Birthday Week! (Week 46)

Monday August 20^th, 2018

 

Hello everyone!



I don't have a lot of time again this week, so I will be brief. My birthday was good! Not too much special for my birthday, we still had to be doing work, but at the end of the day, my companion and I stopped at Popeyes for dinner. Funnily enough, there was another guy there named Hien who was celebrating his birthday with his two brothers! I thought he was joking with me when he told me it was his birthday too, but then his friends came! I invited him to English class on Tuesday and hope to see him there! Anyways, as we hadn't done too much for my birthday, I bought myself a cheesecake dessert thing at Popeyes thinking that is what I would get, and feeling content enought with that. Awesomely enough, when I got home, the other elders in the apartment had decided to get me a birthday cake! It was super nice of them. My parents have photos of the cake they will probably post on the blog. No people in it though, as no one was in proper attire for photos... Still, it was super nice, and a good birthday!

In the area, we are doing good. We met Co Ngoc and Em Tram again, and shared the Plan of Salvation, they are very open which is awesome! We also got Anh Huy, a former investigator, to meet us, and he wants to learn again! Besides that, we have been out contacting a lot! Unfortunately we were told we could not use our sign at Aeon Mall anymore, but I am sure we will find other ways of contacting people! We have met several already who we shared a message with and now they are considering meeting again. We even have an appointment tonight! Hopefully that goes well! We had a fun barbeque for ban xeo on Saturday and got a lot of non members to come to that too, which was great! So the work is definitely going forward there.

The weather here is quite interesting. It is raining like crazy here! We keep getting caught in rainstorms, but are pressing on.

That is about it for this. I need to go now, but will share more next week! I think we are going to a Vietnamese market today, which should be fun. I will talk to you all next week!

Elder Watson/ Nghiem

Here is a picture of me on my 8th Birthday. This is the year I was baptized a member of the church!

 

New Transfer! Two weeks again??! (Week 44 and 45)

Monday August 13^th, 2018

 

Hello everybody!

Wow, a lot has been going on. And crazy enough, I am about to turn 19 this Thursday! Time flies by! I will have to see what I can do for my birthday... While still doing missionary work of course!

So I will try to sum up the major events of the last two weeks. Tons of things have happened, so there is a lot. First off, I now have a new companion, Elder Trung. He is also the new district leader here. He has been in the south his whole mission, and came in the MTC group right after mine. He is from Idaho. He is pretty cool, and very much into contacting, which is great! We haven't gotten any new investigators yet, but have an appointment this evening! Looking forward to that.

We also had our big English event! It was a lot of fun. People loved the Apples to Apples event I ran on our future floor. They understood it well too! The topic I picked was crazy, and one person put the answer as kids, which was really funny. The egg drop on the Modern Era floor also went really well. We had a turn out of between 35 and 45 people, so it was quite successful. The members also helped a lot, both with the decorations and the event itself. Now our branch wants us to do the events once a transfer, so we have to think of a new idea fast for the next one! Wish us luck! Also, my parents will probably add photos from the event to my blog, so you can check it out there when they do so!

We are also doing well working with members and the branch, as well as our investigators. We are still teaching Tony, last time we did an activity on commandments, where we asked him to draw a picture and would stop him when he broke a "rule", but did not explain the rules beforehand. We did it afterwards and he was able to complete the task. We explained how God gives us rules to help us know what we can do and become in this life. We are also still working with President Khanh and his family, and he is doing really good! He is still trying to work towards getting sealed, and is getting more actively involved in the branch, which is awesome! And our other members are still doing great! Anh Quan gave a talk last Sunday and it was really good! It was funny though, he wanted to make sure no one slept at the end, so he finished in a very loud voice, almost yelling AMEN! It was a great talk. Oh, he also got the priesthood that day too! Very cool!

Those are the main happenings of the last two weeks. Of course, there are lots of other things too, but these are the main ones. I will let you all know more next week. Thank you for reading my emails. See you all next week! 

Elder Watson/ Nghiêm

Two Weeks?! (Week 42 and 43)

Monday July 30^th, 2018

Hello everyone!

