30 de diciembre 2013

Well this week was Christmas and it was really nice talking to the whole family this week. The hour goes by pretty quick, and it's really quite crazy to think that I will have one more call home.

Christmas Eve and Christmas were all a lot of fun. For Christmas Eve we had the Christmas Breakfast and Devotional hosted by President Watkins himself. The Breakfast was a steak breakfast with all of the other typical american fare you can think of. I wasn't that hungry so I really didn't eat all that much but I had a good time talking to everyone and being able to reconnect with all my old friends and associates here in the mission. I was able to see Sister Li. Sister Li is the sister of the other Sister Li at the temple. Every time I've brought investigators to the temple visitors center in Oakland it's been Sister Li, she's from Hong Kong and so I've gotten to know her really well. Well Sister Li (her sister) is in our mission for 3 transfers, she is a temple square sister, and Temple Square sisters get a chance to come to another mission for 2-3 transfers. She came up to me and she said "So YOU'RE the Elder Sanchez my sister was telling me about..." It's weird because they look the same, except the Sister in our mission just looks younger.

I got to see everyone I used to see, all the Chinese missionaries, and my old zone, it was really fun. Our zone (Menlo Park) did a little gift exchange. My gift was a picture frame. It was a white elephant gift exchange so you didn't know what you were going to get. My picture frame was snatched up by Elder Call. I got Elder Peal's present which was 2 half pound reese's cups. I like Reese's quite a lot so that was good. It was just too much so I gave a lot of pieces to other missionaries.

The Devotional was really great, we all sat down, and heard special musical numbers by other missionaries, and then we had a chance to hear from Sister Packer the wife of the area authority here in the north California. Elder Packer then spoke, and his testimony is always really powerful. I've been able to hear from Elder Packer a lot in the past few months because he's been in the Saratoga stake twice while I was there. Really awesome guy.

President Watkins spoke about how important the work is here, and specifically talking about bringing a light and spirit into our families the following day through our phone calls and skyping home. He told a story about his own life, and in which President Watkins was nearly crying the whole time. He said "What limb would I have to give up? What check would I have to write? What would I have to do to go back to this day?" He related this story to making our parents proud and making sure we realize that we need not and should not waste a moment to be good to our parents, and our families. President Watkins did not want to go on a mission when he was younger but since he had so much pressure with the family and the people around him since his dad was a patriarch and all of this,  he put his mission papers into Salt Lake, and he received his call to go to the Mexico Mexico City mission. He told us about him and his mom boarded a plane to Salt Lake City and the whole time he was just full of dread and regret of going on a mission and just didn't want to go. They got to the MTC and He just had a bad attitude. Him and his mother went into the MTC and still had this bad attitude and look on his face. His mom grabbed him, and brought him to a section of hallway where no one was able to see. She pushed him up against the wall, and said "Elder Watkins, you need to be obedient and you need to work hard" and he responded with and as he mentioned with a typical eye roll and not making eye contact "Alright, I get it..." and then she repeated "You need to be obedient, and you need to work hard" and he said "alright mom, mom I get it. I get it" and then she said "This will be the last time you will see me in mortality, now you better work hard, and be obedient" and he responded with "Okay mom, isn't this hard enough?" and she walked away right when he said that. President Watkins mom died a little over a year later. He expressed how much he regretted that day, and how he would do anything to change that day. It was really touching.

Wednesday was another really great day of my mission, and I had a ton of fun. We woke up and opened our presents. I got a new Citizen Watch that is just plain handsome. A ton of candy too. We went to the Ruiz's house for a brunch. Brother Ruiz is a famous caterer here in the Bay Area and he loves food. He treats food pretty sacred. He has never ever been to a fast food restaurant or any commercial restaurant in 20 years +. He is the man, and so Elder Phillips and I sat with 4 sister missionaries for brunch and had a good time. Sister Billings, Sister Baird, Sister Ikegami, and Sister Schank. We had a wonderful brunch, and it was delicious, and then afterwards we got to call home. It was wonderful to talk to everyone, and be able to see everyone again as well.

After that we did more planning and studies, and went to dinner to a Polynesian family in the Menlo Park ward named the Navarros. It was good but I was still full from the Brunch. We then had a gift exchange which was a secret santa. I got Sister Sotele, which I served with in Saratoga when she first came out. She's Tongan from Utah. I got her a picture frame from Ikea with a cheesy picture of me and my testimony in it, and a bamboo plant in a decorative vase, it was nice, and I hope she liked it. I received a tie from Elder Strauss, which was really nice. Elder Strauss turns out used to go to the Nazareth ward for around 3 years back in 2001-2004. I don't remember him at all though?

We met with Members all week, and tried visiting with investigators too. We had a better week for sure. We had one of the AP's with us on Saturday, Elder Alvarez from Guatemala, and he helped us a lot with the area, since he served here for 5 transfers. Helped us get all the resources to gather all the people in this goldmine of an area. The highlight of that exchange was teaching my first "lesson 1" to a non-member in spanish. it went okay, my spanish definitely  not as good as my Chinese. But that was awesome.

Sunday was a great day as well, as I got to teach Christina!! It was awesome being back and teaching in Chinese again. I was on exchanges with Elder Zollinger, and he's brand new Chinese missionary to the field, only been here like 2 months. I love that family.

It has been an awesome week.

It's been weird to think that the entire year of 2013 I have spent serving. 2014 is 8 months and that's it. I am on the downhill, and it's a fast one.

23 de diciembre 2013

This week has been an interesting week in the realm of missionary life for sure, and it's been kind of a big change as far as being in the Chinese program for so long,. I was and still am so used to that plane of missionary work. It's been a good week for sure, and we are working hard, but there is something mission from the work, something is mission and I haven't been able to put my finger on it yet.

This week on monday we had a great day for sure, our zone is the biggest zone in the mission with 35+ missionaries here. It's pretty big, well most of the zone met at the stake center in Menlo Park and we played a game called slaughterball which is basically just dodgeball... free for all dodgeball. It's pretty fun. That night we had dinner with Hermana Matute, we had spaghetti, which was really good, lots of vegetables. Got to meet her three kids, she has identical twin daughters named Mariela and Elizabeth, and then a son named Armando. The twin daughters are really lovely girls, they just turned 11 and they are just smart little girls. Armando, he is a funny kid, he is like 8 or 9 and just is a crack up. It was a good dinner, Hermana Matute is known for her missionary mindedness in this ward so we'll keep our focus on missionary work with her when we are over at her house.

Tuesday. So I have been having really bad pain in my stomach lately, on my right side specifically, and so I have been in contact with Sister Abrahms our mission doctor for the past few days just keeping up with her through the weekend, and Monday she called and said that she thinks it may be appendicitis, so if I had any really bad pain in the right side again that I need to call her, so anyway Tuesday morning comes around, and I wake up, pray, and stand up, and I just felt really sharp bad pain in my side, and so I called her, and she said just go to the hospital and get it checked out, so I listen to her, and the zone leaders take me to El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, and I get checked in within like 15 minutes and they have me set up for all sorts of tests, and so they do blood tests, urine tests, and even a cat scan on me, and everything turned out to be null nothing nil, just nothing. Nothing was wrong with me, so they said it's probably just over stress, and muscle tension in the abdomen, so that was that.

We headed off from the hospital after that, and got In-N-Out burger with the zone leaders (a proper way to celebrate a "nothings wrong" diagnosis from the doctors, right?) so that was delicious of course. After we got home I rested for a little bit since taking tons of blood out and having a lot of iodine shoved into you can take a lot out of you... hmm. We got to work again after that, and did all sorts visits and got one lesson that day, but that night was a pretty cool experience. Brother Ruiz is a guy in our ward, and he's a professional cook. He studied culinary arts in Japan for a long time, and so everytime we go to his house he makes us a 4-5 course meal (he's in catering business anyway) so every single Tuesday he invites all 6 of the spanish missionaries in the ward. He didn't have time to make food for us this week so he brought us to one of his favorite restaurants in the area called, called "Paradise" in Redwood City. It's Persian (Iranian) food. We got there and there was like no one there at all, and so I was thinking hmm I guess this place is not that popular but we sat down, and saw the menu, and it was really simple. you could pick kebabs or a lamb shank, or a lamb stew. Super simple. Brother Ruiz ordered for me pretty much, he got me a ground beef kebab and a chicken kebab with a side of basmati rice and a charred fire roasted jalapeno (or 3...) It was so good. Mom you would have loved this place, Anissa you would have liked it too. I was just so super good. They treated us like kings because they knew Brother Ruiz has a lot of power in the food world.

