October 24, 2010 92 Year Old Faithful Member

My companion is so funny. The only English he knows is slang and it makes me so happy when he says things in English. But he has an amazingly good accent.

So once again.... Not a lot has happened this week, but last preparation day after emailing you guys we went to some "temples". I put quotes because it’s more of an amusement park. They had little ride things and games and lots of amusement park food as well as some not so amusement park food.. Eww. Anyway. And the stuff in the temples is really messed up and all about devils and killing people and different kinds of monsters and this like that. Really really messed up things..
Also there was another typhoon, but it was fairly small. It just rained a lot. And the wind was really really strong.
On Saturday we went to visit a former investigator and he didn't really remember meeting with the missionaries. But he has a neighbor who is Mormon and he remembered that. And he told us that this member was old and sick and couldn't come to church anymore. And so he took us over to this old guy’s house, and wow. I didn't know Asians could live that long! This guy is 92 years old. And he has been a member since he was 55. If I had a calculator I would do the math for you and tell you that that was a LONG TIME AGO! He was baptized in 1973! And according to him, he came to church every Sunday and he read his scriptures and prayed every day. But eventually he couldn't take care of himself and his family hired a full time nurse to take care of his and now he just sits in the same spot buy the door all day long eating and drinking and peeing into his urine tube. And he told us that missionaries haven't visited his for over a year. He told us to go to the church and get tithing slips for him because he hasn't paid his tithing in over a year either. But he saved up his tithing money and next week we are going to get a member to help him come to church. He is the cutest old guy I have ever seen. He says the funniest things. He asked me how long I have been in Taiwan and I told him 4 months and he was impressed. And then he turned to my companion who is Taiwanese and said "your Chinese is pretty good, how long have you been in Taiwan?" I laughed for a long time. But the part that made me laugh was when my companion said he was Taiwanese. After he said that the old guy had this smile on his face and said "you look like a foreigner" and then I laughed some more. And so on Sunday we took him the tithing slips he asked for and we tried to bless the sacrament for him but apparently he forgot what that was. Anyway after we said a closing prayer, he asked if he could pray and of course we said yes. And so he prayed for us to baptize all of Taiwan. It made me laugh. I love that old man. So faithful.


Anyway. Today we went to "MONKEY MOUNTAIN!" I took lots of pictures of the monkeys and so I will send you guys some. And speaking of pictures I am going to buy an 8 gig usb flash drive and next week, copy all of the pictures over to that and send it home to you guys. And after you guys copy all of them to an external hard drive or something like that, you can send it back. And then I can delete them off my card and start over again.

October 17, 2010 Gold Mine Discovered

Dear Family,

So as you all know last week I moved to the big city of Kaohsiung. (weird spelling huh?) And that was my first time moving. Ohhh moving is horrible. Last monday (the day that I moved) started out like this; I woke up at 6:00 a.m. like normal, but unlike normal I woke up with a massively horrible bloody nose. Then, after treating my bloody nose I had to finish packing. The night before I stayed up until 1:30 ish packing and doing laundry but because our dryer is broken I had to just hang my clothes up overnight on the balcony. Unfortunately it rained a little during the night... But at 730 we had to go to the mission office.. So after a quick shower I put my still semi-wet clothes in plastic bags and put them in my suitcase. Then we put my bike and my suitcases on a tjoin truck to be delivered the next day at my new apartment. We then took the bus to the Mission office, said goodbye to the missionaries who were going home, said goodbye to my companion, and got on another bus to go to the train station. After the three hour train ride I got off the train, said hi to my mtc companion and found my new companion! And my new companion is the same asian that helped me on Dan Jones night my first night in Taiwan. cool huh?
I got lucky because he didn't have a bike there for me but our area and our apartment is only a ten minute walk from the train station. My companion and his old companion love bikes. So on preparation days they would find random broken bikes that were in trash cans, and use the parts to build a bike. So for the first 2 days here, I rode this crazy bike.

Also for that two days I only had my small bag consisting of my scriptures and two days worth of garments and basic toiletries. uhhh horrible.
But I do love having a local companion. He is so funny. He makes me laugh all the time and now I have to use chinese all the time and just in the last week my chinese has improved more than I thought possible in just one week. He's so asian. Silly asians. But I love them...