How have things been going? Things have been very good here, and a lot has happened, it has been two weeks since I emailed after all! I don't have tons of time to email though, so I will try to be brief in what I share. So one cool thing is that we now have a new investigator! His name is Tony. He is 12 and his grandmother, Co Ngoc Thanh is a member. His parents are good with us teaching him the gospel. We use activities to teach him since he is still very young. We had him run messages between the two of us to show prayer, and then had him draw a person to teach how we are in God's image, so he looks like we do. He is really cool, and enjoys our activities! We also had been meeting him before to help him practice English, so we know him pretty well. Co Ngoc, the person I mentioned I had contacted the other week, came to church yesterday! And I think she liked it pretty well! She seems interested in having us come over to teach more, so we will see if we can set that up this week.

 

So we met President Chiles a few times this week, both for zone P Day, and zone conference. It was cool getting to know him better. He is definitely very relaxed when on zone P Day... He even let us go to the beach! And we got to put our feet in the water! But no more than ankle deep of course! 

 

We went to Vung Tau, and it was a lot of fun! We first went to see a giant Jesus Christ statue, apparently the second biggest statue of Christ in the world! You even get to climb up to his shoulders! I can now say I have been on the right hand (or shoulder) of Christ! Not the left, good thing, right?

 

We also got to see the White Palace, where the French built a home for the regions governor at one point, and it later became famous as the location of house arrest for a later Vietnamese king. It had cool history to it, and I could actually understand a good bit of what the tour guide was saying in Vietnamese! We did also have a member who came as an acting tour guide for the whole trip, and she shared in English, particularly since the Chiles do not fully know Vietnamese yet, and it helped those of us who haven't studied history or related terms to that in Vietnamese yet... And then we got to see the Whale Temple, with some real whale bones in it, which was pretty cool. It was a lot of fun. And zone conference was great! We learned a lot of things! The Chiles had a training on what it means to really repent. And we had a large focus on trying to find more people, so we are going to try to do more with that. Hopefully we will talk to a lot more people and find those ready to come unto Christ!

 

Also, when we had interviews with President Chiles a few weeks ago, he told us to focus on getting members to their next saving ordinance. We gave some thought to that and applied it last week. We met President Khanh, and asked him what his thoughts were on getting his endowments. He has been less active lately, so we weren't sure how he would respond, but he knows we have good intents, and we have been visiting him for a while, and love to do so! He always shares fun stories and tells us what is going on in life, as well as we discuss the gospel a bit. Well, his response was better than we could have imagined! He told us he is getting ready to go to the temple next year with his kids so they can be sealed! So now we are trying to help him work towards that! Just by asking him that question, he showed us his real desire, and now we know how to further help him on his gospel path!

Our other activities are still going well. We are getting ready for our time travel English event next week! That should be a lot of fun! I had a cool idea on our future floor to have an "ancient artifact" museum making fun of things we currently use. We will see how it goes then!

 

 

Oh, and I learned some really good news today! Chi Uyen, an investigator I had taught in Ha Dong, just got baptized! That is awesome! I am super excited for her.

And I think that about does it. I can not think of anything else at the moment, but if I remember anything else, I will let you know next week. We had district P Day and ate Mexican and American food at Al Fresco's and afterwards played some games, such as Spot It, Exploding Kittens (a Vietnamese favorite), and Uno. It was pretty fun. Well, I will write again next week!

 

 

Elder Watson/ Nghiêm

P.S. My hair has been falling out a bit lately. No bald patches yet. My family and I have researched a bit, and think it is probably just a phase being in a different climate, but I guess only time will tell... I may end up bald for all I know! I would not like that! You can ask my parents if you would like to know more...

 

Two New Investigators! (Week 41)

Monday July 16^th, 2018

Hello everyone!

