Wollongong is doing great. We get transfer calls on Saturday. I CANNOT beileve that I've been in Wollongong for 5 weelks already. Its flown by. I'm hoping that I get to stay in Wollongong for a little while longer though. Apparently once school starts again there are Chinese people everywhere. But it won't start up again until March. So it's still a while away.
So T.T. is the guy we met at the train station. He's good. We just haven't been able to meet him much. He's applying for his Ph.D but before he can apply he has to take an English exam. The exam is on the 11th so he's been at the library all the time. We saw him on Friday when we played basketball but thats about it. A lot of our investigators are in the same boat. They're all studying for this exam so they can't meet with us much.
Last week we met these two Chinese guys on the bus. One of them is from LUOHU! It was really funny because I like to introduce myself and say that I'm from Shenzhen and then he said his family lives in Shenzhen as well. So there names are P. and L. P. is from Shenzhen and L. is from Shanghai. When they left to get off thus bus, we realized that P. was wearing his boxers and had no pants on. Super funny. Only a Chinese guy would do that. So P. and L. are roommates and they're both getting their Ph.D in mechanical engineering. L. is super interested about religion and is constantly asking questions. First time we went to his house he and Elder Liao talked about World War 2 in Chinese for like 30 minutes and he will always ask for my opinion, and I'll have to tell him I have no clue what you guys are talking about. It's funny though. No Chinese want to read the Chinese Book of Mormon because they are afraid that there's flaws in the translation, so they read the English one.
Hope that you are enjoying your trip to the US. Im sure your dog misses you a lot.
Love,
Elder Hall
January 13, 2014
Transfers were yesterday, and I made the cut, so I'm still in Wollongong. Excited to still be here. There' s a lot of changes around here though. New district leader and we have more missionaries coming to Wollongong and they will be moving into our flat. So its going to be a little crowded in our flat, but it'll be fine. So we will now have 12 missionaries in the Wollongong Ward. We've also had 4 extra mini sister missionaries. Mini missionaries are youth ages 16-18 who are thinking about going on missions so they give them a chance to be a full time missionary for a week. So we will really have 16 missionaries in Wollongong for this week.
Wollongong is so good though. It's exactly what I pictured Australia to be. Elder Liao and I are excited to keep on working with who we have and hope to be able to find more. This week we finally got an investigator to sacrament meeting. His name is Aaron from Dali, China. We've been meeting with him a lot. We got him to church and he was super uncomfortable because he was wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Then in Sacrament meeting he fell asleep. So right after sacrament ended he told us that he was bored and then ran home. So our big goal his week is to make a more Chinese friendly sacrament meeting. We are going to try to get all Chinese less actives back to church--so we'll see how that goes.
Everyone is so busy that no one can meet with us. The Chinese are studying at the library all day every day so we're going to go and try to find more people to teach.
Elder Hall
January 20, 2014
So we got two new Chinese speaking missionaries in our flat. One is from Layton, Utah and the other is from Chengdu, China! It's crazy. There' s a lot of Mandarin spoken in our flat now which I love. And Elder Wang, from Chengdu, has this Sichuan Cookbook so it looks like I'm eating Chinese food for the rest of my life! Hopefully we will make some Kung Pao. There's a lot of stuff we have to figure out as a District now though. President Lew says he wants the Chinese speakers around the city and the University, so we may be changing up all the areas, and its going to make a lot of missionaries unhappy. So that will be interesting this week.
This week has been pretty good though. Our investigator A., came to church again this week. He wore a suit this time and he had a much better time at church, so we are making a lot of progress with him. We also met another investigator L. last night. L. always has so many questions that it takes forever to teach him, but we are really happy that he is asking questions. We've also been getting a lot of referrals this week from the sister missionaries, so hopefully we will be able to teach some of them.
I think David and Hailey will have a boy. What are you guys thinking? I always just picture their kid being a boy. I'll try to send pictures.
Love,
Elder Hall
January 27, 2014
That's too bad about Ashley's foot!
Wollongong is always hot. I hear there's a huge heat wave but I don't feel any difference. Wollongong is one of the few places in around here that's really humid, but we are right on the ocean so we often get a nice breeze.
So we switched up everything. I'm now living with 2 different missionaries--Elder Cheung from Hong Kong and Elder Smith from Lehi, Utah. They both speak
Mandarin so it's still really good. We now cover the city and the University--so really the two best places in Wollongong--it's awesome. I can't WAIT for school to start back up again because once it does there will be so many more Chinese
everywhere. We're at a point where I really feel like we've talked to every Chinese person here. We keep on seeing the same people all the time. It's funny though because they know us now so we have a lot of friends around town.
everywhere. We're at a point where I really feel like we've talked to every Chinese person here. We keep on seeing the same people all the time. It's funny though because they know us now so we have a lot of friends around town.
