August 17, 2015
Family,My companion is great. His name is Elder Ma. He is Chinese, but is from Sydney Austrailia. He has been out for 19 months and has been an office Elder for the past 8. I am serving in Macau for my first area. It is aparently really rare for Mandarin speakers to get to serve there, so I am very lucky. We are opening up this area for Mandarin. There haven't been mandarin missionaries here in a while. Also, they only allow Americans to be here for 2 months so that will be my max time here assuming it is that long. Might just be 6 weeks. We live in Taipa which is a seperate island of the main island of Macau. It takes about 15 min on the bus to get to Macau. It is very cool here and very humid. Literally walking out of the airport you just start sweating. That is not an exaggeration. There are tons of Casino's here. We live with 2 other Elders. Both are speaking Cantonese. There are 14 mandarin speakers now, including the 5 that came in with me. There is a flushing toilet, which is great. I don't know if there is hot water, I have only taken cold showers. I might never take a warm shower. Too hot. Problem is we only get 12 hours of AC each day. So it is always hot returning to the apartment. At least we get 12 hours. That is a huge blessing. We are able to sleep with cold air. And mostly study with AC. Mission president is great. We rode with Him from the airport to the temple. He lives in the temple and there is patron housing and His office just accross the street. That is where we stayed the first night. President Lam explained that the Asia South Area covers about half of the World's population and only has 2 temples. Hong Kong and Taipei. The other 142 (something like that) serve the other half of the world's population. That goes to show how much work needs to be done here. It was cool staying in the patron housing since there were some families from Mainland here to get their endowments and a family from Mongolia to do the same thing. We practiced out Chinese with them a little. It was cool to hear from them and and their testimonies. They are inspiring. First interview was good. Pretty quick. Asked me about the family. Reminded me to be exactly obedient and said a few other things. There are a decent amount of people here that speak Mandarin. Even if they don't speak it, they can understand it. Most can speak it, just don't prefer to speak it. There are 3 branches in Macau. The branch we attended yesterday had about 40 attending. They had me share my testimony. I could really feel while we were taking the sacrament the Savior's love for them. It was amazing. These saints are awesome. Especially when I hear them sing the hymns in Cantonese. Also, the piano player for sacrament is about an 8yr old boy. There is a seperate Area book for Mandarin and sometimes the Cantonese people find Mandarin people they turn over to us. We are teaching 3 investigators now. It is really hard to help and teach according to their needs. Their situations are all very different and very complicated.P-day is today. It is 1:50 here right now. We only get 1 hr to read, write, and send pics, so my letters will be shorter. The jet lag is really hard, but I am starting to get over it. The food is fine. We had this rice box with all these weird meats and stuff in it that I didn't love, but it was fine. We mostly cook ourselves. We do eat a lot of rice and I get a workout just trying to get the food in my mouth with chopsticks. They do have these good Bao things. Just bread with stuff in the middle. They are really good. We also had these other really good bread things while we stayed by the temple for Wed. They only give us 1700 HK dollars a month, so we don't have much money too eat out. It is 1 US dollar to 7.75 HK dollars. We were not able to attend the temple last week, but we will be able to every transfer aparently. We ride the bus a ton here in Macau and the MTR a lot over in Hong Kong. It is about a 1 hr ferry boat ride to Macau from Hong Kong. Also, apparently there is this non-member who comes and gives a cake away to the missionaries every week. And I got it this week, because I am white. He usually gives it to the white missionaries. Here in Macau we have 12 missionaries and 3 of us are not Chinese. I left my Camera converter thing so I can't send pics today, sorry. I'll remember next week. Hope that answers all your questions.These past few days have been pretty hard, a lot harder than the MTC. I am so tired and have no idea what is going on ever. My comp speak English, but when we are teaching I never know what is going on. He just stops talking and looks at me and I have no idea what to say. Sometimes he will try to explain in Mandarin what he wants me to say while we are teaching or finding on the streets, but it is hard. Apparently I have to relearn all the words I thought I knew beacuse my tones are way off and nobody can understand anything I am saying. He corrects me a ton, which is a blessing, but is kind of frustrating. I pronounce a word wrong and he tells me that was wrong and tells me how to say it and it sounds exactly the same to me. I am doing sounds and tones 15 min every language study. I really need it. Apparently it is really rude to shake your leg and I do that a lot, so I got to work on not doing that anymore. And a bunch of other details in teaching I need too work on. It might take a while to get used to sweating all day in slacks and a white shirt. It could be a lot worse though.I love this quote from Wilford Woodruff. "Do not be discouraged because you cannot learn all at once; learn one thing at a time, leran it well, and treasure it up, then learn another truth and treasure that up, then learn another truth and treasure that up, and in a few yeras you will have a great store of useful knowledge which will not only be a great blessng to yourselves and your children, but to your fellow men." Often I feel like we superficially learn something. Then we forget it soon and it goes to waste. This principle can really help us.One more quick thought, after our very first lesson with Gao Jiemei, my comp railed into me about all the things I did wrong and what I should never do, I was pretty frustrated and mad at him for being so unkind especially considering how little I knew about the culture here and had not experience. I felt we didn't have the spirit much in our lesson and it was bad. I was blaming it on him. I then was reminded through the Spirit what Elder Bednar has said at on of the videos I had watched at the MTC. He said something like, "If something goes well, thank the Lord. If something goes bad, look inside and see what you need to fix." That is opposite the world. It reminded me also of Utchdorf's talk, Lord, Is it I. That is so imporrtant and I am grateful I was reminded of this. It definietly takes a lot of humility to do this.Thanks for filling me in on what is happening at home. That is exciting news. Thanks for all your prayers. I am very grateful for the Savior's Atonement and know it is real and we can use it and should use it everyday. I know more and more the importance of patience and humility in helping us to press forward and learn what the Lord would have us learn.Love,Elder Stratford
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