Wednesday! Wednesday is a day filled with a lot of service for us. In the morning we had a service opportunity with an organization called EHP which basically feeds the poor and provides toys for less privileged children. We got there and we were doing food stuff with helping people load food into their cars, and I had a chance to meet a Chinese gal going to school in the area at Palo Alto College named Tingting 婷婷 or Christina was her English name, and she was awesome, she grew up in Boston, and she is super American, she doesn't speak Chinese like at all (Kinda like Julianna) but she can understand. We talked to her the whole time as service just asking us questions about the church, and about everything in our lives. It was really cool. The service provides lunch so we kept talking, and she said "Can I just shadow you guys for a day? I just was to see how you guys do it.." We were able to get her number, and this week we texted her a couple times, she flew back to Boston for the holidays but when she gets back the Stanford Singles ward sisters will be teaching her.

We hurried home, and on the way home I noticed my back wheel was wobbling a whole lot, so we just went to Palo Alto Bikes to get my back wheel trued out. They trued it after about 2 hours, and in that 2 hours we got a ride with other Elders to do weeding at Stanfords huge nature preserve area thing. We did that for about an hour and picked up my bike, and everything seemed to be fine. After that we didn't have much time for visits before our 7 oclock correlation with our ward mission leader at the church, so we did what we could, and headed up to Redwood City to the chapel for the correlation. He was 20 minutes late, and so we starrted at 7:30. It took too long and our ride took too long get back to pick us up so we weren't dropped off until almsot 9.... pretty annoying that we didn't get to do any work at all, but tried making it up.

Thursday and Friday were both harder days, but we really did work hard and we were able to have 3 lessons. My bike broke down twice, the wheel ended up needing replacing. (Sorry about all the charges on my credit card lately) 

Saturday and Sunday were both really productive days, I got a flat on Saturday night though, I fixed it with some patches really quickly though. We were about to get 4 lessons on Saturday and Sunday and now this next week were are going to be working on a lot of finding people prepared to receive the gospel.

To tell you more about my area, East Palo Alto is pretty dangerous and has a lot of crime, but it's fun. Menlo Park is nice, and is a very rich town. Redwood City is half nice half not. Half of the not so nice part is little Michoacan, and there are tons of Mexicanos there. The other half is just really nice and it's on the top of mountains overlooking the bay. Really quite nice.

My spanish is improving for sure, and i'm working on conjugation and other things. I'm doing okay, and still need a lot of practice but I am doing well with it so far. People still can't believe that I can speak chinese here, my companion always introduces me as that missionary that speaks chinese here. so it's pretty interesting to see the reactions.

We went to Ikea this week with the other elders to use the bathroom and there was a ton of Chinese people there and they were pretty amazed I don't really understand fully the breadth of the task of learning this language but I am beginning to understand now. I have less than 8 months left here on my mission, and time is going by too quick. I will be home sooner than later.

Thanks everyone, 

If anyone wants to get me a late Christmas present, a bike computer that tracks the mileage and speed and all that would be awesome. Trying to keep track of that. 

Love, 

Elder Sanchez

16 de diciembre 2013

Well it's here now, the time where I am away from the Chinese program, I am now serving in the Redwood City 2nd Ward (Spanish). It is a Spanish ward of course, I am serving with Elder Phllips, a pretty quirky kid from Virginia. He's like 5"2' and 110 lbs. He is a small kid. This ward is known for baptizing like crazy in this mission. It had nearly 50 baptisms in 2012 and it's just really active in the realm of baptisms for sure.

This area has been pretty interesting this past week for sure, and so I'm learning spanish here I suppose. I know enough spanish to ask simple questions, and to greet, and things like this, and maybe respond clearly. But that's about it, but we'll see how this goes. President Watkins told me only 2 transfers here and I'll get transferred back into Chinese. I am hoping back to Fremont, but we shall see about that. If I get transferred to Fremont then I'll be able to train there. That will be pretty interesting.

Day 1 here in the field, we went around on our bikes (yes we are pretty much full bikes) meeting different members and seeing the area more. The Redwood City 2nd ward has 6 missionaries involved, 2 sets of Elders, 1 set of Sisters, all with their own areas, we cover the central zone or middle zone, which includes the south of Redwood City, all of Menlo Park, and the north part of East Palo Alto. In South Redwood City, that whole section of town is called Little Michoacan, because it has the most people settled from Michoacan there... outside of Michoacan. East Palo Alto is considered the most dangerous part of the South/West Bay Area , but not to worry, missionaries haven't gotten hurt there.  It's a pretty interesting town though.

So yeah, this week was good, we only had 10 lessons, which is pretty low for the spanish program, but we tried out best to work hard, it's a different animal on bikes for sure. We are trying not to waste time, the first couple days I got here I noticed a lot of wasting time was happening, and so I think that is part of the reason I'm here is because I'm not one for wasting time. So we cut back on that and got into a groove by Saturday. Hopefully it keeps up, because there are baptisms here to have, people to find, and people to teach, and every minute could be put towards those people.

Trying as best as I can this transfers to change more, and to do better as a missionary, and I think I've been successful at that so far. I am trying my best to keep my Chinese (there are Chinese people up here, just not as many as Cupertino or Sunnyvale though) and balance it out with learning Spanish. President Watkins said he wants me to balance them, and try my best to learn both while i'm here more. He said meet with members up here that speak Chinese every 3 weeks to do a refresher, so I get to see Christina again! Woohoo. She only lives a mile from our apartment (We live in Menlo Park, she lives in Palo Alto) so every 3 weeks I get to go over there. I'm pretty happy about that.

We are biking probably on average 10-15 miles a day, which is pretty nice, even though we don't have a scale currently in our apartment, I can feel like I am losing weight... hmm. It's a too bad we haven't eaten much Mexican food since I've been here. Mostly other countries food so far. My first dinner was like a 5 star restaurant with Brother Ruiz and his family, he is a professional Chef, he studied in Japan for 5 years in cooking school, and so our dinner with a 4 course meal (literally), so that was pretty awesome. We have papusas on Friday night, theres a member that owns a restaurant thats based out of their home, and so we can go get some papusas from them when we don't have a dinner. I'm not the biggest fan of papusas, I don't know if it was because I just wasn't that hungry when I ate them or what, but they aren't super good or anything. The best thing I ate this week was home made Caldo de Res by a member named Sister Teresa Sanchez, she's from Michoacan I think. It was really really good, I couldn't finish more than one bowl though sadly.

Okay, now onto investigators: We have quite a few, a lot of them are consistently meeting with missionaries too. I think the whole ward has about 20 progressing investigators among the 3 sets of missionaries right now. I haven't met many of them yet, but I have met 3 sets (it seems to be a common theme that either both husband and wife or girlfriend boyfriend for that matter investigate or they don't at all) so we have Juan y Jenny, who want to be baptized, but they aren't currently legally married since a divorce is still in the works in Mexico (pretty common thing here...) and we have Cesar who is a husband of a very active member in the ward, he told us this past week he isn't ready to be baptized yet but he wants to. We met another couple last night that were investigators, but I forgot their names... one from was Michoacan and the other from Durango I think. Really nice couple, we shared with them about the true spirit of Christmas.

I am pretty grateful to be here, and I know that being here is for a specific reason of course. I am also glad I can keep up my Chinese. I have realized that I really enjoy speaking Chinese a lot better than Spanish, but that's probably because my Chinese is like 100 times better than my Spanish, Chinese is a simple and beautiful language, i'm really excited to study it more in depth when I get home, perhaps move onto other Asian languages... Japanese... right mom?

So that was the week! I hope next week brings more surprises. Off to week 2 of the transfer already.

Elder Sanchez

For those who want to know, my address is

858 Coleman Ave Apt G

Menlo Park CA 94025

每周信函2013年1​2月9日

So here it is, the end of my time here in Cupertino. I have officially ended here starting today. I will move on to other areas of the Lord's vineyard here in this fine mission. This week has been an amazing week for sure, and I am grateful that I was able to end in such a way to make it the best week ever.

I think this week has been really awesome, we worked hard and it paid off, and I had a feeling I was going to be getting transferred all week, so I started preparing mentally for this change. 

I am grateful for the time I spent here, I love the Branch President, President Law, he is just the best, and I love the Branch Mission Leader, Brother Davis and his family. They are also just awesome. It's been a good week, of ups and downs. 

The biggest thing this week really was working towards new investigators, and so we tried hard, but it didn't seem to pay off just yet. Just when we thought things weren't doing well, on Sunday we had a gal that has been coming to church every week get invited by a member to take the lessons and she said yes. Super cool. Her name is Angela, and she just graduated from grad school, and so right now she is job hunting here in the South Bay Area. 

