Mission Tour!

I feel like the past few weeks have given me an opportunity to do a lot of reflecting, and the reason is that I am coming up on a year of being in Taiwan. What? This week we had our once-a-year mission tour, where we have an opportunity to hear from our mission president and a special guest, a member of the Seventy. The reason this is so weird is because when I first came to Taiwan LAST year we had mission tour with Elder Gong, who was just called to be in the Presidency of the Seventy but right now is the Asia Area President. So for me to attend Round 2 of misison tour with Elder Sam Wong was just, like, super weird. Aah! I'm old! Okay no more of that.

And mission tour was so great! We were lucky enough to be in the Jiayi chapel, 3 minutes from our house, so that was nice that we didn't have to travel far. The tour was over three days, so on Wednesday they met with missionaries in Taizhong, Thursday with us including missionaries from Zhongxing, Tainan, and Jiayi, and then on Thursday they went down to Gaoxiong. It was pretty neat! It was so cool to hear from our leaders. Elder Wong is hilarious with his Cantonese accent and funny comments. He's also a leader who just kind of wings it with the program, but I'll talk about that in a minute. President Blickenstaff talked about D&C 6 and how we need to repent and not be cumbered with things. Sister Blickenstaff talked about John 6 and believing in Christ. We had Costco pizza for lunch and I had plenty of time to get really nervous for the part after lunch, when I was singing in a musical number.

The time came and we went up to sing our number, "I Believe in Christ." We had a quartet with me, Sister Ashby, Elder Smith, and Elder Johnson, and the very talented Elder Crockett who just made up his own arrangement on the piano. It was kind of funny like the day before we were performing he was like, "hey do you think we should do the last verse in a different key?" (keep in mind this is after we had already added an a capella part and made up our own stuff to split parts on the fourth verse, etc) and even though changing the keys always works I just had to be like NO TOO MUCH. It was a really great musical number though, and it really brought the Spirit to the meeting. The coolest part though, was at the end when Elder Wong was wrapping up. We were about to have testimonies from missionaries who are going home soon and then the meeting usually ends with the president authority (Elder Wong) giving a testimony as well. But this time he was like, "You know, usually I would be the last speaker of the meeting but the missionaries who sang the musical number did so well that I'm just going to have them come up here and sing the last verse of their song again instead. They're just going to give my testimony for me. And that will be the closing song as well." OKAy I guess we're singing again! it was a pretty neat experience. And then afterwards Elder Wong asked us to sing the last two verses again so he could get a recording of it. So now there's a member of the Seventy with a recording of me singing on his phone. That's pretty sweet.

So it's been a pretty good week! We have seen lots of miracles and we have lots of investigators who are progressing. One cute girl named Cindy said, "I'm not entirely sure why I want to be baptized, but I know that it feels good and I want to do it." 

OH I totally forgot to talk about the other awesome thing that happened this week: we got to go to a wedding! A member in our ward was getting married this weekend but her new husband is not a member, so they had the wedding at the chapel. It was really interesting. It was kind of a mix of a wedding, a sacrament meeting (this lady gave a talk and started going off on how her kids went on missions), and a wedding reception. It was pretty fun though and the food was tasty and now I've been to a Taiwanese wedding. Sort of.

So yeah! good week. I'm happy and loving Taiwan, my companion is great, and we see miracles every day.

Love you all!

Sister Cardon

November Has Come

And here we are, already halfway through Sister Thao's last transfer in Taiwan! It's a little crazy how fast time goes by. How on earth is it already November?! Last November was the month I came to Taiwan in the first place. What the heck?

Life is good in Jiayi. We are seeing a lot of success in finding new investigators, setting dates for baptismal goals, getting lessons, etc. Seriously, I can't even believe how great this area is. The only problem is getting people to come to church, but that's the thing that is really hard for missionaries to control so I don't feel too bad about it. We'll just keep on keeping on!

