Vietnam Week 2

Good morning/good night, family! Week two is offically complete. Well not officially, not until Wednesday, but it’s pretty close. This week has been great! It went by pretty fast, and I’m pretty much used to the heat by now. So that’s good, I’m no longer dying because of it. Don’t really know where to start, so this email will be a little bit all over the place!

On Monday we did our pday activities, which is email, grocery shopping, NAP (we get to take one on p days) and then family home evening. At FHE, the members threw a cute surprise birthday party for Chi Man Nghi (my companion). The cakes here are so funny. They aren’t too bad tasting, not as good as america’s, but the way they decorate them is HILARIOUS. They always do white frosting with the person’s face outlined in a different color. It’s so funny, i’ve witnessed three so far. At FHE, Chi Ha (my companion)’s brother opened his mission call! He will be serving in Anaheim California, Viet speaking. We also played this hilarious game, but I will talk more about it in the big email. 

Tuesday, we had a district meeting, a few lessons (if I remember correctly) and of course planning. WE plan SO MUCH here because everything is so new. We plan for english class, branch correlation, weekly planning, daily planning, relief society planning, happy families class, self reliance class, basically everything you can think of.  As of right now, we have about… 4 or 5 investigators/less actives we teach. Em Hoa, Em Hien, Chi Trang, Trung Anh - those are our investigators. Em Hoa and Em Hien are both 19, but they’re both like 3 foot 5 and weight 70-75 pounds.. So my age but literally half the size of me. Chi Trang is older, we just started teaching her. Trung Anh is 21 and is TINY but I love her to death, she’s so cute. Em Hien and Trung Anh are committed to baptism.. Oh so is Em Hoa. But Hoa and Trung Anh don’t have official dates yet. Em Hien’s date is Aug. 20th. There’s also another investigator that I haven’t met yet, Chi Ngat. Her baptism date is sometime in August as well, but she’s not progressing right now so I don’t really know what we are going to do about that. Every week we try to make contact with the recent converts, Em An and Chi Hien. This week we also met with a girl named Khanh Linh - she’s good friends with Nhi Tran, one of the people I talked to at BYU when I got my call. Our only less active that we visit is Chi Trang. She’s super pretty, I think she’s 23. She’s been a member for a year or so now, but she hasn’t been to church in a long time. When we visited her last week we made this fabric scripture covers! I will send a picture of it later.

Wednesday is English Class day! Chi Man Nghi and I teach the little kids. They are super smart and know more English than I know Vietnamese, but none of them like to participate or talk in class. Every lesson we have a spiritual thought after words from For the Strength of Youth. I gave it last week with Chi Ha to the older class. We had probably 15 people stay to listen. None of the little kids stay, but I think it’s because class ends at 8 and 8 is a really late time for people to be out because it gets dangerous outside. We even have to be in by 8 every night or else the elders have to come escort us home.

Thursday. Don’t remember what happened on Thursday.

Or Friday. The days blend together so it’s hard to remember.

BUT on Sunday, yesterday, I GOT TO BAKE BROWNIES. I haven’t baked anything in 2 weeks and 2 months. It was President Hassell’s birthday yesterday, so we gave him a picture of our district and a pan of brownies that Chi Man Nghi and I baked. They were pretty good, the sugar here is a LOT BIGGER than in america. Like chunks. Anyways, when we delivered the brownies, Pres. Hassell invited us in for some CAKE THAT HE HAD MADE. IT TASTED LIKE AMERICA. It was so good. Apparently he is a really good baker, so he made a chocolate cake with really yummy chocolate frosting. Nghi and I are going to try to make frosting one of these days, if we ever have time to. LOL. Anyways, so yeah, last night for dinner I had a brownie and a piece of chocolate cake. Probably the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I don’t even feel bad about it though because once we go outside we bike and sweat it all off. 

Oh, Sunday Nghi and I also had to teach relief society - revelation and prophets. I have a hard time understanding when people answer my questions, so I just ask questions, nod my head, and then look at Nghi and she comments about it in a way that I can understand. Anyways, afterwards Co Hang (i’ll talk more about her in the big email) told me that my vietnamese is getting better! So that’s good. I feel like I’m not really improving much.. Like I’,m just saying the words that I already know. I am learning new vocabulary though, so I guess that’s a start.

So lately for personal study, I started the Book of Mormon over so that I could read it verse by verse and actually understand what’s going on. It takes a LONG time. For example, I’ve been working on 1 nephi 8 for like 3 days now and I just finished this morning. It’s really fun though because you notice things that you wouldn’t have noticed before. For example, 1 N 8:28 has a footnote linking it to 2 Peter 2:20, which talks about pollution. As in like, the world pollutes us. I thought that was SO COOL because I had never thought about using that word before to describe worldly things, but I love how perfectly it fits. Anyways, I challenge you guys to try it out, study the Book of Mormon verse by verse and see what you find!