Fall is Here...

September 15, 2019

Fall is Here...

A lot of stuff happened this week and it flew by really quick, if my email is really jumbled that's why. But things here are going good, the weather is really cold though. Summer is definitely over and fall is here. The cooler air is nice though I will say, luckily right now there isn't any pollution, so we are in the sweet spot for cold weather. Our apartment is out of hot water and heating though so I feel constantly cold, but it's nothing really new. In January we didn't have heating so I'm glad it's only September where we have no heating. Things are going good though, school is really fun, and we found some church work to keep us busy. The group of elders right before me just went home though which was very weird. That makes me and my guys the people who have been here the longest. It still feels like I'm just getting the hang of things though, weird to think I will be home so soon.

The English classes are going really well, the students this year can speak way better than the ones last year, so I feel like I've been able to teach better because they can understand more. When we teach we go all on our own though. We were given the BYU slides to help us teach but honestly they aren't very good or fun, so Scrimsher and I bought a ton of chalk and just wrote everything out on the board. We actually ended up running through an entire piece of chalk one day. We make these sentence formulas for the students so literally all they have to do is plug in a verb and they're good. Teaching is something I really look forward to. It's really cool to work in a school, especially with people my same age. All the students are really cool and value English, so teaching is easy to do. I'm truly grateful I have the chance to teach while here in Mongolia.

Our piano lessons have been going really well. This week we had a few new students come so we have about 16 to 18 people there every time. It seems like a lot of people but we make it work. The students are all progressing a lot though. They really value music here which is really cool, I think it's a lesson that could be learned for a lot of Americans. So earlier in the week some people knocked on our door and gave us a news paper, and on the back was an ad for "Mongolia's biggest laser light show." So of course we were interested in it. After piano lessons were over we met Scrims who had been saving seats for us at the city square and got ready. We were really excited to see what it was going to be like, then an orchestra came out. So I was getting behind the idea of some cool classical music with a cool laser show, then they played one song and had literally 3 lasers going the whole time, then some old dude came out and started talking about the importance of democracy. It was cool to hear about the political revolution but we left because it was just political speech. Pretty big false advertising haha.

Also I don't know if you remember, but there was a guy named Baljinyam in Bayangol who I met with every week when I was there with Yorke. His wife was a member and her only goal was to have him join the church so they could go to the temple. I saw him at church on Sunday because we were a bit earlier than usual to our ward and found out he got baptized the day before. It was really crazy to me to hear that, it made me really happy to see the results of my efforts. He's a great guy and will be a great member. When Yorke and I found out about it we were pretty stoked though.

Because Teasdale was going home, Enhjin wanted to see him one last time to talk and get a picture. Right after school Scrimsher and I went and Yorke was in town for transfers, so the 4 of us rolled up to the church and met with Enhjin. We taught her all the lessons together and saw her get baptized and everything. It was fun being back together and feeling the friendship we have with her. It was a cool time to be there, she's brought a lot of people to church and her cousin was baptized and she now has a friend who she is bringing to church with her who is going to be baptized. It's pretty cool that we all got to see the results of what we helped with.

There was a day this week I was really struggling, feeling like I should be doing more, but not knowing what to do. So I was praying for help to be better and know what else I could do and when I finished my phone buzzed and I got a text from Delgersaihan. The guy who we have been teaching for a long time who was supposed to get baptized a while ago. He said he's been in the countryside and couldn't t get ahold of us but he's back in the city and wants to meet with us again. That was honestly a huge miracle, we thought he just kinda left. But he's still interested and everything which is awesome. It was a very cool experience.

We also got a refferal who is a solid guy. He came to church and we taught him after. He's a very smart person and likes to talk philosophy. Quackenbush just told me he's out of this one because he can't understand, so I was there straining to try and comprehend what he was talking about. Luckily I knew enough philosophy to sorta get the gist of what he was saying. It was fun though. It was another really cool experience where I was able to speak freely and super fast and have a deep conversation with this guy about life and the gospel and Christ. I felt very fluent which was a really interesting feeling, I don't really ever feel fluent out here. It was cool to feel God helping me understand and converse with him because it's what he needed at the time. So we chatted for a while about philosophy and I helped him connect a lot of what he thought to what our church believes. His big thing was that he feels like a God created this universe and there are parts of this God's influence left over that can be felt, and he thought that this influence was Jesus. That in Jesus was the most of this influence of God. Which was pretty much right, so I told him about Christ and how he is God's son and had parts of God in him while living here on earth. And then about the light of Christ which is the influence of God felt because Christ created everything. He was pretty blown away and just said "that literally makes so much sense." It was fun to chat with him, we are gonna meet him again, so hopefully it goes well.

Alright finally, this was probably the highlight of the week. So we've been teaching piano and some of our investigators have brought their school friends and for a few weeks now the friends have been bringing their mom. So we decided to meet with the mom and her daughters just to chat with them. We get to their house and find out the husband is a real devote Buddhist and shaman too. So we just start chatting with them and long story short they are baptized members of the church. They lived in Korea for a while and they were baptized there. So that blew my mind, I had no idea. We talked some more and then I shared a scripture. It was 1 Nephi 17: 14-15. I really felt like I should share this one, normally I just kinda share a usually missionary scripture but I read this scripture in the morning and it came to my mind. It fit perfectly, talking about a mom not being able to forget a child, and then comparing that to Christ remembering us. It was awesome, the spirit was really strong and the mom got kinda teary eyed when she felt it. It was honestly one of the coolest meetings of my mission. She wants her daughters to join the church too, so we found some new people to teach. It was just a very cool experience. She pulled out of the drawer her original copy of the Mongolian book of Mormon. It was all marked up and annotated. I gave her a new updated version of it and she was very grateful. They were just the nicest family ever. It was probably the best meeting of my mission.

And that's it for the week really. Love you guys

Austin