Anyway this week went by really fast, without a lot of special things. There is a member in our ward who is a white guy who married a taiwanese girl, and his chinese is way good. He speaks with a beijing accent but with the "ah"s on the end just like the taiwanese do. Its kinda funny. But anyway, yesterday he was made the bishop of the ward. Him and his kids are the only white people in the ward! Its a good thing his chinese is so good. He served his mission in Houston Texas speaking chinese and then he moved here for work and never went back. And he has been here for about 15 years. He even recognised my name correctly which even some taiwanese people don't do.

Did I tell you guys about one of the new Elders in this mission named Elder Mutton? Anyway if didn't I'm sorry because its so funny. The name they gave him at the MTC is yang2 rou4! I laughed for about ten minutes. yang2 rou4 zhang3 lao3..... Elder lamb meat.... anyway. I thought it was funny. I think they might have changed his name by now though. So funny.

Im sad to hear broke city stopped playing together.

So yesterday at church I don't know why but we were in the library and because there used to be an English branch there, I found stacks and stacks of old Ensigns starting in 1992. All the way to like 2002ish. Gold! Money in the bank. Who knew that my favorite part of being a missionary is the hour of personal study we get every morning. And I love reading the Ensigns. But I read through some of the old ones from 1992 and its interesting to me that back then we didn't have the cell phones we have today, mp3`s didn't exist let alone ipods and such. But the prophets were speaking on the problems we still have today. I don't know. It was interesting to me.

ummm right now we dont have any investigators or anything and we dont have very many lessons. I havent gotten a package yet. nope.
Sisi - you run really fast.

See you in two years,

Beau

October 10,2010 - Transfer to Gaoxiong

Dear family,

Today I moved to Gaoxiong which is a really big city and it's right on the ocean basically. But I didn't get to email until later because I had to take a 3 hour train ride to southern Taiwan. My new companion is a Taiwanese person! I hope I can learn a lot from him.

Other than that not very much happened this week. Packing is quite the heavy burden. I was up till 1:30 this morning packing. It's weird to think that I have exactly 1 year and six months left. It seems like a long time, but then I look back on the last six and a half months and feel like I haven't gotten very far. I feel like I should know much more than I do right now. But that's the good thing about moving. Its a new start and I can work as hard as I can.

In my new district, I am one of only two wai guo ren. And so all the others are Taiwanese! and my trainer is my zone leader now too.

Oh conference was soooooooo goooooood! I have way toooo many favorite talks. And everyone talked about prophets or agency it seems like. So good. To watch conference in English, we had four missionaries in one room watching it on dvd. And we had desks and the members said we got the VIP room. It was funny. Anyway. How lucky we are to have a living prophet that can lead us the way God wants.

On Sunday the girl with the tattoo came for the first time since she got it and it doesn't say "heavenly father is always by my side" even more ironically it says "keep God's commandments" in this really fancy handwriting - haha I laughed for a while!

The first thing we did when I got to my new area is go bowling! yay. But I owned those Asians! After 4 strikes and 3 spares, I ended up with a 163 score. Which as of right now is my record! My old record is 155 I think..

Yea Sisi braces hurt. really bad. I wasn't lying!!
And yes here in the south, it is so much more hot! ugh. apparently the temperatures are lower here but the humidity is really bad.
Yay for no school Kami and Sisi!!!

I just found out this is my companions first time having a foreign companion. haha

