Letter 2, Week 3

So, the reason this is week 3 but only letter 2 is apparently the weeks start on Monday, and the Wednesday I came in on was my first week.

It's been a great week here, I'm glad to be going to the temple every Monday to start the week. We contintued to teach our investigator Lin DiXiong (Brother Lin) until Friday, when they switched him to be one of our teachers...I'm glad he was patient with us to be the guinea pig for most of our first lessons in Mandarin. He said that we were doing well, and we have heard from many of our teachers that they aren't worried about our ability with the language, everyone in our district has had some experience before and we all enjoy trying to teach and talk to each other. My companion is District leader ( I don't think I mentioned that in the last letter), he was campaigning for it for a little bit, then for zone leader when he was assigned to be district leader. It was kind of funny, I'm happy just to be the senior companion, although we share most of the decisions anyways. The other elders in our district are Elder Darley (he's from Layton) and Elder Peay (he's from Morgan). We are all from Utah. That is the whole of the district. We are the only 4 from this generation (generations change every 6 weeks) going to Taiwan. Elder Phelps and I usually hang out with Elder Kirklin (he's from Pennsylvania, he played lacrosse and we at college at UNLV) and Elder Wing ( he's also from Layton) they are both going to serve in Melbourne, Australia Mandarin speaking.

Saturday, we got to do TRC, which means we got to basically have 10 minutes with 4 volunteers from provo and speak in our language and share a message about the gosepl, that was so much fun and I'm really excited to do that more here, and in the field. We also got a new investigator (our teacher si tu lao shi, who is acting as wu jiemei who she taught) she is really hard to teach, because she is (acting) 17.

We are continuing to learn all kinds of stuff but the grammar is the hardest part for me, I think one of these days soon I will understand that well enough just to start really constructing sentences without worrying.

I will try and get pictures sent home soon so that they can be passed on, some great things are happening here. I wouldn't give this experience up for anything. This is the Lord's work, the spirit is the only way I can ever speak the language well enough to get it to their hearts. This church is true.

with Love,

Shen Zhang Lao