I feel so OLD!

So we had transfers this past week. We went bowling with us four Elders since Elder Pettit and Elder Knapp left the area. It was pretty fun. It was kinda sad to see those two go, because our house was really fun to live in, and now we have to adjust to new people and new situations. 

My apartment right before transfers: Me, Elder Pettit, Elder Fullmer, Elder Knapp

I'm the senior companion now! I'm greenie-breaking Elder Tidwell, from Cottonwood Heights, Utah. So far he's great! He likes to work hard, he loves being a missionary, and I'm pretty sure he knows way more about being a missionary than I actually do. He's set to be AP one of these days, I swear. I don't know a whole ton about him yet, though, since it's only been a few days. I know he played lacrosse in high school, he really likes reading and teaching the gospel. So far so good!

So we had Thanksgiving this week. I'm a little bummed out about having had to wait for the American date... but it was way good! We have a couple members in our ward from America who planned it all out and made it amazing! THEY EVEN FOUND A TURKEY!!! Turkeys were thought to be nonexistent in Korea, but they found one! The only thing was that I had to cook it... And it turned out SO GOOD! Now Mom can make me cook turkeys in the future :P I took a picture of it, I was so proud of myself!

The rest of the week went by as about usual, though. Elder Tidwell brought with him a sweet planning method, though, so we've stepped up the game a ton since we started working together. I just hope that I can keep up, because he just loves working so much!

That's all for this week, though! The first snow of the winter happened today! Just in time for December!

Love you all,

Elder Shaver

THE Highlight of the Week...

Was probably getting a call from Sister Morrise that Michelle got her mission call! Spanish in Montréal! Who'dathunkit? That's pretty convenient that she already speaks French, right? That's going to be way sweet! And probably way cold (hahaha! >:P ) So stoked for you, Sis! 

Here she is with her Québec (and Canada) flag cake!

I also got another really important call: TRANSFER CALLS!!!

I'm staying here, AND I'M GREENIE-BREAKING!!! My new companion is going to be fresh out of training! I'M GOING SENIOR!!! HOLY COW!!!! This could get interesting WAY fast!  Elder Knapp is going to 강남 [Gangnam], y'know, that place in that famous song? It's pretty exciting. He's going to be the oldest missionary (serving-time-wise) in his house. Elder Pettit is leaving for 부평 and Elder Fullmer is training! We're going to have a couple of newbies in the house! Sister Jacobson is leaving and Sister 황예림 is training! Half of our district just changed! It's going to be pretty interesting.

Other than that, though, we've just been doing run-of-the-mill work. We've started a big project to find less actives, so we took a big map and put it up on the wall and have been marking addresses of less active members, and then going out to find their houses (which might sound easy, but you probably haven't been to Korea, so you have no idea). Then we take the stickers down if they're not there anymore. When I got to the area, we had no member book, neither did we have an up-to-date CMIS list. It wasn't good at all. I haven't really mentioned it yet, but that's been taking up a lot of our time to do, but we finally have good records as of last week or so, and have been doing this map project, a lot in the past two weeks. It's just hard to talk about because it's a lot of office-type of work and not much else. We're making good progress, though. Reactivation is just as important as anything else we do here, after all. It's super important stuff!

Anyways. Things are going well. The leaves are almost all off of the trees around here. It's really starting to get cold, although it hasn't been too bad lately. We have our sweaters on under our suit coats, though.

That's all for this week!

Love you all!

Elder Shaver

I Can See Clearly Now...

Well, I've been able to see just fine for a long time, but  I wanted to start out with this:

I went to the hospital again on Friday for the routine checkup, and she said that my eye is finally recovered! I have 20/20 vision, no more weird pressure problems, and aside from the big bump on the side of my eye from the first surgery and the scar tissue on my retina (of which I got to see some gnarly pictures) my eye is as good as new! All I have to do now is get it checked once a year... for the rest of my life. It's a precaution, and definitely not one of the worst things that I might have had to live with. I'm pretty happy. I tried to get the pictures so that I could have them to show to people, but when I ordered them, I got all of the WRONG ones! Now I gotta go back and try again so I can get what I actually paid for. At least the temple is close by :/

Anyways. We had our stake conference, and we had a few special guests attend. President and Sister Morrise came, as well as the temple president, and Elder Aoyagi from the Area Presidency. The latter is Japanese, so he spoke in Japanese and had it translated to Korean as he spoke, which was kind of cool to hear. Plus, I got to shake his hand because we got roped into the musical number 20 minutes before it began, so we were thus conveiniently on the stand. Heh heh.

It was good, though. It's still hard to understand what goes on at events like these, because the Korean gets a lot more refined than regular speech, but it went well.

The sisters from 평택 (Sister Hales and Sister 신) had a baptism in our building right after the conference... Guess who attended? The temple president and Elder Aoyagi. There was pressure on the 평택 missionaries! It was funny afterwards; just one of those interesting curve balls life throws at you every now and then.

Lastly, we met with Samir again. It was COLD when we met him, though. So we spent a lot of time looking for a cafe or something to talk in, but for some reason ALL of them were closed. Well, not all of them, but it did take us a good 30 minutes to find one that was open. It was crazy! We didn't end up having enough time to really teach anything, so we answered some of his questions about the Book of Mormon, and asked how his life was going. Oh! And he showed us his nose flutes! They were SO cool! You really do use your nose to play them! It was crazy!

But yeah, life is rolling along. That's all I got to report on this week.

Love you all!

Elder Shaver

Minionaries!!!

