investigator named Steve (for those of you who have seen Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, every time we talk about him we just say STEEEEEVE!  STEEEEEEEEEVE!  Over and over again).  Steve is so amazing!  When we asked if he wanted to meet he actually said "yes, I think that would be a great idea!"  We met and he asked "There's so many Christian churches, right?  How am I supposed to know which one is the right one?"  Our mouths kinda dropped a few feet because that's the question that every missionary wants to hear so badly!  So we shared the Restoration and Joseph Smith with him and he set a really really solid baptismal date!  It was so awesome.  He actually told us that when he was in elementary/middle school he got the name of "Smiley" because he literally just smiles all the time.  It's so infectious!  He said he actually got made fun of in school because of how much he smiled, but he said that when you smile it just makes everything better.  He's so funny.  Steeeeeve!!  Also his English is perfect.

This week we've been having a lot of members feeding us because TRANSFERS IS ON THURSDAY!!!!  It's here so fast!  Elder Lawrence and I are like 99% sure that one of us is going to move this time, and I'm feeling like it's me.  Aaaah move day again?  So fast!  So yeah it's cool because tons of free food!  Yay!

On Sunday it was awesome because we had our investigator Jeremy come (he asks SO MANY QUESTIONS about what we teach him, which is awesome, but sometimes he just kinda feels overwhelmed with it all, but he's progressed so far!  He's so great and he finally came to church!), who we've been trying to get to come for like a month and a half now.  Yay!  Also we had our 2 16 year-olds come to church too!  Yay!  One of them said that his mom told him he couldn't get baptized until he was 18, but we're going to try and meet the parents and talk to them about it.  They're super awesome though!  They're both progressing really well and had a chance to meet the ward and the youth at church and it was awesome!!

Today we're going to go to yes, you guessed it, another all-you-can-eat BBQ!!!  I'm so psyched :D  And no, I haven't had one in so long!  Although yes, I am getting fat :(  Maybe if I actually worked out in the 30 minutes of exercise we have every morning it would help :P  Then we're going to go hang out at the huuuge park in our area with the district and some members and play some frisbee/soccer.  Fun day!

Thanks for everyone's news and things, as always, and I'll talk to you next week!  Maybe from another place O.o  Have a great week!  加油加油！！

Oh yeah I forgot to mention!  Yesterday our ward told us about a big activity here in TouFen where everyone comes to this temple down the road and there's a new night market opening up for a few days.  The festival is because everyone at their homes have a little god statue of their ancestor or whatever and then they bring it to the huge temple every year so the big statue at the temple can impart part of its blessings on the little statues to give blessings to the family and the home it's in.  So what our members didn't tell us is that walking on the big road right outside the church was literally all of TouFen and ZhuNan (the neighboring city) watching a HUUUUGE parade with floats and dancers and drummers and dragons and everything and it was awesome!!  There were thousands of people crammed on this tiny street and it was so fun!

 Hello hello I'm in the 金華 chapel back in Taibei, because we're going to the temple in 45 minutes!!  Yaaaay!!!  So yeah I have almost no time to email and I have to send/respond to several at the moment, so short group email for today sorry sorry!!!

Ok this week in a nutshell: so we went finding a ton because we didn't meet with a lot of our investigators, but that's ok!  Because our investigators are pretty awesome and we've gotten back up to 5 people who are on a date to be baptised and we're going to add a few more!!  Yaaay!!  Like our 2 16 year-old friends Ethan and Frank who are super awesome and funny and are well on their way to baptism!  So fun fact: literally all of our progressing investigators, and all of our investigators period except for 1 guy are all from our English class, so everybody has English names and we see them like every week, so it's a lot of fun.

But what was even more "fun" was that last Wednesday at English class our investigator James (who, for background, the sisters said "might be gay" after meeting him for like 5 minutes) did something pretty...interesting.  I asked him how he liked English class afterwards and he said "well, um, it was great, um, and really fun, and I think you're like, um, a great teacher, and um, so very funny, and it was um, great."  So I said (like any good Taiwanese) "no, no, I'm not that great or that funny.  Thanks though, but I'm not that funny.  I wish I was, but oh well, right?"  So then he looked at me and said "No, I think you're so funny, and so great, and so handsome, and it's great, and I love your English class, and you're just so great.  And, um, I was wondering, because you're so great, um, if I could take you out around all of Taiwan to play."

UM WHAT???

So I looked at him and was thinking "uuuuhhhhh wut did that really just happen????"  So I didn't really know what to say and he said "no no no!  We'll start here in TouFen and then go around to the rest of Taiwan later."  Oh yeah, like that's better, right??  So then I said "well actually as missionaries we are really really busy and we have to stay in our assigned area so that's not really something I can do...."  So then another student started asking me some questions and I was like "yes, yes Kevin let's talk about something else right now yes anything at all please help meeee!"  Just kidding, but it was suuuuuper awkward.  So yeah he's coming back to English class tonight and then we'll try and set a baptismal date with him and teach him normally and when we get to that whole "gay" thing just figure it out then.  So that was a thing.

So then we went to the park again on Sunday and were making bubbles to try and talk to families like we do every week and there was this grandpa and grandma watching and saying "wow it's so cool!  Look at how awesome he is!"  So I walked up to them and started talking to them and then the grandma just randomly started telling me how her husband was super super rich but how he didn't look it because he has a gimp arm and leg because of how he used to be in a gang and killed 2 people so he was in jail for 30 years and then he gambled all of his (and his sister's) money away and then started a few gambling houses and then realized that was a bad plan after they both failed again and then he started a tea growing business and sells water bottles and he's now filthy rich.  Don't worry, he asked me when our church was so that he could come because he goes to church with all his foreigner friends and I guess I made the cut.  Yay!

