Hello Everyone!
There's not much to report this week. Lessons with investigators have been going well. We've got a baptism date for one and we would have had one with the other one, but we always got cut short. We did commit him to live the Word of Wisdom, though:) I told him if he stopped drinking tea and alcohol, I'd stop eating sweet things. Sooo that totally didn't happen. It worked for about a day, and then I got some chocolate hazelnut biscotti in a package from Megan and I couldn't resist (Not blaming you, Megan! That package was fantastic and made my day). It made me wonder how pathetic I'd be if I tried to break a real addiction and how hard it is for investigators to do that. So yeah, I definitely owe Que Dixiong an extremely sincere apology.
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| Aaron was complaining that Brendan doesn't seem to know how to take a picture without looking goofy. Brendan sent this one with the caption "A 'not disgusting face' with my Taiwan Mission t-shirt." |
I've grown to love my teachers even more this week! T. Laoshi has grown on me a lot and I've worked out some of his quirks so that I can focus more on what he's teaching and not the weird stuff he does. For instance, when he asks a grammar question (or any other question for that matter), he'll tap his fingers on his head like he's pretending to be you thinking, or if he thinks it's a particularly tricky question, he'll tap his fingers over his mouth like "Ohohoho! Fooled you guys!" It used to really bother me but now I just think it's really funny, which is good. I learn a lot more now.
S. Laoshi is still super awesome. We did a couple of really cool activities with him this week. For one, in order to help us learn how to use a grammar pattern that helps you express the location of objects in relation to different objects, he had us sit in two lines facing each other. One line could see the board and one couldn't. He would draw a picture up on the board and, in Chinese, the person in the line facing the board had to describe to the person opposite him/her what to draw and where without doing charades or pointing. It was super hard and helped us learn and use a lot of vocab. I loved it. In another activity, he had us role-play contacting someone on the street and setting up an appointment. It was really interesting doing that because thus far, all our lessons have been set up for us so we haven't had to do the contacting part. It made me kind of scared for Taiwan, but also super excited. There's going to be so many people to talk to and it's so weird to think that most of them won't even know what they're missing by blowing me off or ignoring me.
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| His bulletin board has become a little more personalized. |
At the devotional on Tuesday, the speaker, Elder Schwitzer, told a story about a missionary in Russia who was so loved because from he moment he got there, he didn't shut his mouth. He wasn't scared about saying something wrong, he just opened his mouth in a spirit of love and the ward members and everyone he met just loved him. I hope I can be that kind of missionary. I know that my personality alone isn't going help me get appointments, though. S. Laoshi said he actually approached someone with a huge smile and they just yelled "BU YAO!!" which means "DON'T WANT!" and then literally ran in the other direction like a frightened rabbit. Hopefully I'm not that scary...
But yeah, that's about all for this week! Week 6, here I come!
-Elder Brendan Smith
[sorry so short this week. I need to do a better job of writing in my journal so my week doesn't blur together in my memory like a jumbled mess of the same day being repeated over and over and over. Sometimes it feels like I'm living groundhog day haha. That'll be one good thing about going to Taiwan is each day will be different.]
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