Yang Rou Hao Chi!

This week I will introduce to you how to wish someone a happy new year in Chinese: Xin nian kuai le! Yang yang ru yi! The second phrase is in reference to the fact that it is the year of the sheep (yang). They have these little sayings for every zodiac year, and I learned to say "yang yang ru yi" (I would tell you what it means but I really have no idea) but messed up a couple times and now we say "yang rou hao chi", which means Mutton is delicious. Fun fact Gangshan is famous for mutton (despite a distinct lack of sheep in the area) and yet I think I've only eaten mutton once this week, even though it is the year of the sheep and seems like the perfect opportunity to eat as much sheep as you want. I don't think anybody actually likes the mutton soup though.

Basically this entire week could be summed up in eating. We have had members feed for us for lunch and dinner every day since Tuesday night, and every meal has been a feast. Not just the kind of feast where there is a lot of food on the table, but the kind where they make you eat all the food on the table and then you go to the living room where they bring out candy and then bowls of sweet soup and a banana and a piece of cake and have you ever tried this sesame cracker thing? Then they make you take home the leftovers. Our numbers for key indicators this week were pretty sad. 

But life is still good! It's been a happy week, if nothing else, and we really have wonderful ward members who love love love the missionaries. We are ready to get back into gear and work extra hard this week, because now that New Year is over people have no excuse that they are too busy because of Guonian. Probably they will say they are busy now because they have to get back to work after Guonian. But! We will keep trying. And we will bring souls to Christ and have lots of fun.

We do a lot of spiritual shares while we are at members' houses. Today we are going to share about humility and the one-up syndrome, that it is really easy to want to be better than other people but it makes you a lot happier if you are nice to people. Then we're going to do a roleplay where people have think of a situation where they could have been more humble. When someone tells you they are going on a cool trip, be happy for them instead of tell them about all the cool things you've done. So that's my challenge for you today: resist being a one-upper. 

Love you all, hope you have a good week and find ways to be a missionary at home!

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Wow Those Girls are Really Xingku

I am going to start off this week's email with some very important announcements:

1. In exactly a year from this week, I will be taking a very long trip back to America. So see you all then! 

2. I finally made it out of training! I am so happy. There's a missionary training program called "12 weeks" that you do for the first 3 months of your mission. I was in it for 20 weeks. I was so done. And now I am actually done! Well, I was done a week ago. But I forgot to mention it last week. And now I'm a real missionary!

3. If you ever wondered if it was possible to crush up fish eggs and dry them like fruit leather, the answer is yes. But it doesn't mean you should try to do it. And you don't have to give it to your friends.

4. I've officially been through an earthquake! Well, that had already happened. But I was like 5 years old last time and I don't really remember it. But on February 14th, 2015, at about 4 in the morning, I was woken up by my bed being firmly shaken. After I determined that it was not my companion playing a trick on me, in my sleep-addled state I decided that the wind outside was very strong and for a moment was concerned that the building was going to fall over. Then I realized it was an earthquake. Then I went back to sleep.

5. We are getting new missionaries, finally! 12 of the 19 missionaries in the group after me are coming next week. Please pray that the rest of them can come and we can finally get things in order in the mission!

That is all of the important announcements for today. Chinese New Year is upon us and we are preparing ourselves to be thoroughly fed for the next week straight. We are struggling a little bit to set up lessons and get people to actually want to be baptized. "Could we meet with you and share an important message about families with you?" "Maybe after New Year's." "...okay :( " But never fear! We are still working hard and doing our best to help people come unto Christ. That's all we can do!

There's a Chinese word "xingku" that means like, when you work really hard. Difficult? Man, there's just not a way to explain it. But basically, we had a really xingku day on Friday where we rode for more than an hour out to a town call Yongan, which is right next to the ocean, to find a less active member only to discover that she lives in Kaohsiung. "Why didn't you call her before you came out here?" her brother asked. Ah. Good question. Probably should have thought of that. But it was a really nice bike ride! And there had to be a reason we were out there. Maybe someone in Yongan saw us biking and thought, Those girls are so xingku, I should start going to church. Or something like that. Well, at least we totally looked like we were in a missionary movie.

Hope everyone had a nice Valentine's Day and are spreading love and peace everywhere. You are all great!

Sister Cardon 

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Every Member a Missionary (No, seriously!)

Good times in Gangshan this week! Living the life. The missionary life. It's great.

Last P-day we went shopping at a clothing market, which is always fun. Except that they don'yt really plan for tall American girls to shop there, so selections were few. But it was a nice adventure, and we went with a cute lady in our ward, Sister Zhuang. She is so nice, and loves to take us places and take us out to eat and is always willing to serve. Last night we had a lesson with a recent convert. The ward has asked that we only meet with this woman when we have another member with us, so we set up a member to come to the church, but she cancelled last minute! So we called Sister Zhuang who was happy for us to all come over to her house and have the lesson there, and she fed us dinner as well. She is way cute about studying English, too, and tapes English words around her house. Love her!

Seriously, members are so great. It's so nice to have the support of the members around who are willing to fellowship investigators and help them feel comfortable, and it's great to have someone who speaks better Chinese than you along to explain what you can and can't do on Sunday in order to keep the Sabbath Day holy. Being on a mission has definitely taught me that I want to be a much better member missionary when I get back. One reason is the examples of good members here. Another is because as a missionary, you want to be people's friend, but you just can't do it the same way you would at home. I would love to watch movies with investigators and spend time with them doing fun things so they could see that the gospel really is fun and happy, but I can't because I'm a missionary. But if I were a regular member here I could do that! So when I go home and am actually a regular member I am going to try to be a good example and be people's friend and do the work that the missionaries can't do but really wish they could. This is a new life goal I have. It is also a reminder to you to see how you can be a missionary at home! Go and do likewise.