Ellie and Rittas lesson this week also went pretty awesome, we planned on teaching the law of chastity and also go over the baptismal interview questions with them. The Law of Chastity was easy for them no problems, and going over the baptismal interview questions was not that bad either, they had a lot of questions about the interview questions and all of that but it ended up being really good. Up to this point Ritta has not prayed at all with us, and we were pretty determined to help her pray. So we were going to pray to end, and it was brought up about baptism again by Sister Davis, and Ellie said she was going to be baptized for sure, she said "I really like December 7th, but that's tomorrow, so how about next December 7th?" she was being serious and probably not serious at the same time, but we are pretty sure that she will be baptized very soon. They were both worried a bit that I wasn't going to be there since I was probably being transferred, but I assured them I was going be to able to come back and be there. We wanted to end, and I asked Ritta to pray, and she was communicating to me with her expressions saying "I don't even know what to say!" But we all just told her that it was okay, and she prayed, and it was really good. She said "I want to join the church once I know more" and so it was an awesome prayer.

Christina! I will miss her so much, she has become like a little sister to me, she is just a funny gal. Sunday was her 14th birthday, and so now she is 14 years old, and she is doing so well with everything. We met with her on Wednesday night instead of Sunday because of scheduling stuff, but I was on exchanges with Elder Baldwin, and it was a good lesson helping her understand more on baptism and the atonement, and she seems to understand those basics really well. She is learning English rather quickly, but according to her mom, not as quick as all of the other friends of hers that were adopted, but she is getting there for sure. I will truly miss her! 

Another person that hasn't had a very good time lately is Wu Tao, he was going to be baptized a few months ago, well now his visa has been denied twice, and his current visa will expire on Dec 23. He is currently appealing, and so if he doesn't win the appeal, he will have to be forced out of the US sometime in the next couple of weeks. Pretty sad, he made dinner for us on Thursday night, and it was really good. Too many bones though, little fishy bones and pretty annoying. I will miss Wu Tao as well quite a lot. 

Sunday was a pretty bittersweet day going to church for the last time here, everyone was very surprised that I was going, and I was able to talk to nearly everyone and able to share my testimony and my thanks during Sacrament meeting. Pres. Law isn't too happy that I am leaving the area, he called last night and asked if we had dinner, and we said yes, so he asked how he could get me to come to his house instead, so I told him we could go on splits, and then that would enable me to go visit a few last people before I left for good on Tuesday. So Tonight we are going to split up and i'm going to Pres Laws house and Elder Fisher is going to Ren Feiyan's house to help her son with math stuff. That worked out really well.

The Christmas Party was another fun part of the week, we had it on Saturday night (it was 40º here in Silicon Valley that night, a blistering cold for the people out this way) so we all came and had a great party in the church, with all sorts of Chinese food, from every scope of the Chinese world, Northeast China, South China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singaporean. All there, it was delicious and there was nearly 20 non-members there that night. It was awesome, we had a skit about a normal day in missionary life that we did, with Elder Pekipaki as Santa Clause and it was really funny. It was a real crowd-pleaser. 

Well that was just about my week here, I am pretty sad to leave, but so ready for a new start. Pray for me this week that i'll be able to do well in my new area. I am going English speaking for 2 transfers for sure, by the way. 

Love you all,

Have a great week!

Elder Sanchez

每周信函2013年12月2每

Pretty crazy week, it started off with a pretty great p-day, we all were at the stake center playing volleyball, the only companionship that was missing was campbell. So anyway. We played volleyball monday afternoon and we had a pretty decent monday night, nothing miraculous happened, but we got work done.

This brings us to Tuesday, I had my district meeting on tuesday talking a lot about companionshjp unity in teaching, and we did a lot of roleplays to practice teaching in unity, it was really good. Everyone in the district is doing well to be unified, and so that was a really good district meeting. Since Sister Livingston doesn't really like chinese food that much, Sister Yu hasn't had any chances to eat any real Chinese food at all the whole time she's been here in California, so I set up a district lunch at a place called  刘家香 Liu Jia Xiang in english and it's a place known for it's good Shanghai cuisine, and I've been there twice before so I knew it was pretty good food, so every companionship ordered something, and it wasn't enough food, 8 people 4 dishes, just didn't work out well, but everyone enjoyed it, especially the Xiaolongbao, the dumplings we all got in China when we went to Shanghai that have soup inside. Their Xiaolongbao's are just super. It was a delicious lunch, just not enough food!

After lunch, we headed to DeAnza College and wrote up a huge mural of the Plan of Salvation with the sisters, while we were doing that, we played a game with Sister Yu called "What part of China is that person from?" and I have gotten quite good at guessing, people from different parts of China have slightly different features. It was pretty funny. Sister Yu is pretty funny, I was telling her how people think I'm half-blood Chinese, and so she thought that was really funny, in the middle of contacting she was talking to a guy from Shanghai that was checking out the huge mural we wrote in chalk on the ground, and since he was a male, she wanted to hand him over to me, so the way she wanted to do that was saying in Chinese "Oh! See him? He's half blood Chinese... his chinese is really good!" and so I started talking to him and she slowly walked away and looked for more people to talk to. I ended up have 2 lessons. It was good, I taught a lesson to a gal named Brenda and she was ABC (american born Chinese) and she was really interested, a group of her friends came and were like "Let's go eat! Let's go!" and she was like "ehh... umm... I'll catch you later" and they were like "Do you want anything" and she was like "No, i'll be okay..." and she was pretty insistent on staying and listening to more, but I told her she ought to go (we were already done explaining the kingdoms and prayer so I was pretty much done teaching) I asked her for her number, and she didn't want to give it... so I gave her ours and she walked away. She was a pretty special lesson I think, she was really intently listening and had a lot of good questions. I feel bad I probably won't ever see her again.

After all that contacting we got 2 lessons and like 60 contacts, pretty good. We went to help my favorite member of the branch Jinghao finish up his BYU Hawaii stuff, he's pretty self conscious about his english level, so he doesn't like to call BYU about his stuff because he feels like they don't understand him (he really has good english though) so we did that for about an hour and helped him settle all of his housing requirements and airport shuttle stuff and all that, and since we've helped him so much (and we didn't have a dinner scheduled for that night) he took us out to eat. I love Jinghao, he's probably one the best friends i've made here on my mission. We went to a chinese restaurant by the Cupertino Square plaza (which is like 12 chinese restaurants, and huge chinese grocery store, chinese medicine shops, etc) and went to a place that the english name is "Nutrition Restaurant" but in Chinese it's 世界尚馆 or something to that extent, it basically just means "the world restaurant"... a lot of the dishes there were Dongbei (northeastern) dishes from Chinese. Beijing, Shenyang, Harbin, Qingdao, etc. It was really good, we got 4 dishes for 3 people... a lot, but we ate almost all of it. Chinese food is just a ton better than American food (I betray my country willingly on this one)

We tried to get stuff done between Jinghao's dinner and the english class, but it was pretty hard to do so, because we had to give the english elders in cupertino a ride somewhere, so we didn't get much done in that 40 minutes, but we had our English class, and only one student came... our investigator Ellie (jinghao came too, but that's because he wanted Elder fisher to help with his essays) anyway Ellie told this super long story in Chinese last week that I had no idea what it meant it was pretty poetic in a way (she said she made it up herself) and I told her (kind of jokingly) to translate it into English for her homework for the week... welll.... she actually did it. 3 pages of english translation. She said she spent like 4 hours doing it, and so she asked if we could make corrections on it so that it would be a proper english story. So for an hour I sat next to her and dissected the Chinese version and looked at the english version to see if the meanings were closely related (translation from Chinese is pretty difficult) so we did that for an hour+ and barely got through 5 or 6 paragraphs. I have to admit this story is pretty poetic, but at the same time it's not written Chinese, it's more spoken Chinese written down on paper. It was a lot of fun, really got my brain working hard.

Wednesday! Normal morning up until we had a work project at the McClellan Ranch Park in Cupertino that we go to every week called "Greenfingers" it's this huge nature preserve park in the middle of cupertino. Anyway the lady that runs it named Joann just loves the missionaries, so we were there with Campbell Elders and all 4 of the spanish speaking sisters, it's a pretty fun project, and I really like Joann. Basically we just take out all of the non-native species plants that we find (we are pretty much trained to spot all of these evil evil plants from a mile away and eradicate them command) It's fun, Smilo Grass is the worst.

We went home changed quick and went to DeAnza once again with the Vietnamese speaking elders since DeAnza is mostly Chinese and has a viet population as well, so we split up and went to find people to teach. We went back to our mural that we did and the School Disciplinary officer came up to us and asked us if we did the mural and Elder Bruggeman (the viet elder) said "No, but I know who did" and so anyway long story short, we can't draw murals on the ground with chalk, and we volunteered to clean it off the next day.

Elder Bruggeman and I decided to take advantage of the mural while it was still there, and so we did, he got 1 lesson with a guy (for like an hour+) and I had two lessons with people. It was pretty good, a lot of the people on campus are wary of giving their phone numbers out, but I was able to get one.

