I am pleased to announce that I'm still alive. Sort of. I have a new trainee. My son, Elder Brenchley! He's from Logan UT. To introduce him, he was Mr. Basketball and he is pretty famous in UT for being just an overall good basketball player. He also played tennis. He's really awesome though and he's pretty fun and relaxed, which to be honest is a good blessing. The week started off with me and Elder Farnsworth in FengShan 鳳山 We had a really good time and became good friends over the couple of days we were together. We would stay up really late just talking about mission life and our trainees. He's super funny so we laughed a lot. I'll definitely be in contact with him after the mission. We talked a lot about how nervous we both were to train. He is training too. During those couple of days we taught a couple of lessons and did lots of finding on little to no sleep, but it was super fun and I laughed so much. Then the power went out all across Taiwan, so we had to do all of our contacting in the dark. There was no street lights or traffic lights or anything. It was pretty fun. Then on Thursday morning we made our way to Taizhong. It was super weird being back in Taizhong --being back really close to one of my former areas and being in the same chapel I used for Church for 6 months. I was kind of..... shocked to be back. I was thinking about all the good times I had with Elder Hatch in Beitun. Then we sat through a really boring meeting in which our mission president told us all about how to be a good trainer. Then the trainee's came in and we took one and sat with them. I sat with an elder that was literally doing language study while we were walking back to our seats and he continued to flip through a stack of cards that he made himself. I just stared at him like... "What are you doing? Stop." Then he proceeded to speak in his MTC Mandarin to me.... which was not good and hard to understand. He didn't speak one word of English. So the whole time I was just hoping that wasn't my trainee. Then we sat anxiously while they called up each trainee and gave them their new area and companion. I had to wait quite awhile before I was called up. Then I met him. I saw him. He looks like Hercules. Elder Brenchley called my name and Yuan Lin 員林 I stood up and gave him a hug and we sat down. He was a lot cooler than the first guy I sat next to-- that's for sure.
Then later that day we took a sketchy taxi all the way from Taizhong 台中 to YuanLin 員林. I talked to the taxi driver the whole time in Chinese. I glanced over a couple times to see a look of shock and horror on my companion's face. I felt bad about that, but eventually we ended up at our "new" apartment in 員林. I was surprised that it was a decent city, not super decent, just a little. It's got really really really narrow streets that are just packed with people. We walked into our apartment which was just straight up wrecked. I found myself wondering if someone had literally broken into the apartment and wrecked it before we got there. It was a very scary place with lots of webs and spiders. I did a quick look through the apartment and tried to find an area book, which I couldn't find, so I gave up. We did a quick companionship study and then we were on our way to go find some food.....somewhere. We walked literally in a random direction. Then took some turns. We contacted along the way and ran across two pretty alright guys, but not much interest. Then we somehow found our way to down this road with lots of food and found a 八方. Which is something all missionaries are familiar with. We ate some dinner and then continued to wander around. When all of the sudden our sisters in our area call us. They ask us where we are and I explained in Chinese where we were. They found us and then led us to the church. Where we talked with a couple of members and then we walked all the way back to our Apartment which we somehow found.
The next day we woke up and a had a zone conference for some reason. I had to translate half of it into Chinese. The translation was not that great... I did not do a good job. I looked over at the sister I was translating for and she looked very confused and bored half to death.... Oh well. I tried. Then we made our way home and then we got some spare bikes from the sisters, which was nice! So we did some riding around the area only to figure out later on that we weren't even in our area.. We were in the other elders' area. So after looking at some maps and lots of confusion, I finally figured it out..... Yesterday.
We've been having some trouble finding people. We're doing all that we can. Fortunately the sisters gave us some investigators to work with so we have something to do. Our area is super big and has a lot of secondary areas. So we have to travel great distances to get to anywhere good.
Oh yeah, both me and my trainee have the same last name in Chinese. He is also Bo Zhang Lao, but the character is different. 伯 is mine. His is 博, but are pronounced exactly the same, so we both turn our heads when someone says "Hey, Bo Zhang Lao!" It's kind of awkward, so it was announced in sacrament meeting that I will be known as 大伯 and he will be known as 小博. Which means Big Bo and Small Bo. I'm Big Bo because I'm the senior companion, but he it way taller than me. haha.
This week as been really crazy. Today we're doing a mass cleanup of our apartment. Which is much needed....
I also have to figure out how to get my bike shipped from Daliao to here.
I hope next week goes well. It's been really hard. This is honestly the hardest thing I've done on my mission. It's very stressful, but I'm relatively happy still!
Glad to hear Scott was able to visit you!
I love you all so very much!
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