Elder Jordan Chatman: Week 11- July 8, 2012

We are going to the temple today, so that’s why our p-day (preparation day) got moved to today instead of 2 days ago. (It is usually on Mondays but this week was on Wednesday.

We bike about 10 minutes to a computer cafe place. This is how we are able to email.

My companion is cool. He's been on his mission about 1 year. He has been in this area for 8 months so people all know him and love him here.

We are in the Bade area on Jieshou road. It is southwest of Taiwan. You can probably look it up on google maps. The place that we stay is nice. It is 4 of us living there. They say that it is one of the nicest apartments in the mission. The bad thing is we have cockroaches crawling around!

Something cool, right outside our apartment people set up stands and sell fruit. They have all kinds of crazy fruits and you can get good deals. Then there is a drink place nearby. You can get a big sized mango smoothie for $1.

We had a great bond with everyone in the MTC and I thought we would see each other here. But when you get here. you find your trainer and then you are gone. I haven’t seen any of them. Well actually one kid is in my zone from the MTC but we only see them like once a month. Hopefully I will get to be with one of the kids from the MTC because they were great.

The message is received nicely. The people either say no thanks or are interested in meeting. This area has the most activity right now

People like the missionaries it seems. The kids on the streets laugh at us. People stare a lot at us but most people are pretty friendly. People always say you are really tall.

In Chinese being real tall is called " hen gao."

Chopsticks are different. At first I couldn’t use them at all but now I am getting a little better. They don’t have forks here. They use a big spoon and chopsticks so that has been fun trying to learn those.

Oh it rained last week for the first time. That was terrible. It poured so hard. I had a rain coast on but still got drenched. It is still hot when it rains and the rain just keeps coming. Not cool when it rains and trying to bike in it!

American food is really expensive here and I can’t find much. I’ve been starving most of the time here. I’ve been living off of oatmeal, eggs, and pb and j and those protein bars you sent.

It’s really different here. Nothing like I expected. It is not a third world country or anything but it is definitely not America….not houses.

It’s been a change trying to get use to it.

Chinese has slowly been getting better. I can understand a bit more and more everyday of what people are saying. What doesn’t help is the fact that they have an accent here. For sh sounds they just say s. so like shen means God. So instead of shen like so sen. They speak so fast too. But my companion’s Chinese is really good so it has been great to be able to learn from him

So every Wednesday we teach English class. I have to teach my own class of about 15 people. Their English is pretty good. They can understand you, so you just speak English the whole time and play games with them. We do it at the church. It is us 4 missionaries in the area. It is an hour of class where we play games and teach them some stuff. Then the last 30min we teach a spiritual message. I taught the 10 commandments. There is a lot of non members there so the English class is away for us to try and get new investigators.

I’m in a great area. We have some of the highest numbers in the mission. My companion said he thinks were setting records. Its mainly him carrying the load because he knows the language and he's a stud at missionary work. But I’ve been saying a bit more and more in lessons. We teach like 5 lessons a day and a lot of people of are on the edge of getting baptized.

We teach a lot of people from different countries. One investigator is from the Philippines. She came to Taiwan to be a care taker. She believes in everything about the church but her mom is Roman Catholic and doesn’t want her to get baptized. So it is hard for her to commit to baptism. Right now we are teaching hee to keep commitments like not drinking tea. A lot of people love their tea but she had been willing not to drink it so far.

Biking is crazy. We are in one of the highest biking areas. It takes us like 30 mins to get to our teaching appointments by bike. We bike everywhere. So by the end of the night, I am dead tired. Plus it is so hot that I sweat like no other. One of our investigators asked if I just took a shower because sweat was all over my hair and face that she really thought I had just showered. We have district meeting once a week. It takes us 45 mins to get there.

Food is not bad. I’m not a big fan of the traditional Taiwanese meal. We went to a member’s house the other day. You have some rice then you scoop from some bowls of weird meat and spicy vegetable stuff. One of the foods was those little 1 inch fish that you see in the lake, head and all. It was not very appetizing!

Love, Jordan