After DeAnza we helped Helena out at the church with some of her essay stuff that she has had a lot of trouble with. We helped for a while like an hour or so and she really appreciated it.

We then had dinner, with the Peak's. Favorite members in the Steven's creek ward. It was a good dinner, pizza and salad. They didn't want to cook because they were going to be too much cooking the next day for thanksgiving. So pizza and salad it was.

After dinner we had like 10 people to stop by at in Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Woodside, etc. The very north part of our area (about a 30 minute drive from Cupertino to Woodside) we didn't have much success but it was fun. We only had one person answer the door, and it wasn't the person we were looking for, but she was Chinese, so we talked to her for a little while, and gave her a mormon.org card. We headed home for the night after that.

Thursday, hmm. Thursday was thanksgiving, and everyone knows how hard it is to visit people on thanksgiving unless you set up dinners with them. Some elders will set up 2 or 3 or even 4 dinners on thanksgiving with families so they can keep visiting people. Elder Pekipaki (yes he's tongan) told me about his trainer in Monterey set up 3 dinners in a row on thanksgiving so they could be busy all day and so the week leading up to thanksgiving his trainer Elder Phelps (who is awesome, by the way) would go to the Round Table Pizza buffet every day for lunch and stretch out their stomachs for thanksgiving. Anyway they survived the first 2 dinners, but the last dinner was a tongan dinner (there are tons of tongan people in monterey) and tongan dinners are just absolutely huge, let alone thanksgiving. So anyway they got through what must have been 4 pounds of food, plus a huge platter of pie and ice cream. He told me he felt like he was going to die, literally. Anyway they left the house after dinner and Elder Phelps told Elder Pekipaki he couldn't drive because he was going to die, and so Elder Pekipaki got in the seat and Elder Phelps handed him the GPS, and right when that happened, Elder Phelps leaned forward and threw up all of his thanksgiving.

Our Thanksgiving was filled with fun, we had a Turkey bowl as a zone in the morning from 9-11:30. That was super fun. I got a pair of cleats for free and so I got to use those. It was a fun morning.

After the Turkey bowl we went to Deanza once again to clean up the plan of salvation mural from the ground with the sisters and the viet elders. We got 99% of it up, but we had a few spots we couldn't scrub away, hopefully it will eventually come off.

We did a couple visits to people without any success except one guy, he opened the door and wanted to set up a time to meet with us, his name was Mike Ji, he is from Nanjing, China. Pretty cool!

Our dinner was with a Taiwanese family called the Chuangs. Bro. Chuang has been in Utah for the past 3 months so we were glad to see him again. Our thanksgiving was less than traditional, nothing like last year (being in a half english speaking ward...) so we had the turkey, mashed potatoes... but that was the only traditional stuff. Crab legs, chinese and vietnamese meat and vegetable platter, apple cider punch with fruit. It was a decent dinner, but far from the norm. We were appreciative of them having us over nonetheless and we really did enjoy the meal and their company. Bro Chuang is a native Taiwanese so he looks like a Tongan or Samoan kind of, and he has a hearty laugh like they do too. It's just fun to be with them, they are a really nice family.

We just ended our night with trying contacting again, not many people were there though. Friday was pretty slow, but we got things done, I think the highlight of our friday was definitely meeting with Bro Wang, he's a non member with an active relief society president wife. His wife wasn't home and he invited us over for dinner, we had a delicious turkey and ham dinner with rice, and egg rolls. Really good dinner, and we got to know brother wang more on a personal level rather than calling him to repentance and inviting him to be baptized all the time. It was nice, we read the scriptures in chinese with him towards the end of Mosiah chapter 2, all about obeying God's commandments. We realized he needs to learn himself, we can't teach him directly or else his walls go up and it's impossible to work with.

Saturdays highlights were definitely meeting with Ellie and Ritta, they were progressing so well, we focused on the commandments, Tithing, Sabbath and Prayer. None of them were a problem except Ritta doesn't quite want to pray at all yet, at least in public. It was a super long lesson because Ellie and Sister Davis get on tangents that are really hard to bring back to the lesson, it was almost 2 hours long. They totally agreed with everything, except Ritta doesn't know how to pray, she doesn't know what to say she says.

After them, we visited Shen Mama, she's the oldest member of our branch, she's 97 years old, and she's still pretty full of life. We talked about the things we were thankful for. She is a sweet woman, and she was telling us about how when she was reading Jesus The Christ (yes they have a chinese translation) how important the Redeemer is in our lives, and how she can't pick up that book and read it without crying. She bore simple and powerful testimony of Christ.

After Shenmama, we had the Gao family for dinner with Brother Tsai there as well. We had hot pot and we knew it was going to be a pretty long dinner appointment as soon as we saw that hot pot on the table. It takes like 2 hours to eat hotpot, and it really takes up a missionaries night. But we sat down, and it was cantonese style hot pot, a lot of fishy things, a lot of meatballs, and a lot of other interesting stuff. You make your own sauce to put the cooked food in, and I made my own, and I wanted it TRUE cantonese style, so they offered me to put a raw egg and mix it into my sauce that we mixed up, it was a good dinner for sure.

Sunday, the last day of the week, we had a wonderful fast Sunday. In the middle of branch council we got a call from some Elders in the San Jose 16th ward, saying their recent convert brought her exchange student to church and how we needed to be there to invite her to meet with us, so in the middle of branch council we left (with permission of course) and went the 25 minute drive to the San Felipe building, we met her, and her name is Jenny Yan, she's from Shanghai, and will be going to DeAnza next semester (perfect!) we got to know her, got her number, and then headed back to church.

Church was just awesome, Christina the 13 year old girl from China was there at sacrament meeting with us and Sister Yu was able to go meet her too. It was a great fast and testimony meeting. Throughout the day, we met with Helena to help out with some stuff, the Juang's and taught about the Plan of Salvation, and finally we had dinner/lesson with the McQuinn's who are the family that Christina was adopted into. We had a lesson about praying in English, and she is pretty sensitive about her english but she said 2 prayers in English! It was awesome. We brought up baptism and seeing what her parents thought of baptism in the future and Sister McQuinn was very open to bringing up Christina being baptized sometime next year but Brother McQuinn was pretty nervous about it. She asked us to plan a lesson on baptism for next time to help Christina understand what it means to be baptized.

That was the week, a lot happened this week for sure!

每周信函2013年11月25日

This week has been sickly, and I've been sick all week, but today I am finally getting better, taking dayquil, cepacol tablets, and drinking "airborne" twice a day, I think I'm finally getting over the sickness.

The sickness didn't keep me home for too long, just the first day, which was Thursday.

But before that, Monday through Wednesday were definitely really good days, Monday was a good prep-day. We did a lot, and were able to go to costco to buy groceries and everything. We did the normal thing, went to the stake center, played sports and board games. The usual deal for a p-day here in the Saratoga zone. That night we had dinner at 6 with the Stevens Creek elders, I don't remember exactly who it was but it was a good dinner, we went contacting with those Elders at Ranch 99 and got a few phone numbers. That was good.

Tuesday! Tuesday we had a lot of work to do in the area of finding, but that night we had a really busy night. We were in the very far reaches of East San Jose, out by the mountains contacting former investigators and old referrals out that way, and we find someone that actually wanted to listen, that was cool. They live right next to the mountains, we went and knocked on their door on that night (a cold dark and rainy night for the Bay Area) and young gal opened the door and was happy to see us anyway we asked her if Wenny was there (the name we had on the former investigator) she said she was home but busy, and so we introduced ourselves, introduced the message of the gospel, and asked if she would like to meet and learn more about it, she said sure and so we got a phone number, and so we'll call soon and set up a time to meet.

After that we had dinner with the Boyd's, Sister Boyd is from Hunan, China, one of my favorite places to eat from. Hunan is known for their delicious spicy food (along with Sichuan) and so I was looking forward to dinner with the Boyd's all night. They are a really nice family, Brother Boyd is from australia, and he still has a little bit of an aussie accent still. The food was so good by the way. After dinner, we headed off to the church to teach our English class. Our investigator Ellie said she was going to come this week, so our one student Rocky would have an actual classmate for the first time. Ellie did indeed show up, and we had a really good class. We taught Ellie useful phrases like "You go girl!" and the difference between "I believe you" and "I believe in you"

Overall a good tuesday! Now Wednesday was a little bit more active as far as lessons went, we met with 2 non members that we met for the first time on DeAnza's campus, plus helping Helena with her BYU stuff. She's having a really hard time getting the BYU stuff to work. President Watkins offered to help, but he hasn't got back to us yet. We'll see how that works. Wednesday night I started feeling sick, but we worked until 9 pm anyway. We had dinner with the Lin family at 7 and had some delicious Pidan Zhou (皮蛋粥）which basically is really old preserved egg (it's black in color) in Hong Kong style poor mans porridge. It was not the first time i've had this dish, but I enjoy it, it's not really bad, but it's not something to go crazy over. Elder Fisher might have had a hard time with it.

