Dear Family,
Changwon is pretty awesome, it's a relatively new city, so
the layout is nice and organized, which is really weird for Korean
cities. It's also really well-kept compared to other Korean cities I've
been in, so that is pretty nice too. Elder Gim was at the Provo MTC at the
same time as me. He is from Seoul, but went to BYUI for a little while. He is
23, which isn't that weird since he's Korean. Korean missionaries are
usually older since they have two years of mandatory military duty to do, and
it's pretty common to do it before their missions. We probably speak about
half Korean half English. He is pretty good at English, but not too
comfortable speaking it. He's really funny, and he's a really good cook,
so I scored there. He makes Korean food for us fairly often.
It was really weird having so many people at church.
Sacrament attendance yesterday was 82. It was wonderful. We don't have any
progressing investigators here, but we have some people with good
potential. The members are really nice. Yesterday, by the end of church,
we had like 4 or 5 meal appointments for this week. It's an interesting group
of people though, there are a lot of youth, lots of really old people, some
deaf people, a Japanese lady, and some people from the Philippines. So
it's really diverse, especially as far as communication goes. They have
someone doing sign language, and we have to take turns translating for the
Filipino people since they don't speak Korean, which is really hard to
do. I translated for someone in Priesthood meeting, and I think he might
have just been more confused after the things I told him. This guy is
super cool though. He was baptized in the Philippines when he was 14, but his
mother died soon after, and since his dad is disabled, he had to provide for
their family. So he went inactive, but later in his life, he realized how much
peace and happiness the gospel brings, so he started coming back to
church. Right now he is in Korea because there are more opportunities for
work here. His wife and son live in the Philippines, and he only gets to
visit them every year and a half. Sunday is his only free time that he
has, and he rides a bike for 40 minutes to get to church so he doesn't have to
pay for a bus. His love for his family and for the gospel is just so
admirable. Before he was baptized, he was Catholic, but he never
understood why they did any of the things they did when they went to church. He
just did it because that's what everyone else did. He said one of the things he
loves most about the gospel is how we are expected to know things for
ourselves, and do things because we want to and because we know it's right, not
because anyone else told us to. Anyway, he talked a lot, I think he gets really
lonely living in a country where he doesn't speak the language at all, so it
was good that I was able to talk to him.
English class here is really fun, we have a kids class in
addition to our normal classes. We taught the alphabet to these two
little girls who were maybe 3 or 4. It was super fun.
Our service project here is kind of weird. It's at this
place where old people relax. It's just a bunch of electric massage beds and
chairs for them to lay in, and all we have to do is push a button to turn it on
for them. But it gives us lots of opportunities to talk to people, so it's
not completely pointless.
Having four people in the same house is really fun. We
do almost everything the same, the only difference is we pray all together
before bed instead of companionship prayer. Did I tell you that Elder
Quiroz is in my house? He was in my district in Tongyeong. So it's really
fun since we already knew each other.
I'll try and send some more pictures, but I kind of forgot
which ones I have already sent, so if you get some repeats, that's why.
Love you!
Elder Hines
 |
| Elders Gim & Hines |
 |
| Changwon |
 |
 |
No comments:
Post a Comment