So then we went on exchanges on Monday with our zone leaders (I went with our zone leader from Sweden who is the goofiest, and one of the most distracted guys I've ever met) and it was one of the best days of my life.  I'll borrow a quote from my good MTC friend Elder Sowards: "Anyways COCOs is life. Cocos is like the way better Starbucks, for 35 NTD I can buy Mango Bingsha(Mango Shaved Ice drink). Otherwise known as Heaven in a cup. having a bad day? MANGO BINGSHA will save you. It is pretty much the official drink of the Taiwan Taipei Mission."  The drink known as Manguo Bingsha is back, after a long and dreary winter away from it.  Be still my heart, all is right in the world again!  I've had 3 in the last 2 days :D

So that's this week in a quick nutshell, folks.  I'm sorry if I don't have time to respond to everybody because I'm down to like 25 minutes o.O but I'll try and hop on again later today after the temple.  That's about it!  Thanks for everyone's news and encouragement and everything, and life's going great at the bus station!

PS Transfers end this next week O.o so that's crazy.  One of us will definitely leave and just maybe train, so that's freaky.  There's only 2 elders coming this transfer and they're both Taiwanese, so that's a super weird thought!

Talk to you all on Monday!

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

"funny shirt at the beach day" with me, my companion, and the zone leaders.

 Another Monday, another week in the beautiful land of 頭份，台灣 from the chapel on top of the bus station!  And, drumroll please, HAPPY  EEEEEEAAAAAASSSSSSTTTTEEEEERRRRR!

Honestly you all should be impressed that I can keep coming up with these new greetings every week.  I thought I ran out like 25 weeks ago!

So!  A run-down of this week:

1. We experienced what I think I can only explain as the "wettest" rain of my life this week.  It was like taking a shower ALL DAY for 2 DAYS.  It was a lot of fun.  I found out that my rain jacket is not only non water-proof, but also likes to soak up all of the rain and hang on to it for a day or two :D  The rain drops were pretty big, but it was so wet because they didn't fall very fast, so none of it splashed it all just stayed there and got soaked up.  Yikes!  I love Taiwan!!!!  Fun fact - Elder Lawrence and I were yelling "I LOVE MY MISSIOOOONNNN!!!!" as we biked down the road when it rained that hard a few days ago at the top of our lungs.  It was a good time.

2. Last P-Day we went to a member's house after going to the beach and made some sushi with her and it was AMAZING!  It was awesome.  I love sushi so much it made my day!!!

3. We started meeting with 2 students this week (they're 16) and they're super awesome!  They have awesome thoughts about life and are super funny.  They kinda remind me of me and Ryan or Edward or another friend joking around together, it was a lot of fun.

4. On Saturday morning we met with our 75 year-old investigator named Morse (yes, as in Morse Code), and he set a baptismal date!!!  He's soooo funny and just an adorable man.  He wants to learn English (never learned it before), but he's scared to drive at night so he can't come to our class.  We used to have an afternoon one and he actually called our mission office asking if he was allowed to come (it turns out we don't do it anymore), and then we ended up teaching him about the church too!  He's awesome and said that learning about Jesus was such an amazing opportunity and he hoped that we could tell everyone about it, including the friends that he wants to bring to our next lesson!  He's so awesome.  It turns out that when he was a young student he would wake up at 5 AM and run 8 KM every morning, in addition to playing soccer, running (obviously), badminton, and boxing.  Now he still wakes up at 5 AM and he walks exactly 10,000 steps around the track.  He's so great!

5. I don't know if I've said this or not, but every Sunday we go to the big park in our area and make huuuuge bubbles with some sticks and soap water that a member helps us make and play with the kids and invite them to our English class.  So yesterday we got our whole district to come (8 people) and made a TON of bubbles and had a blast.  It was pretty fun.

6. Today we're going to go over to the neighboring city of MiaoLi and play some ultimate Frisbee for a few hours and then come back and send some packages!!  Yaay!  Also, today we went to the morning market that we go to every morning (also to advertise our English class) but today we got to just sight-see and buy some stuff, so that was fun.  It turns out that I bought a 10 KG watermelon, which is - you won't believe this - 22 POUNDS.  It's not even that big!  And, you really won't believe this - it was $3 US DOLLARS.  I LOVE TAIWAN!!!!!!!!!!  The watermelon here is soooo good it was awesome.  Also I bought a super cool basic string necklace from a Buddhist lady that....I can't wear on my mission so it's coming back to you guys in a month or so!  Yay!

Also, here's what our mission president sent out:

April 26 is TEMPLE DAY for South, TaoYuan, ZhuNan, and XinZhu zones.  Therefore, your p-day is not next Monday.  Missionaries from these zones, please tell your parents TODAY that you won't send them an email until April 26 next week.  We don't want parents to panic!

So my next email will not be until NEXT WEDNESDAY here, which will mean NEXT TUESDAY NIGHT IS WHEN YOU WILL SEE MY EMAIL.  Please don't freak out!

That's about it this week!  I hope everyone's week was good and I hope you all have a great week this next one!  Talk to you on the flip side!