Thursday I was home sick all day with Elder Davis, we stole all the '3rd companions' in the zone from the tri-panionships and I stuck it out with Elder Davis. We cleaned the apartment all day after I had done resting as much as I could. It looks really good now.

Let's move on to Saturday! So saturday we didn't do much work, but we did go to the temple, we have an investigator named Sida that wanted to take the temple visitors center tour, and check it out, so we brought him up there to see. We set it up with the sisters at the temple, there was one Chinese speaking and one english speaking that helped us. Sister Kwok (郭）from Hong Kong and sister stewart from Utah. It was a good tour, and I think Sida and the friend that he brought really enjoyed it. We didn't stay long because we had Stake Conference from 3-8 that day (and I was feeling really sick again) so we left with the member missionary that brought us up to Oakland and hurried off to stake conference. Stake conference this year was really awesome, all about hastening the work of salvation, and being better member missionaries. We enjoyed it, and President Watkins talk was the best as always. He's really funny, I feel like he has a very similar thought process to me. Basically he broke down his day to almost every detail up to that point in which he gave that talk, and talked about how he had 8 meaningful gospel conversation that very day, without even making it hard.

At the end of the night we went contacting again for the 30 minutes we had left, and Sunday was here. The last session of stake conference, and the topic was all about Thanksgiving for what we have, it was a huge stake conference, filled the whole place, luckily us Chinese speakers get a room to ourselves for translation. We had 2 investigators come to Stake conference, Ellie (and not Ritta...... >.<) and Angela (we met her at 99 ranch a few weeks ago, she loves church so far, we just need to set up a time to meet with her) Both Ellie and Angela are being fellowshipped so well into the branch.

Had an interesting experience at Stake Conference, there was a man that was asked to share his talk in Spanish since we have a Spanish branch in our stake newly formed. The translator Sister Law didn't know how to translate obviously, so she was like Elder Sanchez you should translate, so I did, I went from Spanish --> Mandarin. Super weird, I didn't even think I could understand spanish that well anymore, but I feel like I provided a decent translation of his talk. The thing that surprised me most was that I knew that Endowment translated into "Investidura" ... hmm. I don't remember ever learning that word before.

We went home after Stake conference, got some lunch, rested some (still a little sick...) and headed out, we ended up visiting a member with a non-member husband to get some translation help on one of Elder Fishers stories... it was good, and we had a good time getting to be better friends with Brother Wang.

After that we visited Xiao Mama (if I haven't explained yet in a previous email, when you get to be super old like 80+ you are called by your last name and "mama" if you are a female and "bobo" if you are a male... by the way it isn't pronounced like bowbow more like bwo bwo)

We got to see her, and share a message of thanksgiving with her, it is hard to fully understand her, because she doesn't speak mandarin fully, her mandarin is filled with words from Taiwanese (not taiwanese mandarin) and Indonesian. I've gotten pretty used to her mandarin and can understand about 90% of what she says, but when new missionaries come into the area, they pretty much have no idea what she is saying.

Our dinner tonight was with the Wu family 吴， and James and Elva. James and Elva are former investigators that met with the Chinese senior couple we had like a year and a half ago. They were going to get baptized and then... tithing struck! and James decided not to go forward. Well anyway they have been coming to church pretty regularly ever since, and I have invited them to take the lessons about 3 times since i've been in this area, and James shuts me down every time. Anyway we tailored the message specifically towards him, but aimed it at everyone so that he didn't put his walls up. It was about living below your standards, and going forth according to the knowledge that you have, and obeying the commandments. It was a great message, and we invited them to look at their lives and find that one principle or commandment they could work on being better at , and take it personally and work on it.

Our last stop of the whole week was up in Palo Alto, Christina! My favorite 13 year old gal ever! We had a really great lesson with her, she is really trying to do her best to learn the gospel as its coming at her, but it's really a step by step process for her. We taught about Christ and his earthly ministry. We watched "Finding Faith in Christ" in Mandarin with her, and she enjoyed it. She commented things through out the movie like "哇，他帮助了好多人" and "他怎么做这些？" so we explained a lot of things to her, we asked her if she wanted to believe that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ were there, and she said "我相信吧" and I responded "你要相信还是你相信？"  and she responded "相信吧" she really is a sweet girl. I will miss her a lot if I get transferred away from here. I will make sure to get some pictures before transfers on the 10th. I told her I would visit her a year from now so that she can talk with me in English because by that time her english will be better than my Chinese. She was happy to hear that, but didn't believe that her English could be good in a year from now.

Great week!

Elder Sanchez 

每周信函2013年1​1月18日

We had a really great week, it started with p-day. We had lunch with Helena, last lunch with her we supposed before she became a member of the church. We went to a place that had a lot of her hometowns favorite dishes.  We had a fun p-day and had some fun play monopoly. Later,

We had the Zheng family for dinner. This family is the best, really. Just a really funny family, Clarabelle was the funniest one there, she found out a trick with her pinky where she could totally straighten her pinky except the joint at the fingertip would bend down, and she was loving it. It was really funny, she said she was an alien. Funny little girl.

We taught Edward the 1st lesson to help him prepare for baptism. It was about a 25-30 minute lesson and he seemed to understand it all really well.

The other highlights of the week were tuesday night being able to teach Rocky again and help him out with his business. He said he wants to come to church, (but) there always is a but. That's his day to rest... ... ok.

  We also on Wednesday met with Helena to go over everything for her baptism, she wanted to go over the rest of the commandments, and the rest of the Plan of Salvation and the interview questions. We were with her for about 2 hours. Pretty long time but it worked out just fine.

Her interview was that night, and she passed without any problem at all. It was one of the shortest interviews i've seen on my mission. It went really well. We gave her a blessing afterwards because she was getting a little sick, and then we walked her home.

Thursday, thursday! Zone conference, I don't know where to begin on this one,  I guess I can share my general thoughts about it. I thought it was super good. I learned a lot about obedience and being that missionary that is obedient for The Lord, and not for other people solely. I learned who I am as a missionary and I learned that constant improvement is possible, and that balance is also necessary on your mission as well. It was a good zone conference. We learned a lot about the numbers of our mission are turning around, and how we are the only mission on the west coast that their baptismal numbers are NOT going down. We are projected to get between 550-600 baptisms as a mission this year. We are the only mission that is going with reversing the trends.

Moving on to the weekend,

So this weekend a lot happened that was pretty awesome. Well first, the wait is over. Helena has been baptized and confirmed a member of this wonderful church. This picture was taken after her baptism.

First to tell you about Ellie and Ritta

Ellie and Ritta are a mother (ellie) and daughter(ritta) that have made good friends with Sister Davis (a member from taiwan who just so happens to be our branch mission leaders wife) they met about a month ago at a singing class. Anyway, this friday we had our 3rd lesson with them, we gave them a reading assignment which was to read the entire Plan of Salvation pamphlet and be prepared to learn the material in it. So we got to the Davis' home that night to teach the lesson, and we were a little caught off guard because Ellie cut her hair really short, a big change from the last week (its very stylish!) anyway we sat down and talked for a few minutes, and then we switched gears and I asked her (and I'm not sure if she just wanted to say it or misunderstood me) "Who would you like to say the prayer?" anyway she didn't even blink and she just started saying the prayer.

After the prayer had finished, we asked them if they had a chance to read it, and they said yes of course, and Ritta who in previous lessons didn't seem super interested in what we had to say got really excited about it and pretty much taught the whole thing in detail to us in like 5 minutes.  It was quite good, they both knew their stuff really well and you could tell that they had really taken time to read it through carefully. We started off with the lesson, and we taught it through and through (not without distractions of course...) and got to the end, talked about the three Kingdoms and briefly covered that (we had to leave for another lesson) and then Sister Davis testified, and then asked Ellie she said in chinese "Hey Ellie didn't you have something you wanted to tell the missionaries?" anyway she said she wanted to be baptized but she wasn't sure how to make a goal and she said she wouldn't be very good as a member to start off with...

She ended up saying "I can't be baptized because when I go to China, I will miss a week of church" and all this (she was being totally sincere, not just making excuses) and so we asked her if she would think about the day December 7th in the next week, and come back with an answer and she said that she would. She later explained that ever since she started coming to church in the beginning of October she doesn't drink alcohol anymore and she doesn't seem to know why she doesn't want to drink it anymore. Pretty interesting stuff haha. We asked her to read our next pamphlet "The Gospel of Jesus Christ" and set a firm goal for baptism for her and her daughter.