See ya in 1.5 years,
桂长老
桂俊杰
Elder Graham

October 3, 2010

Dear fam,
So........ coooool story for you guys.... you might even freak out a little. I know I did. So in my last package that you guys sent me, you gave me a copy of an article from the New Era, and I told you guys it probably happened around the area that I am in because we have one of the most famous night markets in Taiwan in our area. Anyway, we found that the guy from the story not only lives in the city that I serve in, not only is he in my zone and in the stake where I am serving, but he is in MY AREA and in MY WARD!! Did that just blow your mind?! Cuz it blew my mind right out of the water bucket. Anyway, I think I’m going to type in my journal entry from that night:
9/28/10
Sooooooo today was cool. Tonight we went to visit a member family. The Cai family. (1Tim 4:12 written in the margin) and they were great. All we did was get to know them and let them know us, where we are from, our families etc.. And then we asked them if we could help them in any way. Then Cai di xiong got up and left. To answer our question, Cai jie mei just said "eat the pineapple I gave you" and then she laughed. sad face. But then Cai dixiong came back with the latest Liahona (September 2010) and opened to "Miracle at a Stoplight". He told us that this story happened here in feng jia. Elder Thomas and I were like... "oh that’s pretty cool". But then he explained more. The guy in the story, Su meng wei, still lives here! Him, his wife and his 5 children. He even holds the melcheizedek preisthood. But he is less active. What happened is he married his wife, had 4 kids, but then him and his wife got in lots of fights and that’s why, in the story, he was having a bad day. Anyway, he still got a divorce but then he married a woman who had 2 kids already. But before he married her, him and his kids got baptized. And according to the Cai family, his wife and her kids are members as well. Here is the problem; her parents didn’t approve of them getting married in the first place. So to satisfy her parents, they got a divorce and they aren’t technically married. But they still live together and do all the things married people do... So when they had their interview to get married in the temple, the stake president said they couldn’t go because legally they weren’t married, and thereby were technically breaking the law of chastity. So because he couldn’t go to the temple, he stopped coming to church. So Cai di xiong gave us his number so we could work on them coming back to church and hopefully to the temple! He lives about the distance between our house in Kaysville and church. So close!
Ok you are out of my journal now.
I read a cool talk by Arlene Calkins from the sep 2008 ensign called "casual gratitude".It’s really short but I’m sure you will still like it.
ummm what else happened this week... deng yi xia.
My scripture of the week is john 14:26 notice how it says remembrance. I think it’s pretty deep.

I can’t wait for conference! Yes mom, we made it just fine with the money we had. The members rarely feed us. Which I think is awesome because it’s always something really gross like squid. Ewww! This week we did lots of cleaning at night and we found out we have a wok and two blenders and a juicer thing and lots of random stuff like that. Favorite food.... hmmm today we will be eating kal rou (bbq) and its sooo good. It’s an unlimited amount of food and its all meat! But it’s expensive! like 9 US dollars. I don’t think there is anything I need. ..except for less distractions... haha!
--
See ya in two years,
桂长老
桂俊杰
Elder Graham

September 26. 2010

Dear family
So once again not a ton has happened this week. For three days this week my companion was in training meetings for a total of over 18 hours. Ouch. In the meantime I went on splits with an elder Webb and an elder Rostedt. They have a member that was baptized in 1963. That a long time ago. They also have a less active member who we talked to that told us that he hears the devils voice in his head whenever he doesn’t smoke. And we asked him, "do you mean like temptation?" and he said no. he hears an actual voice. Yeah...
and on Wednesday we went to an American breakfast shop for lunch and it was so good. It smelled like Grannie Annie's in there. Yumm
so I think conference is on this week for you guys. You can’t tell me anything! I don’t get to listen to it until a week after you do.
I think you guys should find and read a talk by Neil l Anderson called "it's true isn’t it? What else matters?" It’s good
I was teaching my English class and we had two new people that week so I showed them the picture of the family. And then they all asked me who the person in the middle was and I was like... that’s me... and they were like whoa because apparently it looks like I lost a lot of weight. But I don’t think I have lost a lot of weight, I just had a jacket on in that picture. All the food here is fried this and fried that. It’s kind of gross. Was the food like that for you pops?
Oh and my whole class all thinks I look like Mr. Bean. ummm who in the heck is Mr. bean? I’ve never seen Mr. bean before...
so last week I won the claw machine twice in one day!!! anyway hopefully pics will come from that. I won two Patricks! a small one and a big one.
also this week we are living a little tight because we were supposed to get money last Friday, but we won’t get money until this Thursday. So we arent spending a lot of money on food and stuff. And my companions tire is about to pop which isnt good. but we bought about 20 lemons for about one US dollar and some really cheap sugar, and we make lemonade instead of buying drinks like winter melon tea. those drinks are like 75 cents U.S.
I’m proud of you sisi for running so fast! The Taiwanese people think it’s weird to pray because when they think of Christian prayers they think of recited memorized prayers. when they realize they can actually talk to God and receive revelation, it’s cool. speaking of other Christians... can you guys send me some information on what some other Christian sects believe? specifically Protestant churches and Presbyterian, Catholics. it’s good to know what others believe.
this week was like fourth of July or something for them here and I got so many videos of fireworks but I can only send the shortest one. they were setting them off right behind our house! no Kami, Taiwan is nothing like Utah. haha