Okay, Elder Puzey…you’re safe to back up now.

We had an awesome week this last week. Probably the best thing was being able to finally get that member referral that we try to get every week (成員回條, setting up with a church member’s friend to teach them – we’re supposed to get at least one each week). We had been trying to work on getting it all this last week, but hadn’t really gotten one yet.

Costco free samples – LDS version of Happy Hour

Sunday morning came along and nothing; we hadn’t gotten a member referral yet. We weren’t able to get a hold of a lot of our investigators for church, so I wasn’t sure what the outcome would be. In my mind, I quickly said a prayer like, “Please have someone bring a friend to church today!” Well, guess what happened?

I knew getting the Costco membership would come in handy!

Someone brought a friend to church and we were able to set up an appointment with them for a different day this week! Plus we had someone from English class come who we didn’t really even invite to church! And to finish it up, during our church, the zone leaders (地帶領袖們, other missionaries) called us and told us they met this great high schooler who lives in TianMu and can come to church right now, so we quickly went upstairs to meet them and bring him back to the class we were in. Topping it all off, we were able to accomplish making all those indicator boxes green, which was great! (We get a printout of all of our indicator numbers each week – lessons taught, investigators at church, etc. – if it’s green, that means you hit the standard!)

We still have our amazing investigator named Timo! His only problem is that he still lives with his girlfriend since she doesn’t want to get married until he comes back from England next year (he leaves in September to study his masters degree). However, within these next two weeks, he’ll be moving out. We sent him the baptismal interview (洗禮面談) questions over a month ago, but yesterday we did a practice interview with him. Since we’ve already taught him everything and he follows everything perfectly, it went awesome! Once he moves out, we know that he’ll be immediately ready to be baptized!

Fun fact about Chinese in Taiwan – in most other parts of the world, they use Romanized Pinyin to type Chinese. It allows to me to use our Latin alphabet to type out how each character sounds. However, in Taiwan, they use ZhuYin (注音 BoPoMoFo), which are 37 “asian-looking” characters that are used to “spell” words/Chinese characters.

ZhuYin (BoPoMoFo) keyboard

So on our cute little Nokia phone (which has little to no ability to do anything), we have to type in 注音 instead of Pinyin. I’m fairly used to it now because I text so much on the phone, but it’s still a little difficult. They also use this system to type Chinese on the computer – they have the characters on their keyboards.

– Elder Austin Simonson
文長老