Week 40- January 28, 2013

Week 40

January 29, 2013

nimen hao,

This week we had transfers.  My companion and I both stayed though.  I’m happy about that because my companion is pretty cool and I love this area. A lot of new missionaries came in too and a lot went home….. like 20 left and 15 came in - so a ton of people are training now.  (That is when the missionaries who have been out a while teach the brand new ones coming in.)

Our investigator, Miguel is still going strong. We taught him some commandments this week and he accepted those no problem. We are stilling aiming on him getting baptized in 2 weeks. He is really a miracle investigator. When we first met him, he was friendly but just not willing to listen to us and was deep in his Catholic faith. But then my old companion left and took Miguel’s phone number with him.  So we had no way to get in contact with him. Then two months later, a sister missionary met him on the road and from that we were able to start meeting with him again. Since then he has been super willing to listen and accepting of our message.

Besides Miguel though, we don’t really have any investigators that are progressing. All of them always seem to come up with some excuse of why they can’t meet with us or why they can’t come to church. So this week, we really need to go out find some prepared people to teach.

People always ask about how my Chinese is coming along and if I have any mess up stories. Well this week, I have two mess up stories. The first is when I called 2nd Nephi (that is a book in the Book of Mormon) ugly. In Chinese the word for read and look is the same (kan). During a lesson an investigator was commenting on how 2 Nephi was hard to understand and I said yeah 2nd Nephi is difficult to read (nan kan). But sometimes when you say nan kan it means ugly so I said yeah 2nd Nephi is ugly. haha

Another one is when I asked a kid if he had mental problems. The word for question and problem is the same. The kid raised his hand during the lesson so I asked if he had a question.  But I guess somehow I said it like I asked if he had a mental problem. J Sometimes when you think of something in English, translate it directly to Chinese in your mind, then say it, it has a different meaning. Sometimes a word has two different meanings also. Also you have tones and if you say a tone wrong, you can totally mess up the meaning. A guy in the English ward served his mission here and said one time on his mission he gave a talk about pig’s feet accidently. This is because when you say zhu1 jiao4, it means pig foot.  But what he was really trying to say was zhu3 jiao4 which means bishop. It is funny stuff!

Anyways that’s the excitement of this week. Jesus Christ lives. Follow Him and you will have happiness and peace in your life.

-Elder Chatman