We have a really awesome investigator named Rebecca. Well, she's sort of an investigator? Before I came here Sister Thao and her companion would just go out to lunch with her sometimes because she (Rebecca) recently became Buddhist and just wanted to have friends but was not interested in the gospel. Recently, though, she has been asking a lot more question about God and prophets and the commandments we follow (which are like, everything that devout Buddhists do)(except being vegetarian)(Buddhists can stick with that). Rebecca is really funny and speaks English most of the time and is super spontaneous. Yesterday after we chatted for a long time and then went home she texted us and was like, "Hey if I want to get baptized can I do it before Sister Thao leaves?" What? we hadn't ever even talked to her about baptism. It's pretty awesome to see how the gospel can change people in just a short time. We are going to keep working with her and help her to have a desire to be baptized (for the right reasons haha, not as a goodbye present to Sister Thao). Miracles!

Other things that happened this week:

I went to Mission Leadership Council last week in Taizhong and it was super exhausting. We took the train up to Taizhong and then sat there and did missionary meeting stuff for like 6 hours and took the train home. But we had a delicious lunch! And it was cool to see all of the mission leaders in one place trying to figure out how to help our mission improve. I felt very inspired. And I asked Elder Stevenson how his dad is doing. He said he is stressed out. 

Halloween! We celebrated by having a birthday party at a member's house, because Elder Robinson's birthday is in November. They had a cake with a picture of Elder Robinson's face printed on it in frosting. It was pretty hilarious.

And I can't really think of anything else to share for this week. I went on exchanges with Sister Ashby from my MTC district! That was fun.

Have a good week!

Sister Cardon

Pictures: We went on exchanges to Xinying this week and I don't know why but they have statues of deer, like, everywhere.

I decided to wear an elephant dress today. It is green.

This Email is Mildly Mediocre

It'd be great if I could tell you all the cool stories that happened this week, but I can't. If I told you, I'd have to kill you. And I can't, because my license to kill was revoked. So that's too bad.

Okay, not really. But, I can't really tell you any cool stories because I legitimately cannot think of anything cool that happened this week.

So I'll tell you some of the mundane things that happened this week!

Sister Thao and I are both almost out of money for the month so we have been eating $35 (that's Taiwanese money) bowls of turkey rice for, like, every other meal.

We spent a lot of time calling people last-minute to come to lessons with our investigators and we had some success, but also some unsuccess. We will plan better this week.

This morning we went to the hospital because Sister Thao has a wart on her foot and on the way there we had to wait for the train for 40 minutes but on the way back we had to run to make it.

I'm mildly addicted to the Butter Milk Bread they sell at 7-11. It's delicious and full of white flour.

We biked to our secondary area on Saturday, but we didn't really have a good map of the area, so we did a lot of "Do you know where this neighborhood is?" and people pointed us in vague directions. Finally after about an hour and a half of biking we found the neighborhood, but the house numbers didn't make any sense. Then we finally found the house, but when we got there a grumpy man told us that the lady we were trying to find hadn't lived there for ten years. We then went to 7-11 and had microwave dinners.

Yesterday at FHE we played a game kind of like "Big Booty" but with animal signs instead and it was really fun. Got a little rowdy. No one was hurt.

We are going to go shopping in Xinying today.

I am in charge of putting together a musical number for zone conference next week! So that is fun. We are having a quartet sing "I Believe in Christ." It should go well. 

And that concludes the mundane for this week.

Something that has been great about this week, though, is that we have some really great investigators who have a desire to learn. We met with Angela and Rainy last week and set baptismal goals with them, and this week when we met with them again and asked, "How do you feel about your baptism?" they both were really excited. Angela was worried that the baptismal interview would be a test about the Book of Mormon haha. it's really great to see them start to progress and build their testimonies and come closer to God. And I've noticed about myself that I have become much better at really listening to people and trying to figure out what they need and ask questions. Like, I always have tried to be friends with my investigators, but now I feel I can connect with them a lot more (Chinese helps) and really be on the same page. It's so important to really understand people and listen them. People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care! True facts.

Love you all! Have a great week.

Sister Cardon

Pictures: from our long bike ride on Saturday

...I don't really have any more pictures. Man, I was really bad at taking pictures this week! I will do better next week.

Anyone for Turkey Rice?

