Transfer 2 - Week 1

Good morning good people! 

It's 6:23am over here in Taiwan! This last week has been an interesting one. I'll just flat out say it working with our investigators this week was tough work. We were unable to meet with our main families and it really stunk. They all had things come up! Some were running marathons, others got free tickets to kung fu performances and had to go (who can blame them?) and others were visiting families out of town. 

But, despite being unable to meet with our main people, we were able to meet with some less actives and members which is good because that's who Elder K and I have felt we should focus on. I went through the ward directory the other day and found that we have about 520 members. Only about 100 of those are semi to fully active. So we've got a lot of work to do basically. 

While contacting a few days ago around one of the local colleges here we found some awesome guys. Three best friends and they're pretty solid investigators! We taught them a lesson on the street and set up with them the next day at one of the cafes close by. To be honest I didn't think they would show up because these were some cool college kids you know? But they showed up and we taught them the restoration and they ate it right up! We gave them some Books of Mormon and we'll be seeing them again soon. They also came to our weekly English class we have at the church so they're turned into some total studs for us. We love them. 

Another positive to being unable to meet with investigators was we had a lot of service opportunities. This week we had 7 hours of service. And 4 hours of those were helping a family move into their new house. Well, apartment really. Here in Taiwan things are more bunched together so most "houses" are actually 3 to 4 story compact apartment buildings. Most people live in these types of places. So that being said this family only needed our help moving the heavy stuff. Dressers, closets and a refrigerator. 

So we get there and all of the heavy stuff is upstairs so we need to bring it down and because the houses are so compact the stairways are very very narrow. So with these really heavy objects, there's only room for two people to carry them, so they better be able to do it. And since people here in Taiwan are slightly smaller in stature, it is left to us. Whoo! Ask the missionaries, they can help you! Very true statement Elder Nelson, thank you... Anyway so we get all the dressers and closets and such down the stairs and load it all into the truck and it's pretty, unbelievably hard in fact. We get to his house and we're sweating from working and the humidity and such and of course, the husband is totally fine because he hasn't actually lifted anything cause there's no room in the staircase to do so. So when we get to his house we're like alright, "Where to?" He says, "Number 4" (in English) and claps his hands and goes inside. So Elder K and I are like what? The 4th floor? Carrying up these extremely heavy dressers, up strait and narrow stairways 4 floors? Needless to say I thought I was going to die a few times. So that day was eventful. 

Anyway it has been a good week! Time just keeps rolling along and it's weird to think about. Hope you all learned something from my story! When you think your back is going to break and the weight is going to slip from you sweaty, worn hands, know that it won't! Keep going! OR you can always ask the missionaries because we can help hahahaha. 

Love you all! 

Just making the good ol' calls! Picture turned out strange for some reason but kinda cool!

Our stake had a talent show at our church the other night! A terrifically funny dance, thing.

Made pizza Sunday night at our Ward Mission Leader's house! Such a cute little girl... 

MARGHERITA PIZZAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MY FAVORITE FOOD EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In Taiwan? Who would have thought?

A little caprese goodness. Oh Italian food you.

We also performed! My district sang Amazing Grace and Abide With Me!

Week 8 (Last Week of the Transfer)

Hey everybody! 

Entering into my second transfer and it's kind of crazy how fast the first one went by! Also have any of you been down to the cafe recently? Man they have a missionary wall up and it looks spectacular! Things have been pretty awesome recently.I passed off phase 1 finally!!! 

Here in Taiwan our mission has a Chinese learning program for the missionaries which consists of 3 phases. The first is church vocab, phrases, grammar, you have to practice teaching the district leader and zone leader in order to pass off each little section. It's basically Preach My Gospel in Chinese so you have to be able to teach every lesson in Chinese. Phase 2 is memorizing 2000 vocab words and phase 3 is being able to read the whole Book of Mormon in Chinese characters. Then after that you can teach yourself how to write! (So excited for that part.)  So yep I'm on phase 2 now and have the first 300 memorized! Whoo! Gotta love some Chinese study.  

