We are Catching Fire! (Week 49)

We are Catching Fire!
Monday September 10th, 2018

Hello everyone! 

 

How goes it wherever you are? Well, I don't know about you, but things here are going GREAT! Seriously, things are taking a huge step forward for several reasons. First off, my companion and I have just been out trying to find people a lot. But on top of that, we had an amazing zone conference! By the way, if any of you know someone currently serving in Hanoi, they have not had zone conference yet, their's is on Wednesday, so keep this on the down low. We were asked not to spoil the surprise. So, in zone conference, we had a lot of awesome new trainings!

Okay, so this picture is from Vung Tau, not our most recent Zone Conference
Go take a look at Week 42 for more awesome Vung Tau photos!

So, first off, they introduced the new super card! They made it sound like this awesome cool new contacting card we would use, so they had us bring all our "old" contacting cards to the front of the room. Then they had their box of "super cards", which turned out to be empty, and they took all our old cards and put them in the box. The new method is they are taking away the crutch of cards so we have to get phone numbers. It actually reminds me of Ha Dong where we could not use cards anyways... I think it will help a lot, making us actually be able to contact people again. They also said that the cards were not very effective, as they both cause us to not focus on phone numbers as much, and they related a study done by Dominoes with flyers, where only three percent of people called back, and they said cards would be similar.

 

 

How does a Four Flowers or a Ginger Fried Pork Pizza sound?

Whereas with getting phone numbers, you have a one hundred percent ability to call or text them, as long as they don't give you a fake number, which does happen occasionally... Then they had a method of bringing a sign up sheet for English class to get numbers, as in have a clipboard and a role sheet to sign up on. My companion and I are stepping it up and trying a new method, putting all activities on the sign up sheet, including learning about families or Jesus Christ, and it is going good so far. You sit in a park with a sign for English or another activity, they come to ask about it, you get them to sign up and explain all the other activities, and they sign up, putting a check on each activity in which they have interest. You send information for the activities they want, and Elder Trung and I call anyone who signs up for Sacrament, a Church tour, or learning of families or Jesus Christ.

If they just sign up for English or YSA, we just text. They aren't worth our time... Just kidding! But we do just text them. And the other big thing that they introduced is for Sacrament. Last zone conference they really focused on doing baptismal invites, and this time they are focused on getting people to church. They introduced the C.H.U.R.C.H. list. Basically you make a list of anyone who can possibly come to Sacrament and call them on Monday. You then make categories of people to confirm on Saturday who said yes, people who are "sketch" as in they say "If I have time..." who you call again on a day like Friday, and those unable to come. Those who do not pick up you call again later. The list both includes current investigators, and what the APs called "Hail Mary’s", who will be hard to get to come. It leads to a lot of calling, but in the APs district, where they have tested it for a month, Sacrament attendance has almost doubled! It should lead to a lot of new investigators, but also our phone bills are going to be going through the roof! All for a good cause though! It is a really exciting time! We have only applied it for half a week so far, but are seeing great results! I think this really could change the whole mission!

So, we got four new investigators this week! Two were an older woman, Co Hao, and her niece, Em Phuong (who we did not know she was bringing), who I contacted two weeks ago. She is super busy, and I had a hard time setting up an appointment with her. She is also one of the harder people for me to understand on the phone... I am not entirely sure why.

Well, on a phone call two weeks ago, I at least got that she would come when she had time, and I got her to agree to call us before she comes. Usually, when most people say that, it means they won't actually come, but in this case, I felt she actually wanted to come, I just didn't know what else she had said, so we left it at that. Well, she just showed up last Monday at 5 p.m. and called and said "I'm here, but there is no one else here." We were in a taxi on the way home from getting fit for our Ao Dais (traditional Vietnamese tunic). We told the taxi driver to go to the church instead of the apartment, so we went in P Day clothes! We also had to walk home later since we did not have our bikes... We gave a church tour, and had a good lesson explaining who God is and how to pray, and they want to meet again this week! Then there is Chi Nhu, who Elder Trung contacted. She is Catholic. She didn't seem overly comfortable in our lesson, but we got her to agree to borrow a Book of Mormon and try to read in it... We also taught the Restoration and about the Book of Mormon to give a new perspective for her on Christ. Afterwards, we lost contact with her, as her number was unreachable. We thought she blocked us, but we had set an appointment for Sunday, and had the member who helped us in her lesson send a text (as she should not be blocked yet) to confirm with her. Still no response, and she did not come to the lesson, but last night she texted us from a different number saying her old SIM card got destroyed, so we have contact with her again, and will try to set up another appointment! And we got a new investigator yesterday, Em Trang, who did not say she wanted to learn about church, but wanted to learn of families (she signed up on our new clip board sign up sheet). We read the family proclamation and discussed temples.

It was an awesome lesson! Afterwards, she was still not overly accepting of learning, she said she totally had interest, but her family is Chinese and might not agree with her converting. We explained how we teach and don't baptize people right away, and how they have agency to keep learning throughout the teaching process. And then we had an awesome testimony born from our member help, Em Thanh, who just got baptized last Sunday! Her family also did not agree with the church initially (though they let her attend all the activities), and it took her eight months to convince them to let her be baptized! Actually they attended her baptism last week! It was a perfect experience to share, and Em Trang agreed to learn! We have an appointment on Wednesday! So things are going awesome! As for our other investigators Co Ngoc and Em Tram have been busy lately, and have been unable to meet us, but are still interested, so we found another way to meet them, we are going to go to their house this week at when they are home and share for fifteen minutes. Hopefully that will go good! Anh Nghia is doing good still. He is still aiming for his baptismal date at the end of this month! And Anh Thanh Huy is doing well. He is still in his hometown with his family, but has been reading the Book of Mormon which is good.

As you can see, things are going great! What is more, we have three appointments with new people already set this week! One of them is an awesome referral, named Chi Anh. She used to live in Taiwan, and had an American friend who got her to go to institute. She also learned the first lesson. Now she is back in Vietnam, but wants to learn about Jesus Christ still! She does live far away in the west though, so we will teach her through Skype, but it is still awesome! And we have another guy we don't have an appointment with yet, but he came to Sacrament meeting yesterday and seemed to enjoy it. We will see him at YSA today! We also are expecting our YSA and English numbers to soar, hopefully we can fit everyone in the church building!

 

Well, I think I have shared enough on the excitement here. We are also adding one more idea to our contacting, we are going to try to have a schedule list for people interested in meeting us to tell us what days they are free so it is easier to set up appointments later. That should be good too! And I guess one other thing to note is that we had a great spiritual thought in English, we had a class on travel and had everyone make paper airplanes. Then we made an impossible task for them to throw the paper airplane a really far distance to hit a target, which no one could do. We related it to the grace of Christ, and how if we try our best, we may fall short, but how Christ will move the target to the best we can do, with the whole "we are saved by the grace of Christ, after all we can do" concept. We also talked about how different people have different levels of their best, but Christ knows that and will adapt it to us. It went super well, and people reacted well to it. The other elders actually got a new investigator after it! It was really good! Also, we have Jeopardy night on Tuesday for English!

That will also be awesome!

Well, I am out of time now, and again probably overloaded everyone. Still, I am super excited about all that is going on. My companion and I really are trying to get a lot of work done, and I think we will see a lot of success! Looking forward to it!

Elder Watson/ Nghiem

Hong Kong Temple - Closest Temple for the Vietnamese people

 

P.S. We had another big flood! My family will probably post photos later. There is a pretty funny one of a guy who sleeps on a hammock in the park, and under him it got flooded, but he is still sleeping there.