You know, I've decided I'm just going to stop trying to predict where I am going to be and who my companion is going to be and stuff, but recently it's usually just ended up being wrong. I was all settled and ready to spend another six weeks in Shizhong with my cute Korean Sister Eo, and then at 10:28 on Saturday night I got a phone call. "Sister Cardon," President Blickenstaff said. "I would like you to serve as a Sister Training Leader in Jiayi with Sister Thao. Is that okay?" "No, that's not okay," I responded. haha I'm just kidding I didn't say that. I think I kind of sputtered and mumbled and said umm yes at some point. Wait but I'm not kidding that I've been called to serve as an STL, which is pretty exciting! For those of you unfamiliar with the organization of a mission, we have various leadership positions such as zone leaders and district leaders, who both lead and help other missionaries and report numbers and stuff. But there's also Sister Training Leaders, who are called to help the sisters in their zone. The difference that it makes to me now is that I will be going on exchanges a lot more often, I get to make a lot more phone calls, and I will definitely be striving to increase my humility and faith. I've had several very good STLs on my mission so far and I hope that I will be able to help the sisters in my zone as those ones have helped me.

New area! Jiayi is more in the middle of Taiwan, between Taizhong and Tainan. They are famous for eating Turkey Rice and having nice people. I already love it here; the city has a great small-town feel and the streets are small. Wow, I really did miss having just two-lane roads while I was in Shizhong. I am so excited to be here for the next while. I will likely be here for 3 months at least; this is Sister Thao's last move call so she wil be going home in six weeks, so I will be probably be here for at least a transfer after that. And then I only have one more transfer left myself, so this very well might be the last time I move until I go to America. But we don't talk about that. 

Fun facts about Sister Thao: her family has 8 people and they are Hmong! She grew up in Wisconsin and speaks three languages (English, Chinese, Hmong). She is great. 

As for this past week in Shizhong, it was pretty good! We had an English party that was... fairly successful. Lots of people came. It was Halloween-themed. Note to all: don't try to make toilet paper mummies at a Taiwanese Halloween party unless you want it to end up like snow in the cultural hall.

The best part of this week, of course, was listening to General Conference! I love Conference. It was so neat to hear the testimonies of our inspired leaders, especially the three new apostles. Did anyone catch that Elder Stevenson's son is serving in Taiwan? Did anyone think to ask me if maybe that son is serving as a zone leader in Taizhong right now? Yeah that's right. Our mission has an apostle's son. No I haven't ever actually met him. But I probably will at the next mission leadership conference! So that's cool.

I was struck by how many speakers in conference spoke on the theme of obedience, even if that wasn't necessarily their topic. I feel like we are being reminded more and more that each of us needs to develop our personal testimony and stay true to the standards and commandments we believe. It is so important for us to be strong examples of the believers and remember the covenants and promises we believe! One of my favorite talks was from Larry S Lawrence, who spoke about the Spirit and how we can ask to know what ways we can improve. I loved all the examples he gave, even such little things such as interrupting people or complaining can hinder us from spiritually progressing. I think we can all relate that we have little quirks and habits that we can try to improve. And the cool thing is, we aren't alone in trying to change ourselves! We have the Savior and the Atonement by our side to help us get through it.

Love you all! Hope you have a great week and find ways to improve.

Sister Cardon

A Korean and an American walk into a barbecue...

First of all, Happy Mid-Autumn festival! This week has been full of barbecues and moon cakes and it has been great. There's also a typhoon happening today so the ward barbecue got cancelled. But that's okay. Mid-Autumn festival is another chance for people to take the day off when people don't really know what the holiday is about and get the family together. And I love a good Taiwanese barbecue; there's a distinct lack of hamburgers and potato salad but a whole bunch of anything else you could think of to barbecue: thin pork slices, sausage, mushrooms, baby bamboo, etc. It's pretty good. Yeah. Taiwan.