The lady at the counter of the internet cafe place we are at right now is using a mop to wash the ceiling. I'm not sure I've ever seen someone do that before. But it's not a wet mop, it's like a duster thing. I wonder how successful it is. 

Gearing up for the Chinese New Year right now. In church yesterday they passed around a sign-up sheet for people to feed the missionaries. I've heard the whole week of Chinese New Year as a missionary you just eat and eat and eat. I keep wanting to make goals to eat healthy. But then my companion reminds me that New Year is coming and there's no point in being healthy now, let's go get some ice cream. Maybe after next week I will have more of a desire to change. There's a lesson in there somewhere. 

Ah! I know. It's easy to put off changing yourself: "I'll do it after the New Year" "I'll stop smoking when my house is clean" "I'll get baptized when school is over" (yes these are things I've heard people say recently). But the truth is, change is always going to be hard. No matter when you start, it's not going to be easy. So you should start now so you get it over with! And the Atonement has power to get you through anything. It's true. I am resolved. I am going to eat healthy this week. Until my companion reminds me they have strawberry ice cream at FamilyMart.

OH WAIT most exciting thing: a General Authority came to our sacrament meeting yesterday! Elder Gong of the Seventy, who is in the Asia Area presidency. A counselor in our mission presidency, the whole stake presidency, and Elder Gong and his wife all came and spoke. It was so cool! I got to shake his hand, and chatted with Sister Gong for a few minutes. So that was exciting.

Hope you all have a good week!

Sister Cardon

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Are There Even Groundhogs in Taiwan?

Hello all!

 

Still here in Taiwan! And still here in Gangshan. If everything had gone according to plan today would be our transfer/move call day, but unfortunately things don't always go according to plan. We still don't have any new missionaries! Seriously. The group who was in the MTC after me has now waited for their visas in America for three months, and now this week another group of our Taiwan Taizhong missionaries will be going home with no one to replace them. We hear all sorts of things like they are 90% coming this week or we'll be stuck here forever, but until we know for sure we just have to wait. So Sister Grigg and I are just hanging out here until we know more, and in the meantime they will probably have to close a few areas because they don't have enough missionaries to replace them. At this point maybe when we finally get new missionaries they will have so few people left that I will have to train someone. (that would be really awful I don't want to train anyone right now we would have so much trouble teaching lessons it would be like the MTC all over again)

 

Things that happened this week:

Last P-day we went to Costco! It wasn't very fun. It felt like we were in America except things were way more expensive and there's no point in buying Brussels Sprouts if you don't have an oven to roast them in. And I ate six muffins in six days. But it was still nice to get out and go somewhere interesting!

 

People took us out to eat/fed us a feast so many times I was excited to fast on Sunday so that I didn't have to politely eat until I was stuffed past the rafters. Seriously, the members here are so generous. And everybody loves to give us fruit. Once we got seven zaozis (the little appley things) in one day. 

 

We helped someone paint their house on Saturday! It was fun. But kind of hard; we painted three floors of their stairwell but we couldn't really reach a lot of places and it was hard to tell the difference between the original white and the slightly off-white color we put on. Turns out here most people try to paint their house before Chinese New Year, and they do it every year. That sounds exhausting to me.

 

Miracle Sunday! Every week we set goals for the number of lessons we will have, the number of new investigators we will find, etc. On Sunday we were so close to reaching our goals, but it was going to be hard to get all of them. We still had to get one other lesson, a lesson with a Less Active member, a lesson with a Recent Convert, and find 2 new investigators. Well we had a miracle day! We went tracting and ran into two cute girls who were willing to let us teach them about prayer and let us come back, we went over to a LA's house with a member and were about to leave when the LA came outside, and we went to a fireside with a Recent Convert! It was really great to have that sense of accomplishment (hey I know how to say that in Chinese) and to know that because we worked hard during the week the Lord helped us accomplish our goals. There can be miracles when you believe!

 

One of the dinners we went to was with a member and Claire, our investigator with a baptismal date. She is so great! We taught her the Word of Wisdom over dinner right after she ordered some little rice flour things with green tea in them and after we explained that we don't drink tea she was disappointed that she couldn't eat her tea things, but she was willing to start living the Word of Wisdom right then and there! Coffee will be something hard for her to overcome but she is so willing and ready. Now she just needs to come to church! That's kind of an important thing.

 

In conclusion, miracles happen and people change. The Gospel is good and if we have faith we can overcome anything. Yesterday I ran into this scripture in the Book of Mormon, Mormon 9:21 (and proceeded to gasp aloud when I found it because I thought it was so great, which made my companion think I had had some sort of great realization or epiphany when really it was just a good scripture).

 

Here it is: "Behold, I say unto you that whoso believeth in Christ, doubting nothing, whatsoever he shall ask the Father in the name of Christ it shall be granted him; and this promise is unto all, even unto the ends of the earth."

 

Isn't that great? Ask God with faith, and he will give it to you.True facts.

 

Love you all!

Sister Cardon of Gangshan

 

PS If anyone was wondering if we would still have 6 weeks of winter or not the answer is no, what are you talking about, winter never even happened.

PPS I've been a missionary for more than six months now yay

 

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