With Sisters Lee and MacKay now gone, Chinatown is down to 6 elders and THREE sisters. We currently only have 4 areas in Chinatown, which is a far cry from the 8 we once had. There are currently a number of missionaries out of Chinatown, and there is supposed to be a new sister coming in next transfer, but the most I would expect to have happen within the next transfer is that they split the current trio of sisters into 2 areas, making 4 sisters, 5 areas, and 10 total missionaries. This place has changed a lot since I first got here.
We are teaching a dude who used to be a member of the Chinese Congress. He was also basically the governor over the province of BeiJing about 20 years ago. Currently he teaches architecture in a college in ShangHai, and is lecturing at Yale, Harvard, Columbia... Basically, he's SUPER connected, and uses a vocabulary that makes my head explode. Thank goodness he is going back to ShangHai before the end of this transfer. Trying to teach him without a native companion would be impossible, even after this long in the field. He's really awesome though, he has gone to Salt Lake City, he was extremely impressed with the temple, and he has a strong feeling that this church is better than any other. We might not baptize him, since he goes back to ShangHai on the 18th, but they recently changed the rule in ShangHai. You are now allowed to be baptized in ShangHai WITHOUT ANY RELATIVES WHO ARE ALREADY CHURCH MEMBERS! The previous policy was that you were only allowed to be baptized in China if you had a family member who was already a member. Otherwise, you had to go to Hong Kong to get baptized, or else leave the country completely. We heard this update today from Elder Wang Shuang Zhe, whose dad is currently a Branch President in Hainan (no where near ShangHai, but still in China).
Craziest bed head of my mission to this point. I swear, it looked like that when I woke up, I didn't touch it at all.
This one was about 2 weeks ago. Again, I did nothing to it. I couldn't even style my hair these ways if I tried.
Elder Wang loves to run, when he has the energy for it. Last year, we were running basically every day together, but this year we have only really run twice, the rest of the time he is so tired when he gets up that he doesn't want to run, and I don't really push the issue. The exercise band you sent out has been a life saver mom, all the weights got hijacked by Elder Leung because he wants to "get big", and so the only workout equipment available is our bodies and that band. I still weight about 162, I fluctuate a lot within a gap of about 5 pounds 2.5 either way, but I don't really leave the gap too far before returning to within it.
I made Banana Cornbread muffins. Just smash a banana up and mix it into the batter, pretty tasty, the cornbread isn't quite as crumbly either in my opinion.
Just send the card and the mix to my mission office, we don't check the mail that often here, and we are asked to have all our mail sent through the office anyway.
The reasoning behind the departure date is because if we leave more than 30 days before our original departure date, then P. Morgan needs to get approval from Salt Lake, which is super MaFan. I could leave Dec. 6, but most of the group I die with started Jan. 22, they were Spanish speaking, not Chinese, so they wouldn't be able to leave before the deadline on the 18th. Since it is a little problematic to get dying missionaries to the airport, it just made sense to have us all leave together.
Love you all, go do some good in the world today.
Your son/sibling in service,
Elder Christensen
�少�
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