After that lesson on Friday night, we had a pretty interesting experience with the infamous Wang Chongqi. He is one of the beloved non-member husbands of the branch (literally, everyone loves him and he comes to church quite a bit) but he is a very difficult investigator. Anyway I knew how he was, and i've been in their home off and on for the past 6 months for dinner appointments and things like this, so I kinda knew what we were getting into when we invited him to take the lessons again. Anyway this had been our second lesson, our first lesson had gone really really and he said that he had never learned anything from missionaries like that before. So we were determined to get to the root of his problem and his reasoning for not wanting to join the church. Elder Fisher and I had talked about it a lot and tried to come to a conclusion on why he wasn't wanting to be baptized. We figured it was the Word of Wisdom, and tea and coffee in specific. Anyway we got there, and we asked him some thought provoking questions like "What are the pros and cons of knowing God exists?" and things like this, and he said none. Anyway we got the point where we knew he didn't want to do personal prayers and we knew he didn't want to do them because he didn't want to receive an answer. So we talked to him about what was keeping him back. He said he didn't want to give up tea and coffee, and that he said he doesn't know whats wrong with it. Anyway we talked to him about trying to give it up and seeing the blessings that stem from it.

So we got to that point, and he likes to push back on the missionaries even when they are trying to bear sincere testimony, so anyway he said "Why don't you try tea and coffee for yourself and tell me that it is NOT bad?" We didn't want to get into that too much, so we bore testimony, tried to commit him to doing it, and left. Pretty hard lesson, but his heart isn't ready quite yet to receive us.

This brings us to Saturday, Helena's baptism.

Let's just say it was an incredible busy morning filled with exchanges with other elders, waiting for another baptism to finish, adding more warm water to the font, exchanging back, and setting up but at 12:30 we got started, we got some really great pictures, and it was a wonderful baptism. We sang "When I am Baptized" as the opening song, and had a great talk by Sister Catanzaro. Helena was baptized, and that was it! We had another  talk on the Holy Ghost by Sister Tiu, and closed with "I am a Child of God" we stayed afterwards to congratulate her. I wrote a note to her bearing my testimony and telling her how proud of her I was and how she has been an influence for good not only for the people around her but for my family as well. She gave me a wallet she bought in china because she knew how much old wallet was falling apart. I've never been given a gift at a baptism before :P... Julianna came to her baptism and a whole lot of other people. It was good to see all of them.

Helena texted us throughout the day saying how thankful and grateful she was. I was happy that she was happy for how her baptism came out. She was very thankful for the note I gave her too. The next day we had her confirmed in Sacrament meeting. Brother Hessel her host father confirmed her, and it was a very joyous occasion. After the confirmation I told her "You made it." and she responded with "I know. I did it" she was so happy.

I am happy, and also sad. The church has gained a faithful member of the church, and we lost the best investigator ever.

Later that day, President Watkins called, let us know how proud of the baptism he was, and asked about the email we sent him about Helena not being able to apply for BYU because she was short a couple credits for transferring. He said he was going to call us back and pull some strings for her to get in this next fall. Isn't he the best mission president ever?

The last highlight of the week was with Christina the young girl from China. I love her so much, she is just the best ever. We had dinner with them once again, and so we had a good time looking at the pictures of her since she has come to America while we were waiting for dinner. Makes me want to adopt! Anyway, had dinner, and then afterwards we talked about what Christ does for us in our lives and how important he is. We talked about how he can heal us, and talked about he can heal her. Christina's left arm is really not very healthy, and hasn't been fully functioning since she was born, she said she doesn't have enough energy in that arm to do much with it. She was pick things up and move them, but nothing that takes a lot of dexterity. She told us a story that was pretty hard to translate at first because it was kind of vague, but as time went on she got more specific. She said that she was visiting a friends house when she was in China, and she was on the second floor area where they have the AC units, and she said she was by a unit and a electrical cord electrocuted her arm really badly. This was when she was 9 years old. It was the same arm that didn't function very well. She told us how for about 3 or so months how that arm was aching and hurt so much and how she had to peel the peeling skin off of her arm for 3 months. Her parents were not very happy to hear this story because they didn't  know this had happened. They asked us to ask her if her arm now is worse or better than it was before that accident. Anyway it turns out her arm is just about the same than it was before that accident. So they were happy that it ended up that way. They are taking Christina to a physical therapy doctor at Stanford on Thursday to see how they can bring back full dexterity to that arm for her.

That was the week, been reflecting a lot on the past 6 or 7 months in this area, and how good a friend Helena has been. I feel like my time here in Cupertino is coming to close with this baptism. It may very well be the end of the time here, but only time with tell. We will know by December 7th.

Thanks everyone, a lot to read this week,

Elder Sanchez

每周信函2013年1​1月12日

So this week was pretty busy..

Helena is being baptized this Saturday!

I really don't know what to write here besides we had a good week! We taught 20 lessons like usual, and we had a lot of success. We had an awesome time teaching Christina (the 13 year old girl recently adopted from China)

Thursday we had our first lesson with Alice in a few weeks, we were planning on teaching the restoration again with her and probably hand her off to the sisters, but we ended up teaching about Alma 32 instead because she had some questions on faith. We talked about planting that seed and letting it grow, Sister Yu had a lot of really good things to talk about, it was kind of hard for her to get into it, because she is still really new, so she doesn't quite understand queues yet but she will get there. We read the whole chapter and discussed it, and then afterwards asked him what it means to plant to seed and nourish it, and she seemed to understand it pretty well.

Also on Thursday we got to see Wu Tao again, we established connection once again! We visited on Tuesday and again on Thursday, and he still would like to be baptized but he just feels like it's impossible right now because of his wife being against him in this decision. He felt the spirit again, so he really would like to keep trying to attend church. We invited him to do so, but he is just so worried about his visa, so we will have to see what happens after his visa results come through.

Over the weekend, we saw Helena twice to set up her baptism, and also with Sida Zhong, he is progressing well but doesn't seem to make time to come to church... :(

Really not much else to tell about this week, but we did have a lot of success..

Until next week!

Elder Sanchez

每周信函2013年11月4日

HEY! So all the exciting stuff always happens on the weekend, here's the wrap-up!

We started off that day by having the normal things, lunch, and contacting! Then we had district meeting at the Cera building, the sisters showed up half an hour late and left 30 minutes early. What does that add up to? a 30 minute district meeting. It was kind of annoying but we got over it.

After district meeting we got ready and took campbell back to their apartment, and went to a service with this american taiwanese lady named Jayne that lives on the top of the Seven Springs neighborhood in Cupertino (super rich, super big houses) and so we got there and she was going to help us to move a turtle habitat in her back yard, but instead we went and helped her clean her shed out, eventually the sisters showed up and we were able to serve with the sisters (the three sons are all YSA's) so got to know Sister Yu better (yes we have a chinese sister in our district! awesome!!) so excited to have her here, and to get to know her. She's from Shanghai, went to school in Finland, and got baptized there. Now she's here. So pumped. We had a really good service with them, and just had a good time, after that, we headed off to the church to meet with Rocky, he seems to have a lot of problems, he says he has a terrible life, and a terrible amount of immaturity. We asked him if he would be baptized, but he said a lot of excuses like immaturity, and wanting to be baptized in the Jordan River. Anyway that was that.

After Rocky we headed off to the Davis's home, we thought the appointment was at 7... but it wasn't. it was at 7:30. Oops. Awkward, anyway Brother Davis let us in and asked if we had eaten yet, and we hadn't (we were really starving) and so we sat down at ate leftovers from the night before (stroganoff, yum) and so we waiting for a while and Ellie was late, she called Sister Davis and was like oh man my car died, and I had to call AAA, sorry! Will be there in 10 minutes! So around 7:50 or so her and her daughter Rita showed up and we were able to talk to them about the gospel. The spirit was definitely present and I think both of them had been able to feel it. We talked about Heavenly Father, and Prayer, and also the Book of Mormon, she seemed to really like it. She said a few years ago she really did believe in God, but lately she has been able to read the Bible and the Book of Mormon and really be able to develop her faith in that. Her daughter doesn't seem super duper interesting, but she is willing to listen. Her daughter is 14 years old, so we are trying to find her friends in the branch/stevens creek to help her interest level rise.

It was a really good lesson and we really were able to commit her to reading and praying this week, and we set a return appointment with her.

Saturday!?!