 

How are things going? I have to say this week was great for me! In particular, we found two new investigators, which I am super excited about! I will discuss them first. They were actually some people whom I contacted last Monday. We went contacting at a bookstore that day, and tried talking to people. We split up and just talked to whoever, while browsing the bookstore. I was in the pen section in the middle of it all. Considering I am a white, five foot ten inch tall American, and don't have black hair, I get stared at a lot, so sometimes that helps with contacting. I saw a guy staring at me, so I talked to him a bit. He was happy to talk, and was polite when I brought up religion, but when I offered to show him my church sometime, he said "sure" in the way that means "no, I really don't want to do that, but I don't want to be rude." This was also confirmed when I offered my number on a card and he just smiled and said he was just too busy. At that moment, some lady came up from behind me and said (by the way, both of these conversations were fully in Vietnamese) "what are you talking about?" The guy took this as an opportunity to dodge out, so he said something like "oh, he is a foreigner, and works for a church" after which he said he had to go and left. The lady stayed and talked to me. Her name is Co Ngoc. I talked to her about religion for a bit, and she was very polite and open. She then invited me over to her home! This later changed into her coming to our church, but she actually offered for us to come to her house, and she was the one who asked for my number! Pretty much she contacted me I would say! I gave her a card and got her number. I was pretty excited, but my companion and I didn't want to get our hopes up necessarily, for all we knew she could have been excited just to be talking to foreigners or something like that. We ended up setting an appointment for Sunday afternoon. She came and brought her daughter, Tran, with her. We gave them a tour of the church, and had a member there to help, Co Cuc. We ended up talking for about an hour and a half, discussing everything from God and Jesus Christ, to families, and even brought up temples. She was extremely open to all of it! We asked if she would be interested in learning more, and she said she was, and was willing to come to the church to do so! She also said she would try to get Sunday morning off work so she could attend Sacrament meeting! Elder Thong and I were surprised at how open she was about everything, and Co Cuc was awesome with helping explaining any questions Co Ngoc had! Overall, it was a great meeting! At this point, we will probably be switching them over for the sisters to teach them, but I am really excited I was able to help find Co Ngoc and her daughter, they seem so ready to learn about the gospel, and I know it can bring great blessings to their family! I hope they continue to progress and find joy in this gospel as I do. Also, she gave us six coconuts afterwards, which was extremely nice! It is customary to bring fruit when you visit someone's home in Vietnam, but is certainly not required, and six coconuts is a lot! (Also, might I add quite heavy, it made it a little hard to turn my handle bars on my bike and keep balance...)

Some other things to report on in the area: Anh Phuong is now out of the hospital and doing much better I am glad to report! We will visit him at home this week. Also, a lot of the members will be going on a temple trip tomorrow, which is super exciting for all of them! I wish them a successful and enjoyable experience there! Oh, and I got to bike a lot again this week! We went to visit Chu Hung and Co Nguyet this week, and biked out two hours to see them! We also tried to find a referral with an ambiguous address, but to no avail... We may try again another time. And today, we helped some investigators move, and they live a good distance away. I am actually sunburned right now from all this biking of late... Maybe I should have applied sunscreen this morning... But it has been great visiting and serving others!

Our English activity is still going well, though we only had one student with it raining last week... We got to know the one student a lot better though as we had a one on one tutoring session thereby. We did have a second student come late as well. We are also preparing for our big activity in August on time travel, and that should be really cool! And the YSA program is also doing good. Today the missionaries are in charge, and we are doing an activity of my suggestion. We are doing a saltine cracker eating contest, and are following it up with a scripture chase activity! The cracker one will be funny seeing people try to eat a bunch of dry crackers with no liquid, and the other one will be good to help them find scriptures while playing an altered version of the card game spoons! Instead of using cards, they try to find the scripture first.

 

Well, I hope everyone is doing well back at home. One thing of note is that next week we will be having zone P Day and will travel to Vung Tau next week. It looks like a Vietnamese version of the city Rio in Brazil to me, ocean side city with a Christ statue and all! It should be a lot of fun, but that leaves good odds I will not get to email next week, so I will try to send something out in two weeks then! Oh, and in that time, we will be meeting with President Chiles for interviews, and have zone conference, so a lot of stuff is going on for sure! Well thank you to all of you out there reading this. Also, I have a blog set up that recently was updated with six more posts, so you can check that out if you would like. It more or less has what I write in these emails, plus photos. You can search "Advocate Pho Truth" to find it. Until next time!

Elder Watson/ Nghiem