Hi Mom!
I'm here. Doing good. Got your letters :)
It's hard to imagine that 2 months already gone by, more than 1/9 of my mission. What impressed me the most, like it did before, is that I can be even better.
I got my new companion two days ago. We haven't gotten actually transferred yet, we do that tomorrow morning, but I know her. We both served in the visitor center. Sister Poon is from Hong Kong. Speaks Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. She is on a English-speaking mission, that's why they called her to Berkeley. She wants to learn Mandarin better even though she speaks quite well already, and it'd be great cuz I want to learn Cantonese. :) See, it's all just perfect. She is really nice and loves to cook Chinese food, has lots of ingredients, is super awesome missionary, so we'd get along just great. I'm really looking forward to it.
We are at the visitor center about 4 days a week. Every week is different. Of those 4 days, we serve either from 9-3 or from 3pm to 9, depends.
Ok, it's good to have our after-mission trip lined up already. My MTC companion Sister Lao and the other Hong Kong sisters told me to visit Hong Kong and they'd be there to take me around too. :)
Mother, you are supposed to practice piano! That's what we said, remember? It's funny cuz when I first started I didn't want to either, but once you can start playing songs you like, then you really want to play. So just get better and better then you can play cool songs and you'll just want to get even better. :)
Sister Sampaio is leaving, so we've had dinners everyday this week. One of the members too us to Fenton's this ice cream place. They have gigantic-size icecreams, but quite good. Maybe I'll take you there later. :)
I really liked what you typed from Preparation PreceedsPower, (the missionary book) I remember when he said that but it's so good to hear it again. Sometimes I forget. All we are focused on is getting our investigators to progress (go to church, keep reading BoM, keep meeting with us, pray...) but we forget that God knows hte best and we shouldn't ask him to get them to keep their commitments... Thanks, Mom.
So I forgot to tell you in my letter last week about my two "crowning events." No, really, it's was just hte highlight of my week.
First of all, on Friday, we did a booth on one of the busiest street here, Shattuck and Center St. So we pretty much had a poster about the visitor center, with a little bit info about family history, then the three companionships in our district just stood at and around the poster and talked to EVERYONE. It was so scary. I had to make myself say hi. It was good though because I got two person's information, and the rest of the district got theirs too, so it was quite useful. We sang hymns, that was the most effective, caught people's attention and they smiled at us. We had a homeless guy who was ok at first, then he started swearing at us. We just kept singing and people noticed, way to draw more attention to us, guy. :) Anyway, we got one guy interested because of that, so you see, everything works out at the end. It was fun. Crazy idea, but fun, and useful.
The other thing is that I gave a talk in church on the 14th. I talked about Doing hte small and simple things because a lot of the members don't know that read the scriptures and pray often is a commandment. Anyway, so apparently it was really good, as people told me. I thought it was only ok. Glad for the chance to speak though.
This week, besides getting really excited I got Sister Poon...we got new missionary follow-up training by President Meredith. It's surprising how the Lord qualifies whoever he calls, President Meredith is awesome. We talked about the How to Begin Teaching section in Preach My Gospel, steps of finding, the Remeber This section at the very back, and how to help people keep commitments. It was funny because he just disected everything and, really, there is so much more meaning to Preach My Gospel than what is just written. We had practices after on begin teaching and keep commitments. I did ok, but definitely need to work on keep talking rather than having pauses that aren't necessary. Can't type all he taught us, but it was great. Oh, we also all shared our testimony. It's so good to see everyone is different than when we came. We used to say in Jerusalem "You've changed." :)
We finally gotten in contact with the Chinese girl we were teaching. She just freaked out about school, that's all. She said she got "really bad score" on math test. When I asked her, she got 12/15........You know, now that I'm a missionary, I'd like to think that it's not really bad at all, and she should keep meeting with us. Anyway, she came on sunday for sacrament and people noticed and said hi, so that's good. (We've had member lessons in past weeks to get them to be more active in fellowshipping, so it's working)
Other than that, we have lots of potential investigators, people are starting to bring their friends to church again, so we'll be getting more. Summer is slow, but it's near August, the working is definitely picking up.
It's funny though, how we just seem to be at the right place in the right time. Last Monday, when I was here in the library, I got a guy who stopped me and gave me his number so he can meet with us, he wants to come back to church, he was member before. And last Saturday, I was standing outside waiting for our members to show up to a restaurant, a guy walked past and then walked back to ask where the church's address is, he just moved here. So cool!
And, last week we tried to visit a less active, he wasn't there, so we street-contacted a few people and two of them are willing to have the missionaries over. They aren't in our area, but it's so good to see that we were just there at the right time. :)
Anyway, too much good things to write down, so I'll just pause here, to be continued next week. :)
Love you Mom!! Tons. And hugs and kisses.
Meng
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