Saturday morning was super good! Contacting at the flea market, got my lucky 1958 quarter (reference to the movie "No Country for Old Men") and was able to get a new 5 dollar pair of sunglasses to wear when I drive (my old pair got broken sort of) anyway got a few contacts, and then we headed up to Palo Alto to teach Christina! Looking forward all week to seeing her again, she is such a sweet heart. She really is. We talked about prayer and Heavenly Father for a while and asked her a lot of questions and translated for her father and mother.  Then we asked her if she was able to pray at the end. This is pretty much her prayer:

天父，高兴两位传教士能够来这边让我学习关于神的事情， 感谢可以有个机会学习福音带来的祝福，奉基督的名，啊门.

quite remarkable that a girl from china that has never really learned about Christ can say a prayer that is that sincere and formal. It was really really good. What a sweet girl.

After that we had a lunch, and then headed over to have a lesson with Liu Dixing and Sida.

We got there, and they were both sitting near each other, but not next to each other, because I don't think they suspected it. Anyway we introduced them to each other and turns out that they live on the same floor in their apartment building. How funny. We talked about the Gospel of Jesus Christ with Sida, and read 2 Nephi 31 with them (he had read the whole thing in his personal reading already) and he came up with the typical 3 questions that people ask from that Chapter which are "The Lamb of God" "The form of a dove" and "Baptism of Fire" and so we talked about how important these 5 steps of the gospel are, and what it means to him.

Liu Wenlan really helped a lot and was able to help Sida understand better the view of the member and everything. It was really good. After we finished with Sida, we headed over did some more visits with people in South San Jose and then rushed home, got our suits on and headed over to a child of record baptism.

We had invited the McQuinn family to the baptism since it was going to be in Chinese so that Christina could come along and watch a baptism in Chinese, so we showed up, and Brother McQuinn rearranged everyone so that we could sit next to Christina. He feels its pretty important for her to get to know us better. She likes us just fine, since last week she has opened up and talked to us a lot more. It’s really great. I was asking her questions to see what she was understanding and not understanding. She seemed to understand what was going on very generally. It was a good experience for her I think. She has grown more accustomed to me and Elder Fisher. It has been good getting to know her better this past week. Her parents are convinced that her success in learning the gospel is directly tied to how much she trusts us.

Anyway after the baptism! We headed over to a referrals house that invited us over for dinner. We showed up, and Chenxin (the guy we had been talking to over text for about a week) and two of his roommates were there. Both of them were around our age, 21 or 22. Something like that. Anyway one of the roomates was Christian and went to another Chinese Christian church, and Chenxin and this other roommate (his name is JK) are atheist/agnostic, anyway so the Christian one was like just come to our members house to have this potluck, it’ll be good. You can talk to more Chinese people and all of this stuff. We kind of responded like “well if you insist but I feel like this won’t be the best idea since we are representing another church” so anyway we end up going anyway and it’s this apartment in Cupertino, and we go in and people are pretty welcoming, but kind of thinking how weird it is that we are there, and so we just sit down with the two guys agnostic and start talking, and they are asking us questions about God and how to know him and things like this, and they are both genuinely intrigued, and so we talk for about 20 minutes, and then more people start piling into this apartment, and theres the pastor, and he comes in and is like freaking out he comes up to us and says “根我出来，好吗？so we go out with him and he says to us “我请你们离开“ but he says it pretty rudely, and so the two atheist guys were like freaking out thinking why in the world would they kick us out? But we had to leave, and they just came with us. We got to our cars and they were saying “Lets just go out to eat, we can treat you” so we got in our cars, and followed them to a place called 刘家香 which is a Shanghainese restaurant kinda close to our house, it has shanghai style dimsum and regular dinner dishes things like this, so we ordered, and we just talked about the church the whole time, they loved it. We ended up getting a return appointment with both of them. They were astonished quite literally.

We finished dinner, headed to Helena’s house, and had a quick “planning session” with her on her baptism. She just wanted to set a time and things like this. It was good. 12:30 on November 16^th.

SUNDAY!

So yeah all the exciting things happen on the weekends. The weekdays are pretty  normal and we have the usual finding and teaching but all the new invesitgators and things like this happen on the weekends.

Sunday was good, we had a good time at church, and Christina and her dad showed up for Sacrament meeting at 12:30 with us too. So she had her first all Chinese sacrament meeting. She had a lot of questions, and was intrigued by the weird accents that she heard (a lot of the congregation is Taiwanese..) and so anyway it was really good. We had a lesson with Chenxin’s friend JK and it was really good. Not much to say about it. Dinner, trying to visit people, and contacting wrapped up our weekend.

Really nice week, start of a new transfer, crossing my fingers for 11 more weeks here, we'll see.

Elder Sanchez

每周信函2013年10月28月

FAMILY! This week has been SO GOOD. Plus, I am NOT getting transferred. 6 more weeks! By the time I finish here I will have 8 months left, pretty scary. It is going by too quickly it seems.

This week was full with miracles and quite amazing things.

So we met with Helena on Friday of this week, and had a really good lesson with her, we taught her the whole plan of salvation, and she understood it a lot better. On Monday she had told us not to bring up the baptismal date at dinner, and we were wondering why she would say that, she said she wanted to set it on Sunday night, and I told her she really would (I felt like she really was) and so we had dinner with her on Monday night, and she  told us not to bring it up at all with the hessels. I had guessed why, Brother Hessel in his opening prayer didn't acknowledge Helena trying to set a baptismal date like he usually does, so that made me curious, also I asked Helena after dinner (since we didn't even see her text that said "don't bring it up" until AFTER dinner) "Hey did you set a goal yet?" kind of really gently, and she was like "uhhh.... no." and I was like "Will you set a goal to set a goal?" and she responded with a like "uhhhh"... so anyway. I was really suspicious about that.

Anyway the lesson that we had with her was a really good one, she understood the Plan of Salvation a lot more, and we had a really good time with her. At the end I asked her if she had set a date yet, and she said "well I want to know what you think" and I said "Well I think you did you just don't want to tell us yet" and she was like "Yeah, what about you Elder Fisher" and he kind of said the same thing. I asked her if it was the date she had mentioned before November 16th and she got really kind of defensive (little did i know that bringing up that specific date bothered her) so Elder Fisher said "It's that day... isn't it?" and she confirmed it... November 16th. The day has finally come that she has set a firm date to be baptized.

So this weekend, we had a couple of great little successes, but the best was Sunday night.

I'll start with Saturday first though. We had a really good day, we started off with 3 baptisms in the morning, one for the Tongans (Kineo Alfred) and two for Campbell (Bethany and Isaac Trimble) so super awesome that we had 3 baptisms in the zone. After those baptisms we had to go to some service for President Knudsen, where my companion came and picked me up(he went and did some service with Elder Davis) and anyway after that we headed off to SJS, I got a quick lunch and we had a lesson with Sida, this lesson was really pretty good. We taught a little bit more about the Restoration because he had a question about the Apostasy, so we got into the parable of the husbandmen and how the apostasy was foretold, and how it unfolded after Christ died. Explained that this is why a restoration was necessary, and it made a lot more sense for him after we explained it. We told him to do the experiment and to really look for that answer, related it to him by showing how important to everyone if this was the true church.

Anyway after that we had a language study, and had Julianna, the lady that lives in South San Jose that had us doing service for her a few months back. we had a lesson with her about the Book of Mormon and she kept trying to give us scriptures that tried to say "no more scripture" and we were giving her ones that told more about how scripture is so important, and that the stick of Ephraim and Joseph would be joined together. We taught well and made the invitation to find out for herself if these things are true. Our dinner was cancelled so we just went and did more work, went home and ate, and then did a lot of other things, including contacting, until the night was through.

Sunday! Sunday was pretty awesome, it went by too quickly. We had 8:30 correlation with Brother Davis, and that went really well. We got a call right in the middle of the correlation from someone that we on the phone as "Ye Yuan" and we had no idea who it was, I answered the phone and I could have swore he said "Is Yu Zhanglao there?"(Elder Fisher...) and so I was like hmm? Okay here he is, (he had said Wang zhanglao for the record) and anyway he was like can I come to church today? When does it start? So Elder FIsher told him it started at 10:20 and it's three hours long,  plus a linger longer at the end. Anyway he came to church! We had him there the whole time until like 2:30 (soo long... 10:30 - 2:30) anyway he loved it, he loved the members, and it was all great and dandy. All the members think he is hilarious (because he is...) so we have an appointment with him this Tuesday to help him out with some stuff to do for job applications.

Another great success was that we invited Sister Davis' friend to take the lessons with us.

(a little background into this, Brother Davis is our brand new Branch mission leader, and Sister Davis a nativeTaiwanese, and she has been taking singing classes at DeAnza and met this women Ellie a Mainlander, and she has been coming to church for about a month now) She was like oh okay, yeah, this week, what time? So we asked if Friday at 7 could work. She was like cool fine that works. Ellie Liu is the mom, and the daughter is Ritta. I learned her name, its like 刘雨轩, Liu Yu Xuan, xuan is a pretty cool word, not used like at all in modern chinese i don't think, but it works!! woohoo, we got 2 new investigators almost!!

