June 28

We got to meet with President and Sister Hassell on Saturday night! It was so much fun, they are so great. They both don’t sound anything like what they look like, so I was really surprised to hear them talk. They told us a lot about what we can except missionary life to be like in Vietnam. So first things first, I don’t need to bring my temple clothes. So I will be sending those back right before I head out of the MTC. Second, we aren’t going to be allowed to wear our nametags out in public, so they told us to take them off during our last flight to Vietnam. Sister Hassell said that people will confuse us for business people/salesmen, so wearing our nametags would just make the work harder. BUT the good thing is that we can talk openly about the church when we’re out and about. Our lessons will most likely be taught at the church because they said the people don’t really like having different people come to their houses, unless they want to brag to their neighbors about having Americans over. Right now there aren’t a lot of Books of Mormons in Vietnam because you weren’t allowed to print or ship them in, so hopefully we can get more into the country or else teaching/extending commitments will be REALLY hard. As of right now, there are only 2 sister missionaries in the whole country! 2 sisters and 7 elders. And the 2 sisters were 2 girls that could speak Vietnamese but were serving in London and Georgia - they pulled them from their missions so that Chi Schley and I would have trainers! It’s going to be crazy. By the time we get there, there will be 14 missionaries total (including us) and 93 million Vietnamese citizens. Something that was SUPER cool was that President Hassell said they were going to start looking for grounds to build a temple. Apparently when Elder Holland came to the country a few weeks ago, he said that the timing was perfect for the church to be opened up to Vietnam and that he could sense that there was going to be a big boom in membership. HOW EXCITING IS THAT. If a temple gets announced in my time there, I will FLIP OUT. That would be so cool.