Thanks again for everyone's emails and support and news, and I'll talk to you all next week!  加油加油！！

 Summer is swiftly approaching!!!  We are breaking the 60-75 degree barrier that has been over Taiwan for the last like 6 months, and this week it's gotten about 15 degrees hotter all of a sudden so we're getting back to sweat, no suit coats, and lots of hot and/or rainy days this summer!  Elder Lawrence loves being sweaty and gross, and I'm....getting there so we'll see how it goes!  Just kidding - I'm looking forward to summer but it'll be hot.  Yay!

Hi everyone, I have very little time this week because we got asked to help out with a Primary activity on Saturday but it was moved to this morning because of rain, so we have to email before hand.  Yikes!  I'm sorry if I don't have time to get to everyone's emails today, but I'll do my best to respond.

So to get right to it: this week we set a baptismal date with a sweet English class student named Jeremy who's so cool!  We actually teach him in English because his English is basically perfect.  He thinks about what we say a ton, and he has so many really good questions.  We figured out that he probably has so many questions because when we teach him in English we don't teach it the most simply we could (and that we're used to in Chinese), so it brings up lots of questions - i.e. he asked us once "where does sin come from?"  He's super awesome though and he is actually really likely to get baptized!!!

So we had a lesson on Thursday I think with our investigator from a long time ago named Jin De who's an aboriginal (not "Taiwanese" and not "Hakkan", but another thing, because that's not confusing, right?) and very very Catholic and rocks the necklace with a cross and Jesus hanging on it everywhere he goes.  So he's been having a lot of commitment problems because he's worried that he's betraying his original faith if he comes to our church and that God would be mad at him.  So this week was our "do or die" lesson with him, because he's been saying he'll come to church for the last 6 weeks and he still hasn't, so then we talked about faith a ton and how he has the most belief of literally anybody we've ever met, but that the definition of faith (that he himself said) was that you have to go do something and not fear, which he even recognized that he hasn't been doing.  He hasn't prayed about the Book of Mormon or about our church at all to know if anything we've told him is true, so he committed to that and to come to church this upcoming week!  Such an amazing lesson.  The Spirit was soooo strong in there it was awesome.  He even told us the classic phrase that every missionary wants to hear - "When I'm with you I feel so differently from anywhere else that I want to have that feeling all the time; that's why I meet with you".  Yay!

So then we invited tons and TONS of people to church this week and had about 16 actually commit to coming.  The night before about 6 of them cancelled on us (including all of our baptismal date/progressing investigators), and then about 5 didn't show up, but what was super cool is one drunk guy we invited on the street came and brought his friend, and even better our old former investigator Roger (I gave him that name :D) from English class that's like 70 and super Presbyterian who told us he wasn't interested just showed up at church unannounced/unexpected.  So we had 7 people there!  It was awesome.

Well that's most of it this week.  Today, like I said, we have that Primary activity that we're helping out with and after that we have to run like the wind to our former investigator family's house who's going to take us to their ancestral home up in the mountains in a place called 南庄 (Nan Zhuang), which is soooo beautiful.  They really just want to be our parents and spoil us and stuff, which is kinda a weird relationship because they literally try and act like we're their kids (like literally just like we're their kids... it's weird) but it's ok.  They're super nice and are totally uninterested in the gospel but we set this up two weeks ago, so hey why not a free trip up the mountains, right?

So yeah I hope I get to everyone's emails in time today and if not I'll talk to you next week!

--Elder Van De Graaff   -范長老

Well!  Transfers came and....went!  Yes folks, the Lawrence-VDG duo is staying together for another whopping 6 weeks in the bus station!!  We're both really excited to stay and finally see some of the investigators we've met and taught here get baptized!

So this past week, it was actually really interesting.  Monday we went to another area in our zone called 苗栗 (ha-ha!  I bet you didn't know it was called that, did you?  The more you know, right?  Good thing you can all read it and know how to say it, right?)  Just kidding - it's called MiaoLi.  So we went down there to this really pretty out-of-the-way river underneath a huge bridge where there's just giant cement blocks laid out in the river.  Like, each of them are like 15 feet long and there's about a 3 foot space in between them.  We have no idea why.  So then Elder Lawrence was like "hey what if we bought a ton of 珍珠 (these little squishy ball things they put in drinks that are super sticky and yummy) and spat them at each other?"  And some of us were like "yeah!" and some were like "um no...!"  So then they went out and got some and then everyone (besides me and one other person :P) ran around on the rocks spitting gross sticky ball things at each other.  So yeah that happened.  We all walked away happy (them for doing it, me for not haha), so I guess it was a good P-Day!

Then on Tuesday not a lot happened.  We had district meeting as always, and then some finding and stuff.  Wednesday we had English class, good as always, and it was the day we found out that we weren't moving, so yay!  I also called Elder Jensen to find out what happened with him and we had a good laugh about everything that happened the last two transfers and how he was getting tired of being in the same area for 5 transfers (around 7-8 months).  Ha.  He's going to finish up training this next transfer, so that was really fun to talk to him.  Then, SURPRISE!, 3 hours after calling Elder Jensen (so about 2 AM), I woke up really suddenly and was thinking "huh, that's strange" because that never happens on a mission.  Then I was sitting there and was thinking "huh I have to swallow a ton.  That's like when I need to throw up.  That would be really lame.  Huh I have to throw up.  Right.  Now."  So then I ran to the bathroom and threw up every hour until 7 AM.  Yay!  So then, even better, it turns out that I threw up so hard it popped a blood vessel in my eyeball, so it looks like my eye is kinda bleeding all the time.  Yay!  Everyone in the ward yesterday at church asked me about it, it was pretty funny.  There's this kid in our ward that is known as being super whiny all the time and complains about everything and is just kinda pouty and spoiled and he was walking around pointing at my eye and kept saying "look, your eye!  It's bleeding!  Gross!  What's wrong with you?!  Look, your eye!  It's bleeding!" over and over again.  It was pretty funny.