Everyone is going to up Sydney this week for Chinese New Year though. This week we've been trying to work a lot with A., and helping him quit smoking. He's been
doing really well so far he says. He didn't make it to church on Sunday because he said he had to register for classes, so we haven't seen him for a few days. He really wants to quit smoking. He told us he's tried so many times to quit, so hopefully this is the time he quits.
We have met quite a few new people this week. We were on the free bus outside of the Uni, and the bus driver turned off the bus and it was dead silent, and these four
Chinese guys came on the bus and sat down a little ways in front of us. There were a lot of people on the bus and it was totally silent, but I just said, "Hey Shuai Ge
men" which means 'hey handsome guys' (it's really weird in English but apparently saying it in Chinese is less weird) and they all turned around and I started talking to them and they were all super excited and came and sat down next to me and gave us their phone numbers. So that was pretty cool. Australia Day was this week so that was crazy. Everyone was completely drunk this weekend so it was really awkward. Old shirtless guys just came up to us and gave us hugs and stuff. We played Rugby to celebrate 'Straya day. All the missionaries here love playing rugby, so we play it
all the time.
Love,
Elder Hall
February 3, 2014
That's crazy that you are in Phuket. That's a lot of bouncing around to different countries.
This week has been pretty good. One of our investigators, T. went back to China. We have been trying to get a hold of him lately but we finally went to his house and all of the furniture is gone and someone said he and all his roommates left. So that's a bummer.
A. was in Hurstville for Chinese New Year this week, so we haven't seen much of him. But it sounds like he's doing well on not smoking. Hopefully he will be able to make it to church on Sunday because the other Elders' Chinese investigator is getting baptized, so it would be really good for him to come to that.
We met with this new investigator, Z., who's a girl from Beijing and we taught her.
Another investigator W. was also in Hurstville for Chinese New Year. Everyone has been either gone or busy. We also met this guy S., who we've talked to a couple of times and said he wasn't interested. But we ran into him the other day and he was suddenly way interested. He was in Hurstville for Chinese New Year as well, so we will try to meet with him this week.
Another person we met was L. L. always loves to talk about politics or computers with us in Chinese which is alright for Elder Liao but I never have any idea as to what's happening. He's going back to China in March so we're making a big push for him, but he just doesn't want to come to church.
This morning one of our members took us to this rainforest about an hour away and we hiked up to a waterfall. It was pretty cool. There's also a huge Buddhist Temple that we want to try to go to next P-Day.
Anyway that's about it for this week.
February 10, 2014
I got the package you sent this week. I also just got the birthday package with the hot chocolate in it. Turns out the mission office had our address wrong. The mission office has been forwarding all of our mail to the wrong address, so both Elder Liao and my mail has been going to someone else. So that's not good. I know I have friends who have been saying that they would send me a letter, its just all been going to the wrong place.
This week was pretty good. We met a couple new investigators. We also got to meet A. again. He has been gone for a week, and he made it to church yesterday. Unfortunately, he left right after sacrament meeting, and after church we had a baptism that we really wanted him to attend. We are also teaching someone from Tibet, so he speaks a little bit of Mandarin, but his Mandarin is better than his English. Turns out that two of our new investigators live with one of our members so that's pretty cool. We can go to visit one of our members and then meet two of our investigators. We're just really hoping that we can make some serious progress with some people that we teach. So many of them have no motivation to change, and that's why its been really hard to get them to progress. We've been helping a lot of members with service this week as well. We're pretty much free workers so the members love it. We just got a revised ward list and there are probably 30 new Chinese people whose records got forwarded to this ward, so I'm really excited about that. We need more Chinese members. The guy who just got baptized yesterday is Chinese, so we have one more Chinese member.
Have a good week!
Love,
Elder Hall
February 17, 2014
This week was good! We had two investigators at church for the first time. We were really excited. A. came and another investigator, Z. came as well. Everyone has been bringing a lot of Chinese to church lately so this last Sunday we started up a Chinese Gospel Principles class. It went really well. We had Elder Liao teach it and we had a few investigators there so it was good.
February 17, 2014
My District
We've been teaching a lot of lessons this week to people that we find on the bus and on the street and stuff. We've been finding more and more Chinese investigators, and because school is almost back in session I see more and more Chinese people. I used to just see the same ones over and over again. One of our investigators, L., is going back to China soon. That's really sad to see. He is super interested in what we teach but he just never makes time to come to church or anything. We've also been trying to teach S. this week but he couldn't meet with us because his parents were in Australia and they forbid him to listen to us. The same thing happened with another investigator, he told his parents that he was meeting with us and his parents said he wasn't allowed to, but he still does. Chinese parents can be crazy!
I do love talking to Chinese people on the bus and on the street. They think it's so funny that I can speak Chinese.
We had Zone Meeting and Zone P-day this week, and because everyone's Polynesian we played rugby all day. We play so much rugby. It's pretty fun but not as good as football.
Send some pictures of SeaWorld!
Have a good week,
Elder Hall
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