January 15, 2014

You can send everything to the mission office, it still gets to me before the next preparation day, so it doesn't matter that much if it is a day or 2 late. (No, we still don't have a key to our mailbox.)

[Regarding a Facebook post in Chinese] I knew most of those characters already, but I had to have Elder Leung check it to make sure (I had two of them wrong, same pronunciation, different character.) I can read probably about 300-500, but writing is a lot harder than reading, so fewer for that part. The generally accepted number is that you need about 5000 memorized to have fluency in reading/writing.

[One of our investigators'] lesson was...different. He was a very different person from how he was when I met with him before with Elders Williams and Murray. Back then he didn't like praying, and was angry a lot of the time. This time, he was really happy, asked if we could start with a prayer, and volunteered to give it himself, and gave one of the best prayers I've heard given by a nonmember my entire mission. He honestly seemed like a different person. Then the lesson took a South turn when some random lady walked in and sat down, and failed to understand that none of us knew who she was, or that we were asking her to introduce herself, and instead started asking Xxx Xxx Xxxxx about his life (blind, marriage issues, health problems...) and all of a sudden he sounded a lot more like his old self. We managed to get things back on track once the lady left though, and he promised to talk with his wife about being baptized on the 23 of Februrary.

We have a new bishop! After 4 years of service, Chinatown is waving goodbye to Bishop McConkie, who was released this last Sunday by President Buckner. Our new Bishop is Bishop Huang, his full name is Huang Kai. He was Bishop McConkie's first counselor, and is a convert of around 10 years or so I believe. Bishop McConkie will definitely be missed here though, he and his family are moving to North Carolina temporarily, with later plans to move out to Colorado or Utah.

For my year mark, on the hour of when I first sat in my MTC class having my teacher spout Mandarin at me and me not understand at all, but be expected to duplicate the sounds, exactly one year later, I was doing the same thing again, but this time in Cantonese! We have been asked to begin learning basic Cantonese in order to help out the sisters area that is a Cantonese only area (they help the members/investigators who don't speak Mandarin, both already spoke Cantonese before the mission, one natively.) Cantonese is so much worse than Mandarin.

We went to South Manhattan today, I took some pictures of the Wall Street bull and such. I'll send them out some time soon.

Stay safe,
Love, your son/sibling in service
Elder Christensen

陳少駒