So yeah I'm pretty glad that I didn't move because I was throwing up on transfer day, which would have been pretty bad.  Yay!  I really am super excited to stay and baptize!!!  TouFen is so cool and I love it here!

Today we're going to go out to play board games with our entire zone, which will be a lot of fun!  That's all for this week, and I'll talk to you next week from the bus station!!

And from a note home:

On Saturday we had the chance to go to the temple with our RC family, the 蔡家廷 (Cai family), and it was awesome!  We left on a 5:50 AM bus to get there as early as possible, and we got there around 7 AM.  When we walked into the temple, we found out that - Oh No!!  They had all already finished doing the baptisms, so we took them on a tour of the big chapel and to the distribution center and stuff, but it was still awesome.

I love the food here!  Elder Lawrence and I always talk about how weird it is that we're in Taiwan and it feels so normal now, because we remember the same stuff from the MTC and coming to Taiwan at the same time and how foreign it all was and stuff.  Like no grass.  And crazy traffic.  And silent public areas.  And crazy food.  And terrible health standards in restaurants.  And people wearing face masks.  And SO MUCH RAIN.  And speaking Chinese I mean what even in the heck!  I love it so much here. 

So our mission splits us up by city in smaller places like this, so there's only 1 companionship of sisters and elders per city down here.  For Taibei it's way too big for that, so there's actually 5 zones in Taibei (half of the mission, which is 200 missionaries total), but down here it's fine.  So our zone actually covers about 5 cities I think.  We're also the smallest zone in the mission :) 

I hope they realize how great it (the gospel) is too.  They sure need it.  We went knocking last night and probably 15 people told us "no, I don't need it" because they don't want to be rude and just flat-out refuse people.  Oh well.  That's why we're here, right?

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

 The end of another transfer here at the bus station!  The transfer here ends on Elder Lawrence's birthday, which is this Thursday, and we're expecting to get a call that one of us is going to train in the next day or so!  We'll see what happens.  Honestly, anything could happen.  Either of us could stay, move, train, get white-washed, both stay, or anything!  It's pretty crazy.

  Hey hey hey!  Another week in "The Bus Station" here in 頭份.  (If you remember our chapel is on the second floor of a bus station).

So to get right into it: this week has been a little slow; we had almost no chances to actually meet with our investigators, and then other stuff kept coming up so we had little time go find new ones, and then nobody came to church!  Aaah so sad!  But that's ok, because next week is going to be super awesome, and then we'll keep getting more people to come to church and accept baptism and it'll be great!

Last week we had the family we knocked into that just randomly invited us into their house (remember?).  This week we texted them to see if we could come over and she said "yeah come over and eat dinner with us!" and we said "oh ok, I guess if we have to" (just kidding we were obviously really happy to go!).  So we showed up at their house at 6:30, and then she said "come in, come in, my husband's working in 台南 today so he's not here!"  We were about to come in, and we stopped and stared at each other and were like "oh nooo what do we do??" because missionaries have the rule where you can't go into a single woman's home alone without a male there.  So we called the zone leaders.  No answer.  Called the Assistants to the President.  Neither one answered.  We called President Jergensen.  He said "Wow yeah that situation's super awkward!  I don't know; you can't go in, but she did just make you a huge meal.  Good luck Elders!  Do what's right!"  So we started explaining that we couldn't go in because we had a rule to protect us and her and she was like "but I'm like your mom!  Nothing could happen!"  We still insisted and she said "ok ok.  Let's eat dinner outside!"  So, despite the dark, the rain, and the bugs, we ate dinner on her front porch (and since it's Taiwan their porches are really like 3 feet long and their car was right next to us while we ate because it was also their driveway).  She was super cool about it and didn't mind at all.  When her son came home later that night we moved inside and started talking.  Despite starting off a little weird with her showing us weird, slightly scandalous pictures of her ballet dancer daughter who's studying ballet in Germany and maybe probably wanting us to marry her, we had a super awesome lesson with her!  She's seriously so amazingly prepared and it's awesome!

That was the coolest thing to happen this week.  We had all of Saturday scheduled to have someone come fix and replace our entire kitchen, and after they scheduled with us, our landlord, our mission office, and our building security guard, and then after they dropped off all of the materials to fix it, our landlord came by 2 hours later and said "oh by the way they don't work on the weekends so they'll have to reschedule for next week.  Sorry."  So now we're going to have to stay inside all day sometime next week, which will be "so Great!"  Just kidding.  It'll be ok, but a little obnoxious.

So yeah that was this week in a nutshell!  Thanks for everyone's updates and news and support!  Life is great over here on this side of the world, and I hope life is treating everyone well over there.  加油大家！  Talk to you all next week!

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

Elder Lawrence and Van De Graaff

 So this week!!  We had some fun adventures when we went knocking and finding and stuff!

 I've officially been in Taiwan for 6 months this week!!!!  That's so nuts!  Sometimes I feel like I've been here forever and I'll never leave, and sometimes I feel like I got here yesterday and the end is just around the corner.  It's so weird how fast everything really goes here though!  I can't believe this transfer is already halfway done, but it feels like it just started a few days ago.  Like the phrase in the MTC, "days feel like weeks and weeks feel like days".  So true!

