The Weekly :)

Leihdeih hou! This week has been good! Nothing too spectucularly crazy, but a good busy week nonetheless. :) For p-day last week, we went to this gorgeous place called Stanley and I'd definitely recommend it! There was a lot of cool stuff to explore, but we mostly did some shopping in the market so that Sister Christensen and I could buy some souvenirs. Super awesome though! This transfer, we've been really focusing on finding a lot of new investigators since our investigator pool has been shrinking. To make it more fun, Sister Christensen and I have given ourselves a different finding challenge every day, and we've been seeing so many small miracles. For example, on Monday our challenge was to talk to every person we came across that was wearing a yellow shirt and sunglasses. The bus ride home from Stanley is pretty long, and we ended up sitting with a bunch of guys that were visiting from the states. One of them asked us a TON of questions about our religion and how missionary life goes, and we of course were very happy to answer them. They were all so nice, and then as they stood up to get off at their stop, we realized that the guy who had been the most interested was wearing a yellow shirt, AND he had sunglasses on his collar! SO COOL. We also went paak muhning (door-knocking) on Saturday. It's not allowed here for the most part, because most residential areas have security guards that will kick you out if you try, but there's certain village-type areas that have no such guards, so it's okay there. I was kind of terrified to try because that's something that I've never really done before, but it was actually so much fun! It was less of door-knocking and more of just talking to people on the streets and on their porches (because these villages have REAL porches, how crazy is that?) and we met some really cool people that we'll be swinging by to visit again soon. :) All this finding has also been a big testimony builder for me that when you do the work, God will give you the blessings, even if it's not in the way you expected. Although we've been doing TONS of finding, we haven't really found any new investigators through our efforts, which has been kind of frustrating, but we're remaining hopeful. Sister Christensen kept saying that the new investigators would come from SOMEWHERE, and lo and behold, yesterday at church a member from out of the blue brought two of her friends to church! We'll hopefully be meeting with them soon, and I'm hoping it all goes well! That's pretty much it for the week, haha. Hopefully more exciting things to come in next week's update! Love you all! Thanks for all the love! :) Sister Wasden 郭姊妹

The Weekly :)

Leihdeih hou! It's been a busy week, but nothing too out of the ordinary! Here's a short SparksNotes version for your enjoyment. :) 1. Last p-day the sisters in my apartment met up with Elder Roskelley (one of our sweet senior missionaries) so he could teach us how to make cinnamon rolls! I've definitely eaten a lot since then and they're all delicious, just so you all know. :) So sweet of him to share his talents with us! 2. We got new missionaries! We finally have elders in Tai Wai and they are so sweet! One of them is a trainee, fresh off the plane, and it's so fun to watch him experience the Hong Kong way of life for the first time, hahaha. Definitely throws me back to when I was still a baby, so fun. :) 3. I also got to take out one of the new missionaries to go finding before they all got sent out to their new areas. It's always so cool to see how much power baby missionaries have, and we definitely experienced a couple of miracles together. I was really really hoping that we would be able to teach a lesson on the street (which is something that I'd actually never done before, because it's really hard to get people to listen to you for that long here), and after going through a few people who weren't interested, we finally found a guy that we could teach! We taught him most of the first lesson, and I could actually understand almost everything that he said to us (which is also something that doesn't really happen for me yet) and my cute little comp also did a really good job bearing her testimony of Christ and saying the prayer and everything. The guy we taught was still definitely NOT interested (he wouldn't even take any of our pamplets or give us his phone number or anything), but to me, it was a huge miracle that he was at least willing to sit and talk with us for so long. Super cool. :) 4. This week I gave a district training on charity, so it's been on my mind a lot the past week or so. Let me tell you, charity makes ALL the difference! It's the greatest motivator, and if we do everything in our lives out of a pure love for others and a pure love for our Savior, we'll never go wrong. Obviously we'll never be quite THAT perfect, but it's something we can always work on and definitely something that I'm striving to further develop and pray for every day. The more charity we have, the happier we are, and the happier we can help other people to be, and then before long, the whole world will just be a happier place in general. How sweet is that? :) Life is so good! Missionary life is definitely tough, and some days definitely don't go as smoothly as I'd like them to, but there's so many miracles every day and it's such a privilege to help other people and their families find the same happiness that I've been blessed to have. Love you all so much! Gayauh! Give your local missionaries some love for me. :) Sister Wasden 郭姊妹 Picture: Us making cinnamon rolls. This is the only picture that I have from this week, I'm so sorry. I'll take more pictures this week, I promise. :)

The Weekly :)

Leihdeih hou!

It’s been a good week!

Some highlights:

This week is transfer week! I’m staying in Tai Wai, which I’m super excited about! It’s Sister Christensen’s last transfer, so I get to be the one to send her home! We have a LOT of things to do, so we are anticipating a very busy and very very good transfer, and I’m so excited to see what happens. We are also getting elders back in Tai Wai, and we’re really excited to get to work with them and have some extra help with our ward. Also, Sister Mak moved to Macau, and Sister Bannago filled her place as our new apartment-mate! She’s also so sweet and I’m excited to get to know her better! I’ve seriously been blessed to meet so many amazing people!