We went contacting for a while and then headed up to Palo Alto for this lesson I have been looking forward to for about 2 weeks now. Sister McQuinn of the Palo Alto 1st ward called us, and said she had just adopted a 13 year old daughter from China, a girl named Christina, she has been in the same Orphanage since she was 2 days old, her parents left her there, and never came back. Now at the age of 13 she has only been in this family for 2 months. She has been to school like normal and had a formal education, but her maturity level is a few years younger that a typical 13 year old girl. Her orphanage is laid out dormitory style with 6 girls to a room, and only 3 beds, so two girls in each bed, and thats how she has been since day 1 pretty much. Her food is generally given to her, no choices, and so she has been used to that. But now she is living with a wonderful LDS family in Palo Alto. More opportunities and more love.

So we met her! We got up to the house and it's a super well off family, 2 biological sons, 1 adopted son from Korea, and 2 adopted daughters, 1 from Korea, and of course Christina herself. They adopted the two korean children when they were 8 months old. So we met her and her voice at first was super hard to understand, I didn't really catch much of what she said. She is a really shy girl, but laughs a lot. She is a sweet girl. We got to know her a little better, asked her random questions and she was willing to answer them. She smiles almost nonstop, you can tell she is super happy now that she is in a new home with a real family. We sat down for dinner, and she ate everything she was given, even the salad (which she said she didn't like that much). She is just happy to have different choices I think. I asked her what her favorite food here was and she said it was Tudou or Potato... she mentioned that her first night in America she had Potatoes and she loves them, it reminds her of that first day in America and all the love that she felt then.

We then taught her, and taught about who Shen2 神(god) ， and 祷告的方式，我们谈谈关于神是谁，关于天父的意思， 和我们怎么可以做家庭祷告和我们自己可以祷告。  We talked a lot about God and who he is, and a lot about that. She didn't understand who God was at first, but she started to understand after we said that her parents knew about her before she knew about them. They loved her before she knew who they were. The way she learned about God was through church and prayer. It was the same with her, she learned about her new family through a photo album that they sent. Her dad started crying when we explained that. She is such a sweet girl, she was holding hands with both her mom and dad the whole time almost. It was just really amazing. She said she is willing to learn about prayer, and do it, but she wasn't comfortable doing it right then and there. We just talked to them about it and prayed to give her a chance to hear a prayer in Chinese. She is just such a sweet little girl. We will go back every Saturday at 10 to teach her more about the gospel.

One of the best lessons I've had, it was so amazing.

In other news with investigators, it's hard to say really. Working really hard with a lot of them. Simon Lu our new investigator with his wife and his daughter are doing well. We have been keeping in contact with Melvina to get to know her better so that she would also be willing to meet with us on a regular basis as well, along with her dad. So we're pretty excited to see what comes of them. Her mom comes home Nov 11, just in time for us to start the lessons formally with them. We have a lesson with Simon this Thursday.

谢谢你们的祷告， 和你们的信心。我最近很努力讲中文，最近和helena说我的中文的口音很台湾的，所以我找得到了一个非常好的中文program叫chinesepod所以最近我们开车的时候听一些这个chinesepod的对话，帮助我培养我大陆的口音。这些对话都是北京的口音，很普通的口音。不错！

单长老

每周信函2013年1​0月21日

Hey Everyone! Forgot to mention last week, but Brenda Gamboa asked me to baptize her (How I could forgot that?) so she was baptized this past Friday, and received the holy ghost yesterday morning!

Anyway i'll start with the beginning of the week. We got 2 new investigators, and 1 sorta new investigators. We have another investigator family!!!

Simon is one of our new investigators, he is a family guy, has a wife and 17 year old daughter, he invited us over for dinner on Tuesday night, and it went really well.

Simon and his family we had dinner. We had such a fun dinner, and got to know them a lot better for sure. It was awesome, anyway we found out Simon works with Johnny P, Juliannas (recent convert in Fremont) old boyfriend, and that was weird. Then we shared a message, and they loved it. We invited them to take the lessons, they said of course (but the mom was leaving for Minneapolis this weekend) but yes! I got to know the daughter Melvina (yes kinda weird name) and she asked me to look at her writing assignments for her college apps, she's a really good writer.. like really good. They asked me to come over and help with her college apps this weekend, so we're going over again Saturday. Pretty sharp gal. She's planning on going to school on the East Coast.

On Wednesday:

Eason is like 20 or 21 years old. He said he was interested in meeting with us to learn more about our faith, so we did.

It was a good meeting, and he started out really well, he was willing to learn, and willing to accept some of the things we were saying. He said towards the end of the lesson "Oh I gotta go, I have class at 1:30..." and so we ended really quickly. He said the reason he wanted to meet with us is to get to know our church more and be friends with us. I thought that was pretty cool for sure.

After that we were supposed to have another lesson with a guy named Irving, but we ended up just sitting down with another Chinese guy named Steven from Shanghai, and talking to him for a while and just getting to know him. He was cool, and we weren't sure how interested he was, but we were just trying to develop friendships on campus so that we can teach later as well. So Helena came up to us and talked to us, and so Steven left and Helena sat down and we talked for a little bit, and taught a lesson.

On Friday!! Brenda's Baptism!

This was the highlight, we went at 4:30 today visit Helena since she was also coming to the baptism, and I had studied for her that morning, and I had gotten some answers to some prayers for her, I feel like they were inspired, and I still think they were and are inspired. I read Enos, and then the Institute manual with it about receiving answers to prayers, and I looked and studied, and it seemed like that situation was perfect for her to receive an answer. So we went to the General Conference talk, it was about receiving Personal Revelation in our lives, it was talking about going by previous answers that we had received, instead of just asking Heavenly Father again and again. I bore my witness to Helena of the truthfulness of the things, and how I know she will see a miracle if she sets that date.

We waited for Brother Li to come pick us up, and he eventually did. We headed up and just talked, and we got there, and I got dressed, and was waiting and waiting...7 oclock came, not many people showed up, and Brenda hadn't gotten there yet. 7:15 or so came, President Watkins showed up, and Brenda had barely gotten out from changing, we got picture, and everything else, I practice the baptism twice with her (she was good to go) and we sat in there. They got started, we sang "When I am Baptized" and really brought the spirit there, Darien with the opening prayer, and Sister Montalvo had the talk on Baptism and the Holy Ghost. It was a really wonderful talk, and I really felt the spirit. I know Brenda felt it too. It was a great.

Brenda and I stepped down those steps into the font after that, and she said to me "Do I really go down?" haha. I told her "Just come down" and got in position. Said "Brenda Gamboa" and said the prayer. The water was really a lot lower than usual, and so it was a rather difficult baptism, but I got her the first time. She was so excited, like a kid in a candy store when she got back up. We both went to change, came out at the exact same time, and then the Sisters and Elders Woodbrey and Butcher had a musical number that they wanted to do, it was "Come thou Fount of Every Blessing" it was really really good. Brenda was excited to hear it.

After that, Brenda bore her testimony. It was amazing, she told of a story where she was working one day at Wells Fargo, and there was a lady that wanted 3 thousand dollars in a withdrawal, and so she didn't had enough cash in the drawer to do that, so she bought  10K from the vault, and she was having an off day, so she gave the lady her money, and didn't even blink, the lady was gone. She noticed that she was short 2k on her balance, so she was freaking out, and knew  she was going to get terminated. Later that day the lady came back and handed the manager 2K saying "The Teller gave me 5 thousand instead of 3 thousand. I don't need to extra 2 thousand, thank you"  and so at that point Brenda knew she was in trouble, but her boss said something profound to her which was "God is really watching over you, you must be doing what's right" and so at that moment she really felt like that was true. She felt an overwhelming love that God was looking after her. She said she went home full of thanks, and got on her knees and prayed to thank God for everything she said and in her words "My job, my money, my schooling, my education, my shelter, my family, my life, my smartness, and my beautifulness, I promise i'm not conceited or anything" and she said after she had said this prayer she felt an overwhelming spirit over her. She felt of the peace and joy that it brings, and that ever since that day she had never felt the same. When she woke up in the morning she was happy instead of miserable.

She said she has been so happy to be baptized, and to receive the Holy Ghost, she knows this is the best step she can make in her life, and that she is so excited to go forward. It was an amazing baptism for sure.

President Watkins and Sister Watkins drove Helena and I home after the baptism. President Watkins really likes Helena a lot and had asked her a lot of questions. Helena might have been a tad intimidated, but I think she got used to it. It was just nice being there at the baptism and with Helena too.

 That was the week!

It was an awesome week!

Elder Sanchez