Not a whole lot happened this week.

We had our zone training, and some missionaries gave their parting words to the zone since it was their last chance before transfers at the end of the month. It's kind of interesting to see what people have to say when they do that. I wonder what kinds of things I'll have to say... but at the same time, I don't care yet, because it's about a year away.

We met with Samir again! This man is amazing. He caught me off guard this time by showing off his French to me. It made me feel silly for not keeping my French well-practiced, because he speaks way well. This man is proving to us every time we meet that he really does speak tons of languages. It really makes me wonder why he doesn't get a job as a translator or something. Anyways, he's doing great. He read a huge chunk of the Book of Mormon. And he's SUPER into it. He LOVES it. He believes in it, too! So we showed him Moroni 10:4-5, of course. And he said he's totally up for it. So we're going to meet him again this week and see how that's going for him.

I got the minionaries just in time, because our English class was the same night as I got them. We broke our attendance record, so I brought them out to celebrate. There were just enough for all of us. It was perfect!

Not a whole ton else happening, though. Just run of the mill work. We have meals with people, we're always trying to find, the work has just been slow around here lately, I guess. We'll keep trying, though.

Love you all!

Elder Shaver

This is Halloween ... Maybe

This week was pretty much devoted to Halloween. We tried to fit what other things we could into the week, but the reality is that our time was devoted to making the Halloween party we had on Saturday as great as we could make it.

Let me tell you something: It is difficult to get people excited about, and on board with, a party for a holiday that is not celebrated in the country they are from. But we did it!

The only problem was that we focused so much on getting our investigators, English class members, and less actives out that we forgot to invite the members out! We were hoping that our ward mission leader would get the ward out for us, but we totally forgot to talk it up to them ourselves. OOPS! All the people we were hoping our investigators and whatnot would make friends with didn't come!

Can't worry about it anymore! The party turned out great, anyways. The games were fun, the decorations were great, and the haunted house was amazing for how little money we spent on it.

That's really all that happened, though. I went on an exchange with my Zone leader, Elder Nixon, and even then we spent most of our time working on their Halloween party. It was Halloween week all week. I hope that it was fun for all of you back at home, because we managed to have some fun with it out here, somehow :P

That's all for this week, though!

Love you all!

Elder Shaver

Witches and Pumpkins and Bats, oh my!

That sums up the decorations for our Halloween party so far. We've been working overtime for this party, so we're really hoping that we'll get lots of people to come!

The haunted house is really starting to shape up. There were some bumps in the road, but hopefully it'll work out alright. The ward is also starting to get really on board, which is a relief. We're going to do all the publicizing this week. We'll see how things turn out!

We also had our zone conference this week. It was cool to meet with the zone, even though there were only a few new people in it this transfer. There were a couple of elders that came that I know, though. So I got to say hi to them.

Lastly, we met with a cool guy from Cameroon. We found him on the call sheets, and he's very down to meet with us. He's sweet! We made some great conversation with him last night at a park (that turned out to be the park where I got hit in the eye all those months ago. There were some memories stirred). He's out here studying to get a business degree, but he hasn't decided what he's going to do with it when he gets it. He's stuck between a couple of options. Anyways. He would like to learn more about the church, so we're going to call him again sometime this week so that we can teach him. OH! And he spoke French as well as English! We totally talked for a bit in French. It was awesome, but I'm definitely rusty. We talked about it with the other Elders in the house later that night, and Elder Knapp brought up how he could understand everything that we were saying without really knowing any French. We all got a little exasperated about being in Korea... It was funny, though

It's kind of weird how it works out that the investigators that we have that we can depend on for gospel interest are both foreigners. None of the Koreans that we work with care about that, except for our recent convert, 정현, but he doesn't meet with us lately. No big deal, it's just kind of funny how it's working out that way.

Anyways. That's the week. Happy Birthday to Chris and Levi this month! Hope that they were fun ones!

Love you all!

Elder Shaver

All the more reason to hate calculus!

Hello from Korea!

This week has been what it's been. For how awesome this area is, it sure can be hard on missionaries.

We didn't get to meet with anybody this week, even though we had some pretty great contacts and several referrals from the office to try to meet. We couldn't set up an appointment with Samir, either. Such is the life, I suppose.

There were some little miracles that happened, though.

Let me start with what I titled this week's email (I've decided I'm going to try to do that every week now, now that I've just noticed that I haven't ever): So it's been a while since I've gone to see a dentist. This past week, after eating a good lunch, I notice randomly that there is something that feels weird on my teeth. It felt like a popcorn husk stuck in my gums, but rougher. So I go to the bathroom and try to pick it out with a flosspick, and there's definitely something there, because I can see it, but I don't know what it is. Definitely not anything from the fried rice I just ate. So I start probing with the flosspick, and the tip of it disappeared. There was a hole in my tooth!

And I HATE oral surgery! 

I was feeling pretty down. I was dreading it for a couple of days before I made it to the dentist for the appointment I promptly set up after discovering it, but it turned out that there wasn't a hole at all. There was just a lot of tartar build-up that they called a calculus, and all they did was clean it off for me. It was a relief.

Plus, on the way home, a member from a neighboring ward ran into us on the subway and decided to take us to a buffet for lunch. It was a pretty great day.

Anyways, things were pretty average aside from that. Elder Pettit almost flooded the house (but not really), and we've started planning a ward Halloween party. We'll see what happens with that. Korea doesn't really have Halloween, but they do parties every year it sounds like.

Anyways, that's the week. Love you all!

Elder Shaver