SUCCESS is a good quality.... Transfer 2: Week 7

the subject line sounds prideful, but anyone who knows me knows that i've
learned utter humility from my father. wonderful sarah anderson wrote me this
week and told me she loved the weird english on the subject lines of my email. so, i'm giving the people what they want! that sentence was on a book end in an investigator's home. so i thought i'd share.

let me start by saying. i love you! i love you all! everyone within reading distance, everyone that randomly stumbles upon this somewhere, everyone. i am so grateful for all of the earthly and divine support I’m getting here in Taiwan. it's amazing. i feel it. i love it. i think feeling the love of others has changed me immensely in itself. that makes it sound like i never felt love before the mission field, jia de! (not true!); it's just different in the mission field. every letter, every email helps me know who is behind me. it's great. when i come home i am going to be so much more affectionate (but not physically, gross!) and supportive of everyone i see. thank you friends/family for the letters. thank you family for the boston email!

only a few days left in the transfer. it freaks me out. i'm almost at my six
month mark. strange! i really need to jia you (add oil), and start working harder. my time is going to be done before i know it.

this last week has been good. on Friday i finally put my finger on the little
gray cloud that seems to float over every fifth day of the week. so, i email and write letter(s) (usually i only have time to write the weekly to mandi and maybe one other) on Wednesday. somehow, every Thursday there are a million things that happen or go through my head that i want to share with my dearest ozawas. on Friday i can't wait for the next p-day because i want to write write write. by Saturday it feels like preparation day will never come and i've accepted it. Sunday goes by really fast. Monday also goes by incredibly quickly. then Tuesday is the day before p-day and i can't believe i'm going to be writing again. needless to say, weeks vanish before my eyes. it kind of freaks me out. Friday syndrome hit especially hard this week.

on friday i sent a special package to las vegas. goodies for everyone, and
birthday gifts for lauren, naomi and phoebe. i hope you enjoy the pieces of
taiwan and the pieces of my heart that are now in transit. i didn't put pictures on a cd because it was like $70 to do so and i'm a missionary, but i sent my sd card so that you can have the pictures and make a cd of them then send the card back. mom, can you be in charge of opening the box. the gifts aren't wrapped yet, but are clearly explained in the "content key".

this week our investigators were all a little wacky. it was kind of really
disappointing. i love pingdong, but i don't feel the same attachments to the
people that i did in gaoxiong. kind of sad. i hope this fact doesn't leave mike olsen feeling let down, i'm sorry mike, i'm sorry.
-gao xiaojie/wang mama (she asked us to call her something different than we had been calling her, so now she has two names every time we refer to her) is the really depressing investigator i think i've mentioned before. we planned to have a kill ke (a do or die lesson), i was prepped to say goodbye without any tears. and then she committed to come to church! and said she'd get baptized when she knows it's true. what in the world!??! in the end she didn't come to church, so we don't know what to do, but her willingness to accept the invitation threw us for a loop.

-brian/zhang mama are some investigators the elders gave to us. at first i love love loved them. it's not that i don't now, but this week zhang mama gave us mango then went outside and chatted as we taught brian, an 11 year old, on his own. the whole lesson brian lied to us about having done reading in the book of mormon. he colored in a reading chart we gave him, but couldn't tell us where he read. when we asked his favorite part, he turned to the end of 1 nephi 22 and read a verse about the house of isreal being lead out of darkness. i could barely contain my laughter. we asked why he liked that verse (out of all of the verses in first nephi). he said "because they are being lead out of darkness" and continued to ramble lies. LIES! it was horrible. my companion is brilliant and explained that heavenly father helped the house of isreal and helps us if we're obedient and honest. hopefully the honesty part sunk in a bit.

-we visited bao xiaojie but ke (my favorite) wasn't there. bao wasn't drunk this time, but was still hilarious. she makes me sad. we saw pictures of her when she was younger. she used to be normal, with a husband and a family. now she's a mess. she drinks a lot and chew bin lang (i'll explain next email). she told me my nose was pretty so i showed her how my nostrils can flare HUGE. she laughed up a storm and started hitting my knees and telling me i'm funny. then she asked me to give her my teeth. i laughed. my nostrils flared. and she laughed more. (the elders this week also discovered my nostrils. funny. everything is funnier when my nose flaps it's wings.) teaching bao was so-so. she belongs to the aborigine christian church and doesn't understand how ours is different.
-cai jiating was the high point. those kids are amazing! this week they were so open with us. they explained that they want to believe but haven't seen proof yet. we talked about prayer and they told us about experiences where their prayers were answered. we helped them to see that that is the "proof" they are looking for. they are so cute! SO CUTE!

-lin xiaojie is a resurrected former investigator. when we went to visit her she tried to sell mary kay to us. she had us wash our faces with special stuff and put on tons of different cream and an orange/red/brown lipstick. then she started talking about her and her husband's sex life. it was awkward. she told us she won't come to church or get baptized. we don't know what to do. there were other lessons, but those are the ones most easily recalled. it was a weird week lesson wise.

sunday was a dragonboat racing festival. for that holiday they eat traditional food called zongzi. zongzi is sticky rice with meat, vegetables, peanuts, beans, whatever, wrapped in a very specific way with bamboo leaves. we were given to much zongzi! our fridge is full of it. it's really good, i think. i love taiwanese food, but i think it's messing with my tastebuds. on monday we ate at a restaurant by our house. it has a salad bar. one of the dishes at the salad bar was a chilled oatmeal-like thing. it's kind of runny and slightly sweetened. i love it. but as i ate it i realized how not sweet it was in comparison to american food, moreover that it was plenty sweet for me. i think my tastebuds are starting to discount the wonder of butter and sugar and vanilla. mom, you are going to have to repair me when i get home.

on the topic of food, last night i had chinese medicine soup for the first time. most missionaries, i hear, think it's disgusting. it was so cool! it was a bowl, with roots, golgiberries, pig heart and broth. it had an interesting flavor that i really liked. the best part was that it's super healthy. sister juang told me about all of the different kind of medicine soups her mom has made for her and her siblings. i'm so down with that! i think maybe i want to start pre-med up again and then study alternative medicine. it's so interesting to me, and i think god intended us to use the "herbs of the earth" in the way that many chinese do. don't get me wrong, i love conventional medicine (duh! it saved my life), but alternative is so much more interesting to me.

(i realize that every email i proclaim something new that i'm going to do when i come home. i guess i really have no idea. i do know for sure that i'll spend summer in vegas then start at the u in august. i do know that i want to live in salt lake with mandi and beloved lolonani. that is what i know.)

i have only a few minutes left, and i haven't written about the funeral i
attended yesterday. it was interesting, and it will wait until next week. move calls are on saturday, then p-day will be on monday. so, the next email you get will be on sunday night or monday morning, so write before sunday afternoon if you intend to. a few quick other points...

-i finally finished passing off the first language learning book, it was words based on the chinese translation of the pmg lessons. it was boring. i'm excited for the book i'm on now, it's more interesting and next i'll get to study characters! i went through some of the character cards, i think i know a little over 100 so far, which makes me happy but is only a beginning.

-i bought my first taiwanese brand toothpaste. it's called heiren, which
translates to "black person". an obvious name, it makes your teeth white and
bright like a black person's! cool. i like it. it makes me feel clean.
that is all. i love you! i miss you. one year and two weeks until i come home!
until then, i'm where i need to be, and i'm happy! so happy!!

with the sweetness of concentrated dong gua cha,

jade