Also, this coming week I will finish training! That doesn’t really mean much except that I’ve officially in Hong Kong for three months now and also that I can no longer be considered a baby missionary! I’ve upgraded to toddler. ;)

In other news, the whole mission had to get flu shots this week. I definitely cried in front of my whole zone and will probably never live that down. But I hopefully won’t get the flu, so that’s good news!

Our mission has a goal to reach 242 baptisms by 2018. It’s actually a pretty big reach for our mission (people tend to wait a long time to get baptized), and we still have over 100 baptisms left to go, so this past week we had a mission-wide fast for our goal, and we saw SO MANY miracles! I had the most successful travel contacting I’ve ever experienced (one guy sat by me on the bus and said in perfect English, “Oh, are you guys Mormons? I’m from San Francisco and I’ve seen your temple in Oakland!” I LOVE San Francisco so I was able to have a really cool conversation with him and get his number and everything. SO COOL. And while I was talking to that awesome guy, one of our formers that we dropped last month called Sister Christensen and said that he’s ready to meet with us again, and he’s showed a LOT of promise since then, which is really cool. God is so so so aware of each of us, it honestly blows my mind sometimes. How cool is it that we have this all-powerful, omniscient being on our side, and He loves us even more than we can possibly imagine? I love getting to share that message with so many people every day. :)

We also had another Level 8 typhoon yesterday, so church was cancelled again, which was a bummer because we had committed a lot of really awesome people to come to church! Next week, fingers crossed!

Life is so good! God is great and missionary work is the best!

Thanks for all the love and support, I’m so grateful for each of you!

Gayauh!

Sister Wasden

郭姊妹

Pics:

Saying goodbye to Sis Mak

A little more Disney because why not :)

The two happiest places on earth :)

Leihdeih hou!
I don't have a lot of time today, so here's a very quick version of my week!
This week was Mid-Autumn Festival and it was pretty much the cutest thing. A full moon, lots of lanterns everywhere, cute little kids running around, and crazy celebrations made for some fun contacting!
This week we also got to go to the temple (the happiest place on earth :))! We get to go once per transfer and it was SO GORGEOUS and I loved it SO MUCH! Our temple day came right when I needed it and I left feeling so much better about everything. The blessings of the temple are real, folks.
We also got to watch General Conference this past weekend! Also just what I needed. If you haven't seen it yet, please please please go watch it! It was all (as always) so inspired and I know that it's the words of the Lord to us. Seriously so so so good.
Today for p-day we went to DISNEYLAND! (The second happiest place on earth ;)). It was seriously a dream. I love love loved it and I had so much fun with my companion and our apartment-mates! They do everything in a combination of Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, which I thought was delightful. :) Sooooo fuuuun!
Also, here's a PSA from China to America (because I definitely didn't know that this was a thing until I came here): please wash your rice before you cook it! You just pour some water in with your rice, swish it around with your hand, dump out the water, and repeat two or three times. This is good because the water that comes off is actually pretty gross, and also all the bugs that have been chilling in your rice float to the top so you can scoop them out. Happy eating, everyone. ;)
Life is good! I'm so grateful to be a missionary and see so many miracles every day! Keep the faith :)
Love you all! Gayauh!
Sister Wasden
郭姊妹

Pictures:
The aftermath of a rainstorm (we legit almost got hit by lightning)
My cute color-coordinated district at the temple :)
Disney fun!

This Week's Shenanigans :)

Leihdeih hou!
Some highlights from this week:
1. Last p-day we all cooked a meal for dinner with Sister Lam! It was so much fun and I love her and President Lam so much! We're seriously so blessed. :)
2. On Tuesday we had the GROSSEST lizard I've ever seen in our sink! I take back everything I said about surviving the occasional lizard, this thing was NASTY. No one else would come near it though, so I got the (dis)pleasure of catching it. There was lots of screaming and lots of laughs and I will never forget all the excitement, hahaha!
3. Sooo someone always donates TONS of pens to the mission office, and this week they donated blow pens! We decided to get artsy and blow pen my face, which was really fun and exciting, and then a little less fun (but no less exciting, mind you) when we realized how hard it is to wash off. I thought I was going to have a purple face for days! Thank heavens for makeup wipes and some serious scrubbing though. Those did the trick. :)
4. The other day Sister Christensen and I were doing some finding and we took this path that led us from the skyscrapers straight into the JUNGLE. It was AMAZING (and mosquito infested. Forgot to wear bug spray, oops). I had actually just been thinking about how I loved the city, but I was starting to feel crowded, and I really missed a good ol suburban neighborhood, and God sent me a jungle. Tender mercy for sure. There were actually a lot of houses on the side of the path that we could technically have gone door-knocking at, but they had big gates and bigger dogs and we decided to just stick to talking to the people on the path. So fun! (Still no monkey sightings though.)
5. Yesterday we got to see Women's Conference! (Our conference schedule is a week behind because it takes a week for them to translate everything into Cantonese, and even though the missionaries get to watch it in English, we still like to watch it when everyone else does.) Our stake actually forgot to set up the English room this time, so instead, all of the sister missionaries from our zone just piled into the APs' office and watched it together with them! It was so much fun and all the talks were SO GOOD and exactly what I needed. If you haven't seen it yet, go watch it now! SO GREAT.
God is so good and this gospel is so true! I've seen miracles and tender mercies every single day. Life is good!
Love you all! Gayauh!
Sister Wasden
郭姊妹