Transfer 4 - Week 6

This week we had transfer meeting! 

I'm not on my 5th transfer which is pretty weird... Still young though! A few interesting things have happened. A new area opened up in Xinzhuang so now instead of just 4 missionaries here we have 6! We're slowly growing! 

And also I'm district leader which is pretty crazy! Two of the new missionaries in the area are natives of Taiwan and the other missionaries in the district are all on their 3rd transfer or under so their Chinese is not bad. (haihao) District meetings will be interesting! We've also given a few of our investigators to the new Elders so we'll need to rebuild our investigator pool in the next couple weeks. Give out some Books of Mormon! Also, one of our investigators, James, moved to Texas to go to Texas A&M for his Ph.D. so that was sad! He's an awesome guy and we were sad to see him go! He's come a long way since Elder Beck and I started teaching him. When we first met him he would not even take a Book of Mormon but now he reads it almost every day and loves it! Most recent chapter he read was Alma 32 and he really liked it. So he's in Texas now and he'll be able to meet with missionaries there and go to church too! 

Chinese is still coming along and still working on Phase 3. In order to pass off phase 3 you sit down with the mission president and he randomly chooses a scripture from the book of mormon and then you have to know 80 percent of the characters and then tell him in English the meaning of the scripture. So as for passing it off I could do that but it's kind of bothersome to travel to Taipei so I don't know if I ever will pass it off. When you pass it off you don't get anything other than a handshake so I don't know if I'll ever pass it off because it's kind of a hassle to set up a time with him and takes a good amount of time to do. 

But don't worry I'm still studying Chinese like a madman! Still studying characters and improving but just don't get uneasy if I never say I pass it off cause I don't see much of a point of passing it off. Actually my mom wrote me an email in Chinese this morning and I could pretty much read all of it except for like 3 characters so that was cool! Sorry this week's email is a lot shorter because I'm pretty tired... But things are going well and we're working with some awesome people! Love you all!

 

Love,

Elder Hagedorn