Time moves so fast!  This week literally just disappeared!  Also fun fact - I'll have been in Taiwan for 6 months in 3 days.  So that's super weird!  It really has gone so fast here.

 I left Taibei!!!  By way of information, I'm waaaay down at the bottom of the mission on the west coast in the beautiful land of 頭份 (TouFen).  It's in the county of ZhuNan/MiaoLi (竹南／苗栗).  It's a little confusing, because we're in the ZhuNan zone, but in the XinZhu stake, but in the MiaoLi county.  Hmmm...  But it's awesome down here!!!  I'm so happy to have come back to the west coast, and soak up the culture and amazing people down here!

So my camera...kinda broke again this week, so no pictures for the moment.  I'll work on getting more from my new companion - Elder Lawrence!  He actually came to Taiwan at the same time as me, but he was in a different MTC district (same zone though).  He's so awesome.  He's a great missionary, super super 帥, has awesome Chinese, great at basketball, loves the work and the Lord, and is my District Leader (yay another companion to the DL!).  We are kinda out in the middle of nowhere and I love it!  There are a lot of people here that only speak the native Hakkan language (I want to learn it so bad!) instead of Chinese, almost no foreigners around here, everything's suuuper cheap compared to Taibei, there are actual empty spaces (literally there was no empty space in the entire city of Taibei), I melted my pants I bought in training on our iron, had to stitch up my other pants, baptized a grandma who doesn't speak Chinese on Saturday named Wu Lan Xiang, had a baking class, I'm riding a returned sister's bike from more than a year ago, I have 8 minutes to email so not much time left, I'm loving life, and I'll send more later!!  I think that's about it for right now so more next week!!!

Also our church is on the second floor of a random bus station, and the grandma I baptized happened in a kiddy pool that is the only thing we have for a baptismal font!  I love it here!  Life is so great!

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

With the Chen Family!

 Happy New Years!!!!!  新年快樂!!!!

Huge service project

Daaaang, I've been here for 30 weeks!  Minus the 9 in Provo, of course, but daaaang!

companion love, awwwww!

Hey hey hey and almost happy Chinese New Years!  Anyone have special plans?  Just kidding.

新年快樂!!!  That means Happy New Years!!! for those of you who don't read Traditional Chinese characters that only Taiwan really uses anymore!!!  Jeez, what are you guys doing in America, come on people!  Just kidding, everyone's special in their own special way.

Christmas Party

Merry Christmas and Happy New Years!!!  聖誕節和過年快樂!!!

Happy Holidays and a Merry Christmas from the Land Without Snow!

Hello not Taiwan!  I really need to get better greetings, I'm just running out really fast....

So there's this video that we (and through us, the church) has been trying to share for December this year!  It's called Light The World, and there's a # that goes along with it - I bet you can't guess, but it's #LightTheWorld.  Yep.  That complex.  Here's the link: https://www.mormon.org/?cid=HP_FR_25-11-2016_dMIS_fmorg_xLIDyL1-A_  Do it!  Loves!

Hello hello!  I am running out of different greetings to send every week, so I apologize if any are repeating!

opening Christmas gifts a little early!

Another week, another bazillion miracles, another Monday from Taibei!  Let's get to it, shall we?

new apartment in Taipei

Hello hello!  This week's email has been brought to you from......  drumroll please...... CENTRAL TAIBEI!!!!!!!  That's right everyone, I'm right in the middle of absolutely everything!  I was moved to Elder Holloway's last area, called Wanhua and combined with Datong it makes it look like Wanda.....heh.  So yeah!  The Assistants to the President (APs) are in my district, and the zone leaders, sister training leaders, and office elders are actually in a different district but they're super super close.  We live in a place called Ximen(ding), or 西門(町) for those who can read characters (unlike me).  The (ding) is in parenthesis because we actually live in Ximen, but the ding part is the huuuuuge market that's in Ximen that we're right next to.  It's actually the biggest one in Taiwan.  So that's pretty fun.

The transfer, and thus training, ends this week!!!  Holy cow!!  It has seriously gone so fast!  I can't believe I'm going to be a "normal missionary" in just 4 days with a new companion!

Hey everyone!  Another week here in Zhubei!  What's really strange is that training is finishing next week!  It's crazy!  It's gone soooo fast here.

Soooo, as you can tell last week I wrote "Week 16" and now I wrote "Week 19"....  Yeah I'm bad with keeping track of weeks, but this week has actually been Week 19, not 17!  Yep!

All you can BBQ

4 Elders, 14th floor, Filipinos, and a missionary reunion, all on this week's episode of - A Week in the Life of Elder Van De Graaff!!!!

This is Obi-Wan. We found out that this is his job: he's like some kind of motorcycle traffic guy or something. He looks pretty funny, and he's totally grinning behind the balaclava. Love that guy.

Hello everybody!  Taiwan is amazing as usual, and I'm loving it!

