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!