Balmy 20 F...

This week was good, not too exciting though. Just the usual stuff went on. This last Friday was National Women's Day which was pretty cool to see. Pretty much the entire country shut down again so they could celebrate. They take their holidays really seriously here. Everyone goes out and sells roses on the streets. Every girl in the city has a rose and all the old women carry a fancy bottle of wine around. So that was funny seeing that. The old women were going hard. But because of this holiday, the school was closed on the day I teach, It started to warm up a little too. Today is pretty cold, but last week there were some days where it was almost 50. I'm really ready for summer.

At church this week we had one of our investigators come again. Her name is Duulam, and she is 19 years old. She is super serious about the gospel and learning it. We didn't meet with her this week because our schedules never lined up, but this week we are going to meet her after mutual. We taught her last Sunday actually, and she was really engaged the whole time while we taught. Hopefully it turns out well with her, I think it will. We also had some people in the ward give us a few referrals. So we have plans to see them this week too. They seem to be pretty solid referrals, but we will see. So yeah, there is a lot of work coming to us which is awesome. It's a huge blessing to have work, so things are going good. 

We had our mutual again, this week was really good. Tons of people came and brought their friends, so we got to meet a lot of new people. The ping pong is still going hard, the youth are getting better. But it's super fun still. We actually had to bring a thing of card games too because there were too many people there. We decided to invite the other ward that uses the same church building too. So this Thursday there should be like 15 more youth coming. If it all works out we will have like 30 or 40 people at this, so it will be pretty dang fun. 

We had an appointment this week again with Pujee. She taught us in English for her BYU class, and this week it was on Self Reliance. It's pretty cool to get these little lessons from her. It's mostly just her quoting some people and then just giving us life advice and telling us how to not be poor when we go home, and how to provide for ourselves and our families. She also got us some Piroshki. It's a Russian fried dough thing. But she found some with chicken in it. It literally tasted just like a Costco Chicken bake. Blew my mind. Enjoy Costco for me.

So this week we had our 3 investigators get baptized. Their names are Zagadsuren, Baljinyam, and Luvsanyam. It was cool to see them get baptized. After the service they bore their testimonies and Baljinyam said that when he was being taught he felt that everything was true. It was cool to hear from an investigator that he felt all this. Sometimes when we teach, it feels like we just say our stuff and nothing really sticks. Hearing from an investigator that he could feel the truth and the realness of what he learned was a really cool thing to me. Just goes to prove more and more the reality of what we are living and doing. 

Yesterday we met with the Grandma of the 2 boys who got baptized last week. She is super nice. She lives underneath the stairs inside this apartment building. It's like the Harry Potter room. It's crazy to me that she actually lives here, most the time you hear about these things they don't really even seem real. Seeing this really hit me. It's hard seeing people live in these circumstances. But she was super kind and fed us tons of food and we had a really good meeting. She just talked our ears off the whole time. It was fun, I really enjoyed it.

We also got a random call this week from this number we didn't have saved. This lady started telling us she is an RM and she wants us to come visit her. But guess what? She lives in the Gobi Desert. Yeah. This is real. So I called President Harper and asked him about it, and gave him the run down. He said that there is a good chance we could go visit her. There are a lot of members that live in the middle of nowhere, who if they reach out to us, we try to visit them. So things are progressing and it's looking like we will be going to see her. I'm not sure when though. But honestly it doesn't matter. If I can see the Gobi then my life is complete. I'll bring home some sand.

Also this week I found a Supreme fanny pack. Thank you China. I'll send pics.

Love ya guys,

-Austin

Pictures from the baptism. The guy next to me is a family member and baptized them. 

 Gotta love Chinese counterfeit. 

 Dad check out these walls.  They are just like the ones you told me about in Brazil.