Well recently Elder K and I have been teaching Brother Guo. He's been an investigator for about a year and has been meeting with missionaries every so often. So we met with him a few times and felt we should really focus on him and give him a baptismal date and work to get to that. So we gave him one and the next thing we knew he started progressing so fast! Started coming to church every week, reading scriptures, praying, going to singles activities and the whole shabang! Man he's awesome. And he's a super quiet guy so picturing him at singles activities makes me laugh. Ha when I think of him I think I get similar feelings to a proud parent. My little boy is growing up! Love this guy. 

Also we teach the Wang family again tonight as we do every Monday night for Family Home Evening and we're pretty excited! They're such an awesome family. Teaching them the Plan of Salvation and we think they'll eat it right up. I'll update more next week with them. It's starting to get pretty hot and humid here and man I do not like biking up our hill everyday and getting home just totally drenched and sticky. But hey it makes turning on the A/C feel like bliss. Guess the scriptures really do have truth! 2 Ne 2:11! hahahha sorry missionary humor coming out I guess. 

Well I love you all so much! Really! Second transfer here I come! 

Love Elder Hagedorn

Hey!

Last P-day thought we'd dine-out as a district and live it up. Soooooo goooooood

Decorated my planner cover!! Thanks for the picture Tess! :)

Some more delicious food...... Mmmmmmm

Evil dog that lives across from the Lin family (the recently baptized family) he HATES us. When we pull up he just starts barking like crazy, we don't even bother knocking on the Lin's door. When they hear the crazy barking they just go to the door haha. Totally have a double chin in this... Not gaining any weight I promise! 

Week 7 (last week in the transfer...)

Hello my good family and friends! 

To start off, I'm an uncle!!!! Heather and Kael I love you guys and you're going to be some totally rad parents. Tell little Sammy his uncle Bobby says hello! 

Let's see this last week has been pretty awesome. We've found some amazing new families and we really feel we can help them out a little via baptism. One family has been living next door to a member family for about 8 years and has slowly opened up to the Gospel and just this last week at the member's family home evening they were there and we happened to be there so we felt we should try and set up with them (despite 8 years worth of other missionaries fails) and they set up!! We were like oh ok we understand... Wait really? Well how about next Monday for family home evening?! They're awesome. We gave them the "first lesson" (God & prayer. Most people aren't familiar with Christian beliefs really) and it was terrific. Wang Family, they're winners. 

We also found another family, Liang family and they are also pretty great. Had so many questions when we taught them and we just took them to the good ol' scriptures to answer each one and they were like "ooooh.... ok that makes sense" they're genuinely interested and we've set up to meet them every Saturday. So we have the Liang family every Saturday and the Wang family every Monday. It's really nice having some consistent set ups! We've been super busy this past week. Here's a good quote from the missionaries of Zhubei/Xinfeng (The 2 cities of our area) ,"You know you're busy when your lunch becomes your backup plan." Haha oh man that has really been the story recently. You all should see my planner. That thing is pretty beat. I'm going to be buying a 4 color pen today in order to try and be more organized cause right now I just have these little things written everywhere in it and sometimes I need a Urim and Thummim to translate it. 

One day we just grabbed some baozis (little bread rolls with meat and veggies inside them) stuffed them into a bag and put them in our buckets on the back of our bikes. Then while on the way to an appointment, each stoplight we'd hit we'd hurry and take them out and just stuff them into our mouths and each as much as possible. We wolfed down about 15 rolls in 3 stoplights. Hahaha yep. 

Another funny thing is a few days ago I went on exchanges with Elder Orchard to the Zhubei area. He had planned for us "The Heart of Zhubei Project". Which was going into the very middle of the city and knocking at some apartment buildings. It was TOO funny. I'll just share one experience. So we're walking and knocking on doors and we come to a door where the door is glassy so we can see through it clearer if we're close. As we're stepping closer to the door we can tell there's someone on the couch so we start just saying "hello!" and "we're sharing a family message!" and other such missionary talk. As we get closer we can see the guy totally just sprawled out on the couch with his hands behind his head and just looks so comfortable. He's got the TV on and he's watching a movie. Elder Orchard goes "Oh man this guy looks so comfortable, he's got Planet of the Apes on." So we just say "Sorry to bother you have a good night!" and go to the next door. Hahaha it was terribly funny at the time. We were cracking up. Probably not funny now but hey I'm a missionary so my humor is probably a bit off. 

