Jungni Ward Family

April 27, 2015

Dear Family,

My area is a lot smaller than all my previous areas, just since it is in a big city, so there are more people. But strangely enough, there is still no one on the street. It's so frustrating, because there are so many people, just not in places where we can talk to them easily. The ward had about 50 people come to church yesterday, so decent size. We have investigators, but no progressing investigators. A couple of our investigators are foreigners, one from the Middle East, and one from Canada, I think. We have yet to meet them since they're too busy, but hopefully we can soon. Elder Koo has been here for one transfer before me. 

Jungni ward is super fun, I am coming to love it a lot already. There are a ton of members who are YM/young adult age (17-25ish) and they are all super fun, we play basketball with them every Friday night, and we also have a FHE activity at the church every Monday evening. One of them who is the same age as me has a mission call, and is leaving in June to go to the Washington Federal Way Mission. His mom is having him practice teaching the first lesson to us in English so he can practice. He is super fun and really friendly, I feel like we are already super good friends. The whole ward is kind of like that though, they are all really friendly with each other, and it just feels like a big family with all of them. Right now we are planning a party that we are going to have next month, and it will be Harry Potter-themed. It's mostly the missionaries who are planning it, and we have some pretty fun games and stuff planned so far. From this we hope to get lots of less active members and non-members to come, so that should be pretty good. If you happen to have any ideas for Harry Potter-type games, let me know :)

Anyway, I hope you have a great week! I'll try to send some pictures :)

Love,

Elder Hines

Elder Hines and Elder Koo

Elders Hines & Gim HyeonMo with the Ward Mission Leader & young men in Changwon

Elders with the Dogye ward bishop

Transfer and a Baptism

April 20, 2015

Dear Family,

Wow, I'm impressed with google translate, it actually made sense.

Well, I got transferred...again. I didn't expect it at all, but I guess President Barrow doesn't do what you expect. I was super sad to leave, I loved Dogye a lot. The members are super awesome, I really enjoyed serving with the other missionaries in that ward. Anyway, that doesn't matter anymore, now I am in Jungni Ward (중리), in the city of Daegu. My companion is Elder Koo YoungHyun, he is a year older than me, but I am one transfer older than him in the mission. He is really funny, and really good at English too. He says he doesn't know how he is good at English, since he has never been to an English-speaking country, his major is PE, and he didn't really study that hard in school. So it's kind of crazy, English is really hard for Koreans, so being good at it doesn't normally just happen. We also have two sisters serving in our area, and one of them was in the MTC with me. Other than that, I'm not sure what else to tell you about the new area, I just got here yesterday afternoon.

Oh, and yesterday at transfer meeting, Elder Payne told me that LH got baptized a couple weeks ago! So that was super awesome news. LH actually called me about an hour ago and talked for a little bit, and he is doing really well.

It sounds like Colton is his usual self. He only scared you a little? Were there any fatalities?

I came across a really cool scripture just the other day, it's D&C 88:67-68, you should read it. It talks about seeing God and stuff like that. I thought about that a lot, and there is a cross reference in the footnotes that helps a lot, it's to D&C 67:10, which talks about the veil being rent and being about to see God, but then says that it will be with spiritual mind. So what I got from this is that as we do the things it says, which is basically just keeping the commandments, we will be able to more fully discern the hand of the Lord in our lives. It reminds me of what Jesus said, that we can know of the truth of the gospel through living it.

Anyway, that's about all I can think of for this past week. Whenever I get transferred, I can't remember anything that went on the past week, it's like as soon as I get into the new area, I lose memory of the old area. Have a great week!

Love,

Elder Hines

District from last transfer: Elder Powell, Elder Hines, Elder Hoyne, Elder Gim,
Elder Porcaro, Sister Kim GyuRi, Sister Hoffman, and Elder Quiroz

Elder Suter with his two trainees: Elder Itri and Elder Hines

Elders Porcaro, Powell, Hines and Hoyne

A Visit to Tongyeong

April 12, 2015

This week was really good, especially yesterday because of the baptism. It was super fun to go back to Tongyeong and see all the members again. I'll send you some pictures of the baptism, Elder Suter baptized him, and he asked the stake president, Elder Suter, and me to help confirm him, so it was really cool. Oh yeah, and we did a musical number, which was pretty good for how little we practiced it.  It was a medley of "I'm Trying to be like Jesus," and "Savior may I learn to love Thee," and I played piano, one of the sisters played violin, and the rest of the missionaries sang.