Not a lot happened this week, because TYYPHOOOONNN!  Yaay!  We got invited to eat with one of our investigators on Monday night, but when the time came to leave it started raining really hard and we ran into a member while we were biking to another appointment that the typhoon warnings had started and we had to stay home.  We called our investigator, Duncan, and he said yeah, you should totally still come.  Why not?  So, obviously, as the good smart and wise missionaries we are, we decided to go for it (it was like a 45 minute bike ride away in hard rain along a freeway-type thing).  So we got there in about 20 minutes (we biked really hard), ate with him, went home and it was raining sooooooo hard.  Dad should remember the typhoons in the Philippines that were really insane and the rain in Nepal where you could see the wind pushing sheets of rain at you.  It was like that.  It was nuts.  So we got home in another 20 minutes (my legs hurt soo bad) and dried off the best you can here, which is basically just changing.  Tuesday came and we were told we had to stay inside the whole day.  The sad thing is that we had to stay in all day, so I missed the chance to go talk to the conductor guy to sell me the flute!  Oh no!  So I'll have to wait until tomorrow.  Wednesday was all meetings to make up for Tuesday, and nobody was out to talk to us because of the typhoon.  It was sad because the typhoon didn't even affect us that much.  Oh well.

Besides that, I'm doing great!  Today is Elder Holloway's birthday, so we just got back from another barbecue place.  It was sooooooo good.  Moving is really hard, and I love it.  Still losing weight and working out and biking everywhere.  It's awesome!  I'm loving it!  Thanks for everyone's emails of support and news!  I love hearing from everyone.  More next week!.

September 26, 2016

Another week flies by in Taiwan!  Some fun stuff happened this week, so here goes:

First off, thank you everyone for your continued birthday wishes!  For my birthday, we had a completely normal day, but when we went to Hukou to find for a while we went to this tipenyaki place that we had seen a couple days before.  Tipenyaki, for those of you people who haven't had the privilege of going to Taiwan or Japan (pfffssshh who hasn't done that, am I right?), is like one of those Japanese restaurants where they flip all of your food around and make it a big show and fry it right in front of you, except here they just kinda cook it and give it to you without the show.  Which is alright, because it's freaking amazing.  Seriously, it tasted so good.  That was (most) of everything that was special about it.  Exceeeept.....  I ordered a sweet wooden flute from a guy that's coming in tomorrow!!!  Surprise!  So, some background: every Tuesday night, there's this orchestra that plays traditional Chinese/Taiwanese music and uses traditional instruments that sounds awesome!  I heard some of the flutes playing, and I kinda freaked out.  This was last-last week.  I asked someone if they knew where I could buy one, and they said that their director would sell me one for about 4,000 NTD (roughly $115 US), which is a phenomenal price, especially for a flute that sounds that good.  So I said yeah, awesome, but we didn't make it back in time that night, so I talked to him again on last Tuesday, my birthday, and he's selling one for 1,500 NTD and a better one for 3,000 NTD, so I said heck yeah I will (about $90 US).  So yeah, I'm getting a freaking sweet flute tomorrow night!  Whoo!  Sorry for not telling you earlier than now, mom and dad :P  I'm getting the money from personal funds today to pay for it.  Also, I found a ring on Tuesday that's sweeeet.  It's got what I'm pretty sure is a double dragon design on it, and the tails are connected by an actual slit in the steel.  I have a picture I'll send of it, too.  It started out as the band with the design on it that was loose on a smaller ring and the design band would spin around and stuff, but it was too small despite being the biggest one in the store we went to.  So, with a lot of straining and some pliers I pulled off the band and it fits perfectly!  Yay!  Happy birthday to me!

So this week on Monday we went to the beach in a place called Qiding that's about 20 minutes northwest.  It was so pretty, and the trees were so pretty and green and the ocean was so pretty and blue-gray....  It was awesome.  The tide was up soo high when we got there; so high we couldn't actually go onto the beach.  So we walked to where we could find some more sand, and by the time we got there the water had receded about 50 feet.  So, obviously, we played football for 2 hours with some other elders in a different district and zone.  It was awesome.  Our team was losing 3-0, and then we pulled back up until it was 4-3, then tied at 7-7, and then we won at 9-7.  It was sweet.

This week we met a guy named Zen Dixiong (brother Zen).  We found him sitting on a chair right outside a 7/11.  When we approached him we noticed that his feet were so insanely messed up it was crazy.  One of his big toes is bent completely sideways, so that he's literally walking on his toe every time he steps.  He has enormous cuts, or burns or something we're not really sure, on his feet that leak goop all over his sandals.  It was super nasty.  He has no teeth, can barely walk, 1 pair of clothes, his eyes are so bad he can't read even fairly large characters, technically isn't homeless but hasn't taken a shower in at least a year, is only able to eat from Wednesday to Friday because then he runs out of money, and nobody feeds him on the other days, and yet he just kinda hangs out and says everything's fine.  We bought him 4 new pairs of sandals because his were just utterly foul, but I haven't seen him wear them yet, which is really weird.  Somebody else gave him a new shirt and I want to buy him new pants, because there's a cut on his ankle and his pants have almost attached to the cut.  He was going to come to church, but on the way he ran out of strength because he hadn't eaten in 2 days and had to stay home.  We made him a sandwich.  We're doing all we can for him, but just thinking about his situation makes me sad and wish we could do more, but I'm not sure what.  We're looking to find him a job, but we don't know what he could do.  Really sad.

In happier news, on Saturday the other elders in our district had a baptism!  Yay!  They asked me the night before if I would play the flute for them, and I grabbed some music I hadn't practiced before that night and went with it.  It went pretty well for 3 run-throughs.  That was fun.

Our investigator Xie Dixiong/Eric actually lives in a different area, so we went to the elders we had to give him to in Yangmei and did a pass-off lesson with him.  He's being taught by Elder Triplett, an elder who's a transfer ahead of me who I met in the MTC that would always call me Elder Van De Giraffe.  It was awesome to see him again!  Also, Elder Weatherston is in his district, and I originally thought that we were giving Eric to him, but Elder Triplett was almost as good.

