Dinner with members from Yuli
This last week marked my companion’s last full week in Taiwan. He leaves this area Friday morning at 5:47AM, and then his flight back to the US is on Saturday in the morning. The nice thing about this is that we recently have had lots of people who want to feed us! Yay – saving money on food is nice.
View from the train
Last Tuesday morning we took a train ride up to Taipei to attend a mission conference that had about half of our mission’s missionaries in attendance.
Homeward bound
The main speaker was Elder Funk who is a member of the Seventy and is currently serving as the president of the Asia area of the Church. He spoke a lot about focusing our time and efforts on our investigators and inviting everyone to repentance. Some of the senior couple missionaries took the responsibility of making the lunch, which turned out great! Our train ride back here to Yuli took another 3 hours, bringing us to a grand total of 6 hours of train riding in one day!
Dumplings
On Thursday, we had to take a train up to Hualien to have interviews with our mission president. Fortunately that train ride was just over an hour long to get there, so it wasn’t too bad. We got back from there just in time to have dinner with one of the families in our branch – the 蔡家廷 (Cai Family). We helped them make the dumplings, they cooked them, and then we were all able to eat them!
The proof of the dumpling is in the eating….
Immediately after that, he drove us over to our English class in the same town. We had about 11 students there in Fuli this week, which is really good! We’ve recently been able to successfully get new students each week, mainly due to the fact that we’ve been encouraging the middle schoolers (basically all our English class students in Fuli are middle schoolers) to bring their friends with them to class.
Elder Simonson’s doppelganger in Taiwan.
I probably won’t have to transfer anywhere this week since my companion is leaving but we’ll find out for sure on Wednesday!
– Elder Austin Simonson
文長老