I love my new area! Shizhong is great. I've been pretty lucky to have served in a wide range of areas: rural rice fields, friendly neighborhood feel, college campus, and now the downtown. Seriously, if you're ever along and life is making you lonely you can always come to Shizhong. We've got glitzy malls and expensive hot pot and giant roads and a subway system. Hey this is the first time I've really had a subway system in my area! That's cool. Shizhong is also beautiful; we got the Love River running right through our area so we get to bike over plenty of bridges and contact people sitting along the river enjoying the lights in the evening. It's pretty great. The only downside is that our apartment (a super NICE apartment reminiscent of our apartment in Beijing 4 years ago) is like 20 minutes away from everything and we have to bike over a huge bridge to get home. Get some serious thigh burn every morning. It's great.

And I love my companion! She is Korean and cute. Oh I think I never mentioned her name: Sister Eo! (you say it "oh") But her Chinese name is "Yu Jie Mei": Sister Fish. She reads and writes English pretty well but doesn't speak it much, so we just speak Chinese to each other all the time. It's pretty funny sometimes. For instance (this was all spoken in Chinese):

Me: We could now grab the thing or go church grab the thing.

Sister Eo: ...I don't understand.

Me: ...yeah me neither.

Sister Eo: Grab the thing now or at church grab?

Me: Yeah.

Sister Eo: ...the same.

Me: Yeah.

Haha it's great. We're both doing our best. Her Chinese is awesome; she lived in Harbin, China for a year and speaks and reads really well. We're both learning!

You know, it is the coolest thing how just when you are kind of down or discouraged, Heavenly Father sends you some tender mercies to lift you up. Yesterday was kind of a low-key Sunday and we both had a bit of ennui. We had a lessons with some new investigators who weren't that interested and don't live in our area, and when we called a less active member she said she didn't want to meet with us and waste both of our time. Ouch! But we decided to go out tracting and try to find some families at home. Found a street, starting going down in and realized every single house had a giant Buddhist altar in the living room. Knocked on one door and a guy kind of angrily opened the mailbox peephole thing and said a Korean missionary came a few days ago, I didn't want it then and I don't want it now, why won't you guys leave me alone? (I'm not sure who is going around Shizhong parading as my companion, but we definitely did not knock on that door recently.)

BUT then we walked a little further and ran into the cutest scene ever: a family having a barbecue. They had two cute little kids and they immediately invited us to sit down and eat with them, you two are so beautiful where are you from, have some more pork, oh you are missionaries that's so great of you! It felt so nice to sit down and be a family with them. They brought out little sparklers and there were fireworks in the distance and for all intensive purposes it could have been a 4th of July barbecue with my cousins. Except, we were all speaking Chinese. And they offered us beer. But.

In conclusion, you know, God really watches out for all of His children. He cares about each of us and He wants us all to be happy. He knew I needed to have that virtual hug, and He knew that family needed to meet the missionaries and find out how they can be happy like that forever. We are going to go back next week and I can totally see them coming to church and learning about the gospel and getting baptized one day. Woohoo! Miracles happen.

Love you all! Hope you had a wonderful Mid-Autumn Festival as well.

Sister Cardon

Super Great

Sorry guys, shorter email this week because I am almost out of time!

We've had a good 10 days since I emailed. Tracting in the hot sun. Lessons on random doctrinal things. Stake Conference! I should drink more water.

Most humbling moment: Usually when I say something wrong in Chinese it is just with my companion and is not too big of a deal, because she knew what I meant to say, etc. Well, last week we were in Sunday School talking about missionary work, so of course the missionaries were called upon to share. And elder was talking about how even though it is hot and you are getting rejected and you are really tired, you can still be happy. For some reason I decided to pipe in, "or if you are really wet!" in the middle of his share. "Shi1 shi1 de", wet. Well, after I said it I realized that no one really gave any sort of response, not even like a pity chuckle. There was just sort of an awkward silence and then I heard someone behind me whisper to their neighbor, "what does that mean?" I turned around. "Shi shi de, like when it rains." Then the chorus of understanding was let out, "ohhhh shi shi de like when it's raining and you are all wet" "oh okay she was talking about rain" "yeah like really wet." I was super confused on why everyone had reacted that way when finally someone was like "we thought you said 'or if you're dead.' "