A couple hours ago I passed that test that I took 2 weeks ago!  Yay!  I can now start Book B.  I'll send a picture of kinda what that means.  You have to finish through A29 to test for Book B, and A48 for Book C.  I passed Book B's test today, and next week I'm taking the Book C test because I also finished through A48.  Apparently A29 is supposed to take you until the end of training or something to get through, so that's pretty fun.  I passed off through A48 last week.  Yep, I'd say the language is going pretty sweet.  Elder Giordano is taking the Book B test right now and he's rocking it, so he's definitely going to get it as well.

I think that was most of it.  Everything is super awesome, as always.  Today Elder Giordano and I wanted to go get some food and Elder Anderson and Holloway (our trainers) didn't want to, so we decided to go by ourselves and try and find a place we've never been before.  We actually made it!  We only needed directions twice!....  Yay!  It was pretty fun.  Biking is getting easier and easier.  Food is still good.  We got invited to eat at this place called Zebra Diner Bar or something like that that's reaaally expensive and reeaally good on Saturday.  It was fun.  Yeah, that's what happened this week.  Thanks everyone for being awesome and for the emails of encouragement and support.  Lots of love for my American home and friends - Stay awesome!  加油!

Really, everything is great.  I'm doing great, the people are great, the investigators need to be baptized and then they'll be great (just kidding), the district is great, Elder Holloway is great, the weather is hot but mostly great....  Doing great!  The only thing; any more ideas on our English class would be really helpful.  We're doing ok on it, but making it more interesting would be preferable.  Thanks for everything.  Love you all so much and I'll talk to you more next week!

--

-Elder Van De Graaff

-范長老

Hail from Taiwan!

Week 2 in Taiwan!  So much happens here it's unreal.

Elder Holloway, or Hang Zhanglao and Elder Van De Graaff

August 29, 2016

Taiwan!  Aaahh holy cow so much to say!  I'm so sorry that I wasn't able to email you to tell you that I made it here safely, but this is the first chance I had.  A lot's happened these last few days!

So first, I realize it's actually Sunday night when you're getting this, but it's 11:10 in the morning here when I'm writing this.  Yay, time changes!  So my P-Day is on Mondays, and it'll be the same (unless a weird change happens for no reason) until the end, so that's nice.

So Taiwan!  First off, we made it here safely and just fine, met the mission president President Jergensen and his wife at the airport, they showed us a video about Taiwan and how cool it is and stuff on the bus, made it to the mission home and stake center where they have a huge apartment hotel thing for people visiting the temple who can stay there overnight, stayed with like 7 other elders in our room, went out and got some CoCos (a company called CoCo who makes really good smoothie type drinks, and I got this really really good milky icy mango drink) and some zhua bing (some crepe omelette thing that they stuff with meat, veggies, and who knows what else that is so freaking amazing), went to bed, woke up at 5 the next morning, I solved a mix-up with the lady who ran the place, woke up and did a lot of scrambling with our bags and taking stuff around some different places, went to the Taiwan dedication site and talked about it and read the prayer (lots of pictures), went to a bunch of training about how to be safe and not drink the water and stuff, ate some pretty good dumplings and this really weird dragonfruit seed kiwi lime something drink, and then met our trainers!  Whew!  We met our trainers at about 3 o'clock on Thursday.  I'll send you the picture they just sent me of us two when we met.  It's pretty funny because everyone just yells and claps and jumps around when you announce who your trainer is.  Actually apparently they just sent it to you, so that's cool.  It's Elder Holloway, or Hang Zhanglao (the hang from Korea, Hang Guo).  He's so cool!  He's really nice, an awesome basketball player, singer, teacher, Chinese speaker, friendly, smart, and much more!  I can't even tell you all of the things he's good at cus I don't have time!  Right then, we left together to my first area!  It's called Zhubei 1 (also spelled Chupei, but Zhubei is correct).  It was about an hour west of Taibei by train, and we also have the area of Hukou.  Zhubei itself is mostly city, but Hukou is mostly small rice farms and old family houses.  So we went to Zhubei and our new apartment there (pictures of that as well).  It's pretty nice, but very small.  It's actually 2 floors, with only sleeping upstairs and food, desks, kitchen, bathroom, etc. stuck downstairs.