Oh also just got an email from my mission president... I can email friends now! So if you want to email me feel free to send me one!Robert.Hagedorn@myldsmail.net. Love to hear from all of you. 

Well I love you all and miss you. I"m doing well so need to worry about me, this is tough work sometimes but hey missionary life ain't bad at all. 

Goodbye! Or how the locals say it here Zai Jian! Zhu nimen wan an! 

Trying to find an investigator at the Lantern Festival. Way too many people! 

Walking around at the Lantern festival!

No Tobacco Mountain! Great name right?On the way to the top. Being cool and stuff like that. 

Picture of my zone! Xinzhu for life! (Yes, a picture of a picture)

Week 6

Hello good people! 

I've heard about a lot of people getting mission calls and it's amazing! Congratulations! Chantelle you're going to Sweden that is so amazing! I'm jealous of the smorgasbords you are sure to have. Well this last week, just as every other has been terrific! The only downside is that I have yet to receive a letter from anyone... Though I have received 3 packages so thanks for those! The mailing system here for missionaries is pretty skiwampus at best so maybe my letters are just floating around somewhere I'm not sure. Packages get to me faster than letters for some reason it's kind of strange. Anyway if you feel like writing me feel free! 

This last week has been pretty great, filled with good food and I've captured a little bit of those things through the wonderful contraption of what is known as the digital camera so I will upload those pictures along with some other adventures and mishaps in a moment. 

Yesterday the Lin family got confirmed and the smiles on their faces after their blessings made all the work totally worth it! Still working on their dad and will keep you updated! It's been hard to meet with investigators recently and there have been a lot of no shows recently so that has been hard to have to bike down the hill to the church only to wait for no one and then have to bike the 25 minutes back up the hill... But I'll tell you, my legs are quite "swoll" as the kids put it these days. We have, however, been able to find some awesome new investigators and we had 4 potential investigators come to church yesterday while we had no actual investigators come, when 6 of them said they would go... So we're really trying to work with our current investigators but we've decided by a certain point if we still can't get in contact with them, we may have to move them down our priority list and replace them with our new investigators, who are awesome by the way. So this week we're unsure of what will happen and who we'll be teaching so next email I'll let you all know where our investigators are at. 

For now though, we found a Li family who is simply splendid. They're a wonderful young family of 4, dad and mom and then little boy and girl. 7 years old (darn...  so close) and 3 years old. They are so awesome and we're hoping to set up with them to teach them about God and prayer. That's our "first lesson" here because most everyone has Buddhist background or not really any background so we teach them about who God is and our relationship with Him and how we can communicate with Him. So they're awesome and well, we're just horrifically busy everyday. But it's a good busy and I feel I've adjusted completely to missionary life and have already turned into a "sappy old missionary" as one of my friends would say. So yep, we'll just keep plugging away over here and I love you and miss you all. OH and I may be an uncle next time I write! 

Love you Heather and Kael! You're going to be some marvelous parents. Well, merry day to all, and to all a good day. 

Love, 

Elder Hagedorn

Last P-Day at that one American Restaurant, Wild West. This is Vanessa, one of the sister missionaries in my districts investigators. Doing the 1500 kuai (50 US dollars) steak challenge. Needless to say she failed, sadly. In fact she threw up afterwards so really, she wasn't even close to finishing. Depending on how much she threw back up, she could have technically not eaten anything... Me and Elder Orchard (another Elder in my district) thought it was pretty hilarious.

My scriptures! (I have an English set don't worry) 

Happy missionary! The three packages I got and their contents! Yummy candy :)

Stinky Tofu!! Actually very tasty. Though rather pungent. 

At a birthday dinner for the lady cutting the cake, Alma. Cool name right? Don't know where I've heard that name before... Weird. Anyway this is Elder K making a noise I imagine a walrus would make. 

The delicious birthday cake... Soooo gooood. My ward mission leader owns a bakery and so we see his delicacies all the time at member dinners and such. Also, whenever we meet with him he hooks us up with some amazing breakfast breads. I love bread so much... 

At a stake fundraiser. There was a bear costume laying around for a later activity... We thought we'd borrow it for a minute. Elder K looking good.