Super cool stake conference this week: Elder Wong of the Seventy came to visit Tainan and we had some awesome sessions on Saturday night and Sunday morning. He is super funny and was getting all involved with the audience asking question and stuff on Saturday night. The cool thing is that he is actually from Hong Kong so doesn't speak Mandarin fluently; he speaks it really well, but sometimes he would pause and say things a few times to get the tones right. It made me feel better that if a Seventy is struggling with Chinese, I can struggle a little too. The main theme on Saturday was keeping the Sabbath day holy and really appreciating it, so he had this thing where he asked everyone to tell him what sort of things are distracting during sacrament meeting and how to fix it, "so we can help those other countries that struggle with these problems." At one point he said that missionaries often worry about what the speakers in sacrament meeting will talk about in case their investigator would think it was weird, and I guess I nodded a little too emphatically because he called on me and said, "This sister is very brave, she is saying the talks in her sacrament meeting are bad! Why don't you tell us something that can help investigators and members in that case?" oops. So I stood up and started talking and said that we should remember to testify of Christ in sacrament meeting, not ourselves. Always a good thing.

On Sunday his theme was talking about going from "great" to "super great" and it was a good reminder that no matter how great we are doing, we can always take that extra step to be super great.

Love you all! Have a good week.

An American in Tainan

This has been a pretty fabulous week, if I do say so myself. I don't really know how to organize this email very well, so I'm just going to have a bunch of little paragraphs of the funny and awesome things that make up my life right now.

My companion: I love being with Sister Shen so much. Her English is FABULOUS and she loves missionary work. She's hilarious and we can easily chat for hours. It's so cool to be able to speak Chinese all the time; I'm stuck between feeling like I'm really improving and feeling like Wow I really don't know a lot of Chinese. Because, like, her Chinese is awesome. Duh. So we are having a lot of fun.

Tainan is great, though a lot different from the areas I've served in before. It is actually the second smallest area in the mission. Like, we can bike from the north to the south border in 15 minutes, and east to west in maybe 30 minutes, and it's all city. Compare that to my first area in Gangshan where if we legitimately biked from one end to the other it would probably take 3 hours. Maybe 4. So it's super tiny and often when we contact people they don't live in our ward, but in the Tainan 1st or 3rd or 4th ward. There are a whole bunch of little streets everywhere and it's kind of like a maze. I can get to the church by myself now though! So that's fun.

I also am in a bigger missionary district now, with 5 companionships (3 elders, 2 sisters) and it's a blast. I'm serving in the same ward with an elder from my MTC district, which is fun, and his companion is also Taiwanese. So sometimes we are just surrounded by Taiwanese people and I'm like Wow you are all talking really fast. I'm not sure my head can fit quite that much Chinese in it at once. But I'll get used to it. 

People here are so nice! Some people say that the further south you go in Taiwan, the more relaxed and nicer people are. I don't know how much that's true, but the first few days here I was really impressed with how nice people are. Like, in Taizhong on the street maybe 70% of people will take the flier you give them, but here it's more like 90%. So that's cool! And our first day tracting we met two people who were happy let us come back. And the ward is super nice; we actually live on the floor above some really strong members and they invite us to dinner every Sunday.

Someone told me the other day that they have a joke; when someone is taking a long time doing something the other person will say, "Come on hurry up, we don't have American time here!" So the other day I said that to the other American and everyone laughed.

There was a baptism on Saturday that we went to and a lady came up to me, pulled up her skirt to show me she was wearing purple shorts and said, "I wear these for safety. When I ride a scooter the wind blows my skirt around. But it's not for my safety; it's for everyone's safety so they don't see me and get in an accident!" Hahahaha. I love old Taiwanese ladies.

Yep, life is good. I'm excited about my area and my companion and I love Taiwan. 

Oh, I almost forgot! I officially hit my year mark on my mission last week. I think I might be an old missionary. So weird! I'm down to a little more than 6 months. Crazy.

Love you all!

Sister Cardon

PS Pathetic that this was the only picture I have of the two of us. I will strive to take more pictures next week.