November 26, 2014

We had a special Sunday this last week, we called it "Come and See!" In Chinese it translated as an open house event. We only had sacrament, and then we had a decent meal after, and a bunch of activities introducing the auxilliary organizations in the church. It was also my first time translating for sacrament. 2 minor mistakes, but for the most part it went pretty smoothly.

Elder Wang gave his farewell talk this Sunday as well, then he got in a van with the office Elders at 4 in the afternoon, and away he went. He's back in California now, but I'm going to stay in touch with him for sure, he'll also probably give the home phone a call at some point so he can arrange to stay a night in my room on his way up to Idaho for school. I told him you wouldn't have a problem with it (if you do, say now or forever hold your peace.....) I'm also going to be sending a box of books and such I don't really need. On the top I'm going to put Elder Wang's bye bye book, because he had to leave it behind so everyone would be able to sign it.

I can't remember if I told you about our new method of contacting that we are working on. School contacting basically means focus on contacting around schools so we can find the parents with kids going to/from school, because if the parents are the ones picking them up, then we know that their jobs are more stable, and the added benefit of a full family unit, instead of random part families/single adults like we have been getting. The hard part is trying to figure out how to do it without feeling like total creepers on the kids. Which is really ironic because we aren't even aiming for the kids, we are going for the parents.

There is a new program starting up called "He is the Gift". Look it up on LDS.org, it starts this Friday. Really big, and they rented space on YouTube and a Times Square jumbotron. You can look it up on Christmas.mormon.org too.  #ShareTheGift

We had an interesting experience with breath spray last night. We were in Elder Leishman and Elder Wangs apartment, and we noticed his old breath spray, so we tested it. Disgusting, turned out he had swapped out the spray with rubbing alcohol so that he could light matches and make a mini firebomb. Rubbing alcohol really does taste gross.

We saw a demonstration against the police last night walking back from zone unity, which was interesting, since it was the first time I had seen an actual protest in the city.

Elder Kuo/Guo has gone to Poughkeepsie for a while, I'm now with Elder Atkinson. He's a really laid back guy, so it should be pretty fun. We are merging two of the areas together as well, which means that we are going to be really busy probably with lessons. President told all the missionaries in my transfer (after the transfer meeting) to get very little sleep, and to work our butts off. So that's what we are going to do. We also got a new sister this transfer, sister Moe from Highland UT. She looks a lot like the oldest daughter from the family at pageant, I think they were the Dodds? They had 2 daughters and a son named Andrew who got called to Russia. I don't remember.

Love, 

Your son/sibling in service,

Elder Christensen
陈少驹