Chinese New Year.

Hey All,

So this week starts Chinese new year, the biggest holiday in the Chinese world. It's a pretty fun time to be a missionary. The member's load you up with a bunch of meal appointments and you spend a lot of time getting to know them around tables full of traditional feasts. And sometimes pizza or fried chicken. 

But this week started with a pday full of cleaning. It's a new years tradition for everyone to clean their house really thoroughly right before the new years and so as a mission we take the pday right before new years to clean our apartments. Luckily our apartment is really nice and we already keep it really clean so we didn't have too much hard work to do but it was nice to go extra in depth and get everything in tip top shape. I love myself a clean apartment. It really helps you feel good when you get home at night or wake up in the morning. 

Tuesday and Wednesday we went on exchanges with the Muzha elders who are not even in our district but the Zone Leaders requested it. It was fun. It's always nice to see how other missionaries do things and get some new ideas rolling around for your own missionary work.

Other than that it has been a fun week of eating meals with members trying to build better relationships with them. Member work is our goal now in our mission and so it's nice to have a period of time when you get to be with the member's a lot more than normal. I have already eaten so much food that I never really feel hungry or full anymore. It's all just the same. And we are only half way! Hahaha.

Wishing you all a prosperous year and much good fortune!

Elder Neilson

 

 We had a bunch of old food left in our apartment from missionaries past and so we had quite the adventure disposing of it all in the special food trashcans. Among the most interesting things to dispose of was all the flour sugar and other old dry ingredients along with a bunch of decorating frosting tubes from a long forgotten Christmas.

we cross this white bridge almost every day to get to the church. At night it's lit up with rainbow colors

My district walking back from a member meal found a rat on a clear overhang thing. We took a funny selfie with it because this year is the year of the rat!

 Frisbee

A member family took us to their apartment buildings roof before eating with them. They had an awesome view of our areas 

Fried Chicken

Hey All,

This was a fun week. For P-day we biked out to Costco to get some big groceries. But that took a long time and so we didn't really have time for anything else. 

This week I took Elder Zhang on exchanges. He is one of the elders in my district and he is training right now. It was my first time going on an exchange as the leader and not the normal missionary which was an interesting experience. All in all this transfer has been really interesting so far as my whole district often looks to me for help. Especially the two very young trainers are calling me or asking me questions all the time. It's a fun opportunity because you don't really recognize how much missionary experience you have until people start coming to you for answers; and you actually have answers! hahaha. 

Other highlights of the week include going to a members house for their famous fried chicken. The member's last name is Zhou and is he is this really cool old guy who is a great friend to the missionaries. He had a friend at his house today who is visiting from the south of Taiwan and Brother Zhou had us try to share the gospel with him while he prepared the food! It was way funny because the friend had met with missionaries in the past and really liked Missionaries but has no interest in joining the church so we had some interesting discussions. He kept talking about how the only 100% good Americans are the Elders. All other Americans could be evil. hahaha.

This week we had some awesome finding experiences where the Lord provided two people for us to start teaching. They are both formers (people who have been taught in the past but stopped meeting with missionaries for whatever reason). One we called and he set a time to meet with us which went really well. The second was a man who's house was close to one of the member's we were visiting one night and so, at Elder Meredith's insistance, we rang on his doorbell and he immediately invited us in and started sharing all his life problems. It was crazy, and a since he loved to talk it was a little hard to control the situation, but at least we know a lot of his needs in life and now we just need to take the Gospel to him in a way that shows him the Gospel will fix those problems! Amazing to see the Lord's hand leading His work. 

Well that's about all for this week! Hope you all have a good one!

Elder Neilson

Us at Brother Zhous house

Calvin (the recently baptized member who spoke at the fire side last sunday that I taught in my first area) and all the elders who taught him before his baptism. 

Elder Zhang and I on exchanges

Calligraphy

Hey All,

Good week. We started off with a fun pday. A recently baptized member from Hualian, who is good friends with the missionaries, came up to Taipei and we went and ate lunch with him and a bunch of other missionaries who were in Hualian before. Then we went to the National Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall, which is a cool museum type place in memory of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen who is basically the founding father of the government of Taiwan. It was super cool. The best part was this one exhibit of this Calligraphy master named Chen Ming Ching. A tour lady came over and started explaining stuff to us and with her help, and with our Hualian member as translator, we learned a lot about calligraphy and Chinese characters. Did you know there have been 7 different character sets used throughout Chinese history? I didn't! It was fascinating. Elder Brunette, Elder Keys, and I ( two other elders I served with in Hualian) could have stayed in that place learning about Chinese characters for many more hours but eventually we had to go and see other stuff. It was a great pday. Normally it's hard to go to museums because a lot of them are closed on Monday so I am glad we found an exception! 

The rest of the week was full of the same old work! 

