9-9-2013

Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2013 12:06:55 +0800
Subject: Contacting contacting, rice and a Baptism
From: eric.heaton@myldsmail.net
To: heatonjudy@hotmail.com; jessjeanh@gmail.com

Hello family friends and other (I'm not quite sure who other is yet)

This week has been a really interesting one, with two real extremes through it.  But first off the food =)

So I think the main interesting that I ate today was called blood rice... yeah, we were eating with a member who had just come back from a trip (really cool guy and had been gone all week) and he wanted to eat dinner with us, so we go off to a ji pai (fried chicken) stand and then he says something to my companion and hes just like "no man I dont like blood rice" so then he looks at me and I just kinda say why not.  So I got me a little bag of blood rice, which is these little cubes of rice held together with something (blood maybe, but I'm not sure) and had a little sauce in the bottom.  it wasn't really that great and I probably wouldn't order it very much if at all, but now I can say that I have eaten that, which is cool.  The other food thing that I want to expound on that I mentioned before is the kao rou (cow row is how its pronounced) which is a Taiwanese barbecue, so yesterday while we were out contacting we ran into a small group of students that were just sitting outside their house, they had two tiny little grills ( both were smaller than the size of my laptop ) with some hot coals under it, so we go talk to them, and we just kinda joined in for a little bit, we couldn't stay for long because it was about 8:30 but they just kinda let us come, sit down, they gave us a little meat and it was kinda cool.

So that leads off onto what I did this week.  So work has been moving along really slow here.  We really only had 1 progressing investigator and so that left us with a ton of free time to just do some quality contacting.... which is really really boring, especially when you don't totally understand what people are saying when you ask them questions, but I think we had a good like 3 days this week where that was really most of what we did.  So it was a bit of a boring week, but to kinda improve that and on the other side of the coin we had a person this last Saturday that just passed her baptismal interview!!!!  So that was totally exciting and I can't wait for next Saturday for the actual event to happen.  And she is really excited for it as well.

Well that's really all that has happened this week, I am working hard on learning the language and have been slowly seeing the improvements here and there as I understand more and more of this mysterious way of talking that these people have.  The scriptures are cool and I think at the end of Alma 26 (it should be a really short chapter if I'm right) there was a really cool quote of the difference between people who have the gospel in their lives and those that don't, see if you can find it

From that one guy in the Taiwan area

Elder Heaton