Dec 8, 2013

Hey Family and Friends:

Wow!

Korea really is amazing. I have had amazing first few days in Korea. The plane ride wasn't too bad, Sister Mathieson and I stayed awake for most of it so that we wouldn't get jet lag, and we were successful!

My mission president and his wife are wonderful! Sister Shin is so beautiful and regal, I am really excited to be working with her. She really is so nice and very well put together. President Shin is super smart and very motivational. He has a lot of great insight and is really good at teaching. We stayed at the mission house for the first two days, and it was great!

The New York Times is doing and article on Sister Missionary work, and they came to our mission to write about our experience. They watched us get our trainers, and took lots of pictures of it! The woman that interviewed me is named Jodi, and she was super nice. Jodi is a New Yorker and had been with The New York Times for a while. She flew a long way to talk to us! She asked lots of questions on why I became a missionary and about my experience so far. I am excited to see how the article turns out! 

My companion...is so LOVELY! I love her so much. She is a Korean native, but she lived in Salt Lake for two years to attend college. (So she speaks great English, GREAT English). She is so smart and very motivated. I have been so blessed to have so many great companions! 

The children here and the cutest! They will come up and start trying to talk to me in English and then I will try to talk to them in Korean (yes, their English is better than my Korean...). They have the biggest smiles and they love Americans! People are willing to talk to me for the sheer fact that I am American, so it is really nice. They giggle at my Korean and it is great! I have a talk in church on Sunday, and I was stumbling though it but I looked out and everybody was smiling at me and I could tell they were just glad to have me there! They are so loving! 

I am in the Yeo-sung ward in Chung-ju. They call this "countryside." It’s not. It’s very much a city. Ha ha. I have an amazing ward! They are so nice and they really want to help the missionaries. I ate at a member's house the first night I was in Korea, and they were so nice and accommodating. The food was so yummy! 

I have the best investigators. There are four I want to talk about. One is this little girl and she is 12 years old. We do a program called thirty-thirty. We teach them English for thirty minutes and then teach about the gospel for thirty minutes after. This little girl always has so many questions about reading the book of Mormon, (she is almost finished with first Nephi!) and she is really interested in the gospel. She will hopefully be getting baptized in two weeks from now. The 2nd little girl is really cute. She is about 10 and we teach her in her mom's coffee shop. Her mom wants her to have a religion so we teach her about ours. She is really good at praying and I think she will get baptized by the end of my transfer. There is a brother and a sister and are super awesome. We do the thirty-thirty program with them as well. They have no religion at all, and we invited them to pray for the first time. The brother was the one who prayed and right after he finished praying, I asked him how he felt and I could tell he liked it. He didn't know how to explain it but I knew his heart was touched. 

Missionary work is amazing and it is the best feeling in the world. After seeing how my investigators feel after our lessons, motivates me to learn Korean really well. I will get this language! (p.s. what they taught me in the MTC is not at all how they speak here. We learned high form, they speak middle... haha). 

I love my mission, I love my companion, and I love Koreans!

I am working hard.

Here's to another great week!

Love,

팔 자매

p.s. I am starting to accidently pluralize things like milk -> milks and fruit-> to fruits and it is because Koreans do it, and I always catch myself. It’s great!