Today is December. Wow. Time goes really really fast. It's been fairly warm here in Korea up until this morning... and now it's COLD. Probably time to pull out the winter gear.
It's been a good week. We were only able to meet with one investigator, but it was a pretty good lesson. His name is Brother Jang and he's in his 60's and slightly paralyzed on his left side from a stroke or something. So he spends almost all day every day trying different treatments to help get his leg back in better working condition... acupuncture, strange tea, weird incense things that he puts on his head... just a lot of weird treatments. We taught him about God, prayer, and the Book of Mormon. He has almost zero religious background, so we're going to have to go much slower and more simply in the future when we teach him.
It was an interesting week as far as food goes... Nothing too cool happened for Thanksgiving. We were all going to go to a buffet as a district, but one of the sisters has a gluten allergy so we ended up eating weird porridge stuff and kimchi for Thanksgiving dinner. Not ideal, but it wasn't terrible either. And then the 6 of us elders went to the buffet the next day for dinner without the sisters, so it all worked out okay. I have a bucket list of foods to eat while I'm here in Korea before I go back home to America. They're not necessarily foods that look delicious, but foods that are unique to Korea, so I need to have said that I tried them. And I knocked off 2 items from the list this week!
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| 번데기(bundaygee)... a rather disgusting food consisting of steamed larva. |
One is 번데기 (bundaygee), which is super nasty. It's some sort of larva that's been steamed and then it just sits in hot, nasty water all day and old ladies sell it on the street. So, I ate it. Bleh. Never again.
The other food was 산낙지 (sannakjee), which is living octopus. If you eat it at a restaurant, the cooks there wash the octopus real good and then cut it in a professional way so that all the legs are still wiggling a lot when you eat it. Well, the sister missionaries bought 5 small octopus in the market last Pday and gave them to us. So, we ate them. We didn't really think that it needed to be washed very hard, so we just rinsed it in the sink a little bit and then cut it up and ate it. It can be dangerous because the legs are wriggling and the suction cups still work and can grab onto your throat and get stuck, but we just made sure to chew it a lot before we swallowed. Totally worth it.
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| Live octopus... yum. It actually wasn't that bad. |
The 2 new elders in our house are AWESOME. One is Elder Mumford, a missionary who dies in February, and he's training Elder Songhyunbean, a Korean missionary straight out of the MTC. They're both awesome missionaries and work super hard. It's also nice to have a Korean elder in the house... they understand the culture perfectly and help a lot with learning the language.
I've been looking back through my planner from last transfer with Elder Weight and looking at all the appointments we had scheduled and how many of those appointments actually met. We felt like we didn't really get to meet a lot of people this transfer and we got punked A TON, so I figured it out in my planner. This is how it plays out from last transfer (6 weeks):
- 996 people were talked to
- 34 appointments were made
- 8 of the people with appointments actually met, with the other 26 never answering their phone again
- 1 of those 8 people actually met us again after the first lesson
... And then we had to drop that one guy (Brother Kim) because he was just trying to convert us to his church. It was a really good transfer as far as talking to people goes, but our lessons were super low. We don't really know why, but this transfer should be better. We're going to be working even harder and trying a little bit of a different approach for meeting with people. But, anyways, there's a little peek into missionary work at the moment!
Have a wonderful week!
Love, Elder Edwards
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