Because of the baptism, I didn't get to watch all of the Sunday sessions of conference, but hopefully I will get a chance to soon. I really liked the talks about grace, I can't remember who it was off the top of my head though. Sorry I didn't prepare for your questions :)

Work in Changwon is great, I love it. We only have one investigator, and she is 12 and a daughter of a less active member. I honestly don't feel like she is very interested, she just listens because her dad tells her to. I don't know why, but we are having a really hard time finding people to teach in this area. In my previous areas, we started out with nothing and were able to build up, but here it feels like we are stuck in a rut. But it's still good, I love the members, and not just because they feed us :)  They are really fun/funny, and super nice to us.

We made cookies again this week, and they were way better, they were super good. But for some reason they keep turning out really hard after I cook them. I think it's the lack of butter/shortening, does that sound right? But other than that, they are really good. Which is good, so the members don't have to pretend to like them anymore :)

At one of the dinner appointments we had this week, one of the things they fed us was something called "ggeop-de-gi."  It was pig skin with a sauce on it. The flavor wasn't too bad, but it was really chewy, and there was hair in the skin still. I'm surprised I didn't throw up, it was pretty disgusting. I don't know what is up with Koreans and their obsession with skin and fat, but they love including it in the food they make. Or in this case, get rid of the delicious, succulent meat and just eat the skin. Wonderful idea, why haven't Americans thought of that yet?

Anyway, that was my week, it was pretty fun :)

I love you!

Elder Hines

Elder Hines, Elder Suter, LYH, Tongyeong Elders

Watching General Conference

'A rare Korean bird in it's natural habitat'

Cherry Blossom Festival

April 5, 2015

No, I didn't get to go to the baptism, I decided it wasn't worth paying for a bus to get there . . .  Yeah, I'm kidding, they didn't have it this week. It's kind of a weird situation, apparently LYH didn't talk to the missionaries about it at all, he just went straight to the bishop and said he wants to get baptized. And since the bishop there doesn't have very much experience with being a bishop, he was just like, "sure, let's do it next week”. So the missionaries found out, and he hasn't been taught all the lessons yet, so they need an extra week to finish teaching him. The baptism will most likely be next Sunday, between general conference sessions or something. I think conference is just delayed a week because of the language, but I'm not really sure. I will watch it in English, just at the same time as the rest of the ward.

I help with dinner sometimes, but Koreans are "I can do it myself" kind of people, and don't usually like very much help. But honestly, we don't make dinner too often, we either eat at a member's house or eat out, or order food to our house. This area doesn't have too many expenses, so we have more money available than normal.

Things are really good with my companion, he's really funny, and a really hard worker. The language has been feeling a lot easier the past month or so. When I speak Korean with my companion, lots of the time I can just say things without having to think about it very much. It's so nice, it's finally starting to feel more comfortable.​

Something happened this week that was pretty fun. One of the less-active members (we teach his kids English every week) took us to the neighboring town of Jinhae to see the Cherry Blossom Festival. It was really cool, the trees covered in these pink flowers, and they're all over the place, I'll send you some pictures. He played some pretty fun Korean songs in the car for us. You should look them up, the names of some of them are "Buster Buster" and "Bom Bom Bom." He also took us to an island that had a Korean Navy Museum.

Something else that is fun is Elder Powell, one of the other missionaries in my house, has been teaching me to play guitar the past couple weeks.  Right now I'm working on learning "Puff, the Magic Dragon" :)  

It's been cold and rainy all week. I can't believe how much it rains here, I didn't think it was possible for so much water to come out of the sky.

Have a great week, I love you!

Elder Hines