So that night we went finding around Zhubei, which was crazy!  It's insanely crowded, and everything is made smaller.  Like, the people, the stores, the cars, the lights, everything.  Everything is smaller.  It's nuts.  We found this family with 8 people together in their house smoking together, and they all accepted to let us come back, as well as another guy.  Since we said a prayer with them, we counted them all as new investigators, so we got 9 that night!  It was crazy.  My trainer's old companion (Elder Rushton) wrote tons of sticky notes and notes on my whiteboard for me, and on one corner he wrote "9 NI - 1 Night!!".  Guess he was inspired.  He also wrote about 8 times "7 Baptisms during training!" and we have 8 people with baptismal dates and are planning to get more, so we could easily get 7, which would be so sweet!  The "Standard of Excellence" is 1 per month, so that'd be awesome.  That night we taught a lesson with a man who had a lot of questions about why even Christians have a 3 class system in the economy and don't make everybody equal.  Poor guy.  He also said he had a lot of mental problems from when he was bullied as a child.  The next day, we taught a lesson to a woman and her husband who we didn't know.  It turns out she's a member but she was an investigator for 5 years.  Her husband is still an investigator, 25 years after he met the missionaries the first time.  It was really cool to meet them.  That night, without telling me beforehand, Elder Holloway said that he would leave with another member and I would go with a guy named Obi-Wan to go street contacting.  Whaaaat??  So that was freaky.  We went out for a couple hours and met a bunch of people.  We got 2 new investigators from that and told 2 more people about our English class.  It was crazy.  Then yesterday we taught a lesson to an investigator who was super cool and interested, then that night we went to Obi-Wan's house to eat with his family.  Oh yeah on Saturday we also ate lunch with a member at a restaurant.  On the way to Obi-Wan's house, there was a huge hill on the 40-minute bike ride.  I was going so slowly that I had to turn my wheel to stay up.  A lot of prayer going up that hill.  On the way down, there was still a couple uphill spots and I barely made it.  Then, with a lot of prayer on the way down as well, I could feel every pedal getting easier.  I was going so fast I could go uphill and end up going just as fast on the straight parts.  Truly, miracles are real.  Just this morning I was stuck in between a car and a motorcycle, and the opening was less than 3 feet across.  I honestly shouldn't have made it through, but I barely squished through and was fine.  Serious miracles.

So food!  Taiwan's food is....really strange.  I've had sweetened lemon vinegar, peaches as hard as apples, red guava (and normal guava), pig intestine noodle soup, edible flowers, stinky tofu, nasty oatmeal, an awesome chicken sandwich, bacon sauce lettuce something omelette something, and a kiwi that a member gave to us.  A kiwi, not more than 1.  It's always exciting, that's for sure.  Also they don't like having salt for some reason.  Dunno.

So that's it!  Thanks for the emails of support and stuff and news from home.  加油!

Hello again! 

It feels like just Wednesday when I talked to you last.  Things are going good, and I haven't started packing yet.  So that's fun.  That's what the next hour is for, right?  It's going to be fine though because it's just clothes and some toiletries that I need to pack, and I have another hour on Monday night.  We said goodbye to some of our teachers today and yesterday, which was really sad.  They took some pictures of our district with them, and I hope that I'll be able to get those pictures before too long.  I, as usual, forgot my camera, so I'll run back to the residency and get that.  In other news we're doing a departing musical number tomorrow, which I am playing the flute for (it's a violin part for I Need Thee Every Hour that Elder Moss supplied), so that's a lot of fun.  Also, as I'll show you when I get the camera, I got another haircut on Wednesday!  Don't have a heart attack!  I got it suuuuper short (like I put my head through it and then it's good); it's like an inch on the top and half that or less on the sides.  And before Jacob disowns me, it's because I figure that if I have 2 years of needing my hair relatively short, I'd better figure out what I prefer the best given the options.  Also I still like my old hair better (sorry mom), although I have to admit this has its benefits (sorry Jacob).  Only 2 years before I can grow it back, right?  We'll see, I guess.  We had in-field orientation for 9 hours on Thursday (I wish I was kidding), where they basically told us to work with members, make goals, and oh yeah work with members.  It was pretty boring, honestly, but it went by way faster than I was worried about, so that's good.  God works in mysterious ways, right?  The hype is getting sooooo real for Taiwan.  We're looking up pictures, talking to them about food, people, members, investigators, how to find, how to tract, customs, culture, drinks, what's acceptable and what's not, language stuff specific to Taiwan, and so much more!  It's getting crazy.  I think I want to live there for, oh, 2 years or so.  In all honesty, though, just from pictures I want to move there really bad and spend longer there.  It's so gorgeous!  And everything about the country sounds so awesome.  I want to take dad there so bad!  I really think he'd love it there.  Well, I've gotta run.  More later today, and then talk to you on Tuesday!

Travel Plans to Taiwan!!!

Hello hello!  I'm running out of greetings already!  Oh well.  

大家好!  (Big family good = hello everyone).  So, some big news this week!  Here goes.

大家好！(That means hello to a big group of people: literally "big family good"; cool, right?) 

Hello hello!  How are things at the ole' homestead?  Surprisingly enough, Provo is still here and the MTC is still the same.  Shocker, right?

Hello Hello from the "happiest place on earth"

the glorified prison named the MTC!  I'm just kidding.  You know I just have to try and switch it up, right?

Hail from Provo! 

D&C 43: 15-16                     Again I say, hearken ye elders of my church, whom I have appointed:  Ye are not sent forth to be taught, but to teach the children of men the things which I have put into your hands by the power of my Spirit; and ye are to be taught from on high.  Sanctify yourselves and ye shall be endowed with power, that ye may give even as I have spoken.

A lot to say still!  It's been a busy week, but still a lot of the same kind of thing. 

Woooowwwweeee!  So much to say!  Well, here goes.

So, I'm heading to the MTC on Wednesday!  Thank you for visiting my blog, and hope you'll keep in touch with me!  I'll be in the MTC for 9 weeks until August 23rd.  I'll arrive in Taipei, Taiwan on August 24th, and I'll arrive home on June 27th, 2018.  Just planning ahead, you know.  If you want to contact me, I'd love to get an email from you at lucas.van.de.graaff@myldsmail.net or send me a physical letter.  My address at the MTC will be AUG24  TAIW-TAI 2005 N 900 E Unit 138, Provo UT 84602 and my address in Taiwan will be 4 Fl, #24, Lane 183 Chin Hua Street Taipei Taipei 106.  I look forward to getting messages from you, and I'll see you all in 2 years!

-Elder Van De Graaff