On Tuesday we had the first district council of the transfer, and my first as district leader. It went pretty well. It's more of a challenge than I anticipated to lead a meeting in full Chinese because most of my district are native Taiwanese. I'm sure my Chinese will improve a lot in the next few transfers.

We didn't do anything special for New Years but we did have a good Sunday. Sunday night we went up to the big chapel by the temple for a fireside where one of the people I taught in my first area, Zhong He, was giving a talk. He got baptized a little while ago when I was still in Hualian but I hadn't seen him in almost a year. It was super cool to talk with him after the meeting and catch up. All the missionaries who had taught him up untill his baptism were there too and we got to have a fun little reunion. It's super cool to see how integrated he has become into the church. He hasn't just joined the church, he seems to have jumped in head first. He tells me the missionaries in Taizhong, where his college is, have him acoompany thier lessons all the time (sometimes three times a day!) and he has already been to Utah and wants to go to BYU now! He is even thinking a little about serving a mission. Its really wonderful to see how big a part of his life the church is now. It's a privilege to meet people like him and help them learn about thier Father in Heaven and the Plan He has in store for His children.

Hope you all had a great new year and are ready for an awesome year to come! Set some good goals!

Love, 

Elder Neilson

- The museum squad from p-day

- Cleaning up the churches Christmas decorations

 crazy traffic. It's good to be back in Taipei!

I switched my back gears and the chain on my bike on Saturday. After a year+ They had been through a lot. New parts feel a lot better! I can go way faster now! hahaha.

Some crazy hot instant noodles I made the other day with some Dumplings. The noodles were litterally so hot I couldn't finish the last half.

- a picture we took at the fireside with all the missionaries who have served in my current ward

Merry Christmas & Street Finding

Hey All,

Sorry no letter on Monday, I forgot to tell everyone that P-Day was moved to Wednesday for Christmas!

It's been an exciting last week and a half since my last email. I got transfered to Ankang and started working with my new companion Elder Meredith. He is 10 months into his misison and from Salt Lake City UT. It's been good to get in the city again. Everything moves a lot faster here and everything seems more urgent. I will miss the people I met and the experiences I had in Hualian though. Hualin is the location of some of my favorite mission memories for sure.

Transfers themselves was a little exciting. After some taxi problems to the Train station, an Elder Yang and I missed our train and had to take a later one without seats. So we stood on a train for two hours or so on the ride up to Taipei. Not the most fun, but a good misisonary experience and a good learning experience not to take taxis to the train when in Hualian! Just walk instead. Hahaha

So now I'm in Ankang, back in the south Taipei zone that I started out in and finding myself thrown right into the mix with new leadership responsibilities as a district leader. My new district is made up entirely of missionaries natively from Taiwan, except for Elder Meredith and I, and both the other companionships are training. And get this, the two trainers both just got out of training (they have two transfers under their belt each) and they are actual brother and sister! So long story short, I have a very unique district where I have more missionary experience then all the rest of my district members combined! It's a fun time. Lots of pressure to be a good example though. I have learned in the last week or so (and also through training) that the pressure of responsibility is really good because it throws us right into the refiners fire and forces us to improve ourselves. In other words, welcome to church callings, where the Lord asks you to do something you are not ready to do, so He can teach you at an accelerated pace. Luckily, thanks to His grace and blessing, we can succeed at things we are not ready to do.

This week we also had three big events, a misison wide Christmas singing devotional where all the missionaries came to sing a Christmas concert for the people of Taipei, Christmas Zone Conference, and Temple Pday (today). President Peterson has us running back and forth to the mission office so often I don't know what to do! I'm used to being in Hualian and going to the office once or twice a transfer, if that! It's been fun though and having three spiritually uplifting experiences in the course of a few days is really a nice way to spend Christmas.

Hope you all have a great Christmas day, and a Happy New Year!

(cont'd) ...Its only been a few days but we had a fun exchange with the Zone Leaders where the whole zone went really hard at street finding and kept track of how many people they talked to in the Zone group chat. We all got really hyped about it and it was a fun time. Found some cool people for all our areas.

Had an interesting Sunday where one of the senior sister missionaries took the second hour to talk about parenting tips and how to help discipline children. Not the most useful information for missionaries but it was really interesting to think about the kinds of problems parents deal with. Being a mom and dad sounds pretty hard! My parents made it look so effortless that I never would have known! Good luck to all you parents out there!

Not too much else happened. Its been a fun few days and I'm excited to have a great week!

Have a Happy New Year!

Elder Yang and I on the train.

Elder Meredith and I getting Christmas packages home

Elder Merrill (my second companion in Taiwan) and I at his last zone Conference

Elder Meredith and I at the temple today

Two pretty City views. The one with Taipei 101 (the really tall famous one) isn't from my area but when we were out going places for pday.  

A photo of me in front of my new church buildings Christmas tree

the mission taking a photo before the christmas concert