Dear everyone,
Thank you for all of the lovely birthday wishes! I feel very loved, and very happy, thank you. I also feel a little tired, haha! I'll include a picture that I had Sister Marler took this morning before we went to email with some of the birthday love I received - I have a confession, though: we had to take the picture about three times before I actually opened my eyes big enough that it looked normal. :) I love mission life! One of my friends wrote that today I'm "one year older, and wiser, too - especially wiser." That's so true. Obviously I'm here on a mission to help other people, but I also secretly love that this experience is helping me be better and wiser as well.
It was a good week! Really good. Things are going well with our investigators - we're hoping for four baptisms this month. It's going to happen! Pray for it! They probably won't happen until the last two weeks of October, though, so we'll probably have some people get baptized on the same day. Wouldn't that be fun? I'm already excited about it.
Dad, you asked about what kind of Chinese holiday was going on this week. Well, just in time, I was already planning on talking a little bit about the Mid-Autumn festival, or the Moon Festival, in Taiwan. It's scheduled according to the lunar calendar so its time changes every year. I wish I could tell you all a great long story of the Chinese tradition that started the Moon Festival, but honestly, I don't really know. I do, however, remember that there's a Sagua episode about it. Sagua was this PBS animation with Chinese cats in it and you can learn Chinese from it, I guess (no, I did not learn any Chinese fromSagua except maybe "Xie xie," or "thank you"). I only remember two things from Sagua: 1) Sagua's dad cat had the voice of Mr. Ratburn, and 2) there was an epsisode about the moon festival with moon cakes in it and I was really fascinated and wanted to try some. Well, imagine my delight when you fast-forward 15 years or so and I got to eat real-life (well, they're not living) moon cakes! So exciting. I want to say that there's some tradition with the moon cakes that there used to be messages in them or something like that to save someone. But apparently the elder sitting a couple computers down from me says that the moon festival celebrates nine sons who were shot down to save some girl. Hmm. My best bet would be to look it up on Wikipedia. It's a little pathetic that someone actually living in Taiwan still doesn't really know the story behind the festival. Oh, well. But, I do know what the Taiwanese do to celebrate! Three words: BBQ. Everyone's out grilling stuff and eating it and moon cakes and other things. My kind of festival, right? We had a branch activity to celebrate last Saturday but they wanted it to be something other than a BBQ. So we turned it into a cook-off. I'm not sure how I lucked out, but the missionaries got to be the judges of the food. We all had our plates piled up as we went first in line. It was pretty awesome. Yesterday we finished off the festival by watching fireworks in the sky as we biked to our next appointment - life is great. So, happy moon festival, everyone.
I also need to write about another meal I had this week that was not as good. There's this crazy restaurant next close to the church that all of the missionaries call "Ama's" ("Grandma's") - that is not the name of the restaurant, but there's an ama who looks like she's been about 85 for the last 10 years who owns the restaurant. Hence the name, "Ama's." Anyway, elders since the beginning of having elders in Taidong have loved going to Ama's, because it has tons of food for very cheap. Sisters, on the other hand, have mostly avoided going to Ama's, because of the sketchy atmosphere and the strange almost fake quality of the food that's served there. But there have still been a few times that I've gone. This week was one of those times. A member decided to treat us to lunch there, but then after she paid for our food she took off to go help her son with something. This is where the pond juice comes in. Most of the drinks at Ama's have tea or alcohol in them, except for this green bean juice. I've had some really good green bean juice, actually, but this stuff is very big and green and chunky. So we've affectionately named it "pond juice." Sister Zhang, the one who treated us, decided to buy us two tall glasses of pond juice to top off the weird food we were going to eat - Sister Marler and I exchanged panicked glances, but I don't think she noticed. Anyway, Ama pulled out the pond juice and we got drinking. And I got about a third of the way down when I noticed a mosquito swimming around. Gross. I tried to ask the ama for help, but then I saw what she was doing - using her bare hands to scoop up stuff and put it in drinks, using sketchy-looking dishes that looked like they hadn't been washed in forever, etc. I realized that she might not be my best choice for a sanitation ally. So later when her son came by and asked us if everything was alright, I gratefully explained that I had a mosquito in my drink, so I didn't really want to drink it. Thanks. He said, "Oh, I understand. Well if you can't finish it here, I think you should get it to go, just to make sure you finish it in the end. After all, you don't want to waste it." Wait, what? 'Like mother, like son,' I guess - the fact that there was a parasite who had sucked the blood of who knows how many other specimens floating around in my drink didn't seem to phase him at all. So I sighed and asked to get it to go (he nodded encouragingly)... and we dumped it out when we got to the church.
In other news, I'm finally onto learning Chinese characters. The mission has this program where we first learn how to teach all of the missionary lessons, then we learn 2,000+ regular words, then we learn the 2000+ characters that are in the Book of Mormon, then we can do whatever we want. I started the characters thing a few weeks ago and, as I do with all learning programs, am having a love-hate relationship with it. Mostly love. It's super-cool being able to finally read these things and see them on the pages of the things I read and on the signs where I go. The only downside is that in some ways, ignorance really was bliss. Now whenever I see characters (everywhere I go) I automatically try and see how many I know - a little distracting sometimes. But then I snap out of it and keep working. :) One of my investigators asked me how many characters I knew and I said (trying to sound casual and not too proud of myself): "Oh, you know, only like 300 or so." "Oh," she said, sounding disappointed and not-very-impressed. Then I was a little more honest: "It's totally not fair! I only had to learn 26 letters for English! And now there are tens of thousands of characters!" She said that she thought that English is hard, and Chinese was easy. I guess she has a point. Anyway, the point is, I'm still learning and trying to be patient with myself.
Miracles this week: there were a lot of great things that happened, and miraculous things too, but nothing that really fits well into story form. Let's just say that Heavenly Father helped us out a lot with meeting our goals and pulled a lot of strings to help investigators come to church, help us get new investigators (three of them were from member referrals!), etc. He loves us and knows us individually.
Well everyone, that is it for today. Thank you again for your birthday wishes - I'll try and make today the best 22nd birthday ever and celebrate it by eating lots of great food, going to the Taidong forest park, and eating some more great food. Have an amazing week! I love you!
-Sister Winters
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