Referral in the Middle of Nowhere

It was another good week in Thailand. We have been having a lot of fun working out here and we are starting to find more investigators. We are really excited about one family. Chad’s family was interesting. They were investigators but then they have been on vacation for awhile so I had never had the chance to meet them. We finally got to meet with them this week and they were super ready to hear from us and they have a Baptism date for March 13th now. We have also been teaching Song's family they are really nice but they are super active in their Christian church already. It is odd they really know the book of Mormon, like the Bible, is God’s word but they have a hard time realizing differences between different Christian churches. So it is difficult to try and get them to want to change. I think they would be super solid if they got baptized and everything. We also got a new family we started teaching last night. It was a referral from the Sister Missionaries that are in the main part of Chiang Mai. They told us he was right behind this university about 20 minutes on bike from our house. It was behind the university, but I wouldn't consider it right behind. We kept asking people where this road was and they would just say ‘go far’ so we would bike a while then ask someone else this happened about 6 times. Then when we got to the road, we called the referral and he said it was hard to get to his house so he would meet us, where we were, on his motorcycle. We waited for about 10 to 15 minutes for him to get here then he started leading us down all these dirt roads and it was super cool. We were just in the middle of nowhere. The people there didn't have running water or electricity and everyone spoke Northern instead of Thai. (Northern is pretty much another language. It is similar to Thai but you can’t skim off that much. They really only speak it in the mountains in northern Thailand. It isn't really educated at all so all the people who go to school learn normal Thai.) We had a good lesson with his family. It is quite the bike ride though it took us like almost 2 hours to get there and about 75 minutes to get back.

We have been able to have some good P days. Last week we checked out some wats (Buddhist Temples). They are everywhere. We ride by them all the time. This week we are going to go to a museum. It sounds like it should be a lot of fun. Next week we plan on going up to Chiang Rai to ride some ostriches. I am really excited for that. It will be really cool. Apparently, Chiang Rai is the only place in Thailand where you can go ride an ostrich, so you really need to do it if you are in northern Thailand. 

Yesterday we also had a really good experience. It was the 50th anniversary of the Church in Thailand so they had Elder Stevenson come. He spoke in Bangkok but we watched it all here from a broadcast. It was really cool because they had a few people speak in English at it and they had a person translating it to Thai right next to them. It was funny to hear, because some of the phrases or things they say don’t translate well into Thai so it was interesting to hear the translator explain it. Some of the English speakers also tried to say greetings or words in Thai and it made me feel really good about my Thai. That was funny because the translator would have to translate the words they tried to speak in Thai as well.  

Not that much else happened this week. It is starting to creep into the hot season but Chiang Mai is supposed to be the place to be during the hot season. So I will probably just stay here long enough for it to get to the middle of the hot season then get thrown into Bangkok where it is the hottest.

-- Elder Cheney

ฉะนั้น, หากเจ้ามีความปรารถนาจะรับใช้พระผู้เป็นเจ้า เจ้าก็ได้รับเรียกมายังงาน

 ่่้เอ็ลเดอร์ ซีนีย์

Chiang Mai

Well another week has gone by in Thailand. It is still great here I really like being here and being able to experience a new culture. Everything is going really well and we are starting to find people to teach. The area was kind of empty because it was just opened so there are a few recent converts that lived out in our area but not that much else. It is cool sometimes when we go out and when we go down a new street we can say we were the first missionaries to talk to people there. We do a lot of biking, which I really enjoy. I got a pretty nice bike; hopefully it will survive my riding several miles every day for the next 20 months. 

We had an interesting day on Friday. The Zone Leaders called us the night before and told us to go with a group of people to Chiang Mai University. What was going on was that students from Weber State in Utah were visiting and I think our purpose there was to be translators. So we ended up spending the whole day at the University.  Afterwards we went to these gardens, it was really nice there and they paid for us to get into stuff and also paid for our food. We got to talk to a lot of people and recruited a lot of the students there that want to come to the English class we do every week. They were all really nice. It was funny because it was a University from Utah and like half of the people in the group were LDS. They were all Computer Science people so they were helping the University improve things like their website. I didn't really have to do any translating because Elder Parish’s Thai is way better than mine. The only translating I did was helping people order food. It was still a good day.

We have to do a lot of biking because our area is really big; we have to do a lot of long rides to get to all of our investigators.  I don’t mind riding because I get to see all of the scenery. There are a lot of rice fields and lots of green.

I have been surprised with my food eating trends since I got on my mission.  I really don't struggle with cheese anymore. I have had a lot of time were I had cheesy stuff in California. I still will get like hamburgers without cheese, if I have the choice, but it’s no big deal if I get it. Cream Cheese still isn't the best. Yesterday a member gave me a huge piece of cheese cake after church and I just had to eat it. Some of the Thai stuff is worse than cream cheese, somehow, but I can get stuff down when I need to. I also have to drink a lot of soda here. Since the tap water isn't good, soda and other manufactured beverages are pretty big here.  They give me stomach aches but I manage. The people in the branch are great. They like to talk to the missionaries, so I always learn new stuff when I talk to them. It is funny, we have this one member in our branch that wants to go serve a mission and is like 25 already so he has to leave soon but the law here is that he needs to serve 1 year in the army before they are 26.  So he is having problems. He is currently trying to gain enough weight to disqualify him from service. He only needs to put on like 3 more kilos. I haven't seen any elephants yet. I was over by some the other day but we didn't see any of them. The broadcast for the 50th anniversary of the missionary work in Thailand is this Sunday. It will be fun.  Elder Stevenson is coming. It will be in Bangkok so we will just see it via Broadcast.

 

-- Elder Cheney

ฉะนั้น, หากเจ้ามีความปรารถนาจะรับใช้พระผู้เป็นเจ้า เจ้าก็ได้รับเรียกมายังงาน

 ่่้เอ็ลเดอร์ เซนื

Thailand Arrival

Wow, it has been a quick 2 weeks since I last wrote.

Flying over to Thailand was quite a long flight. We flew from Long Beach to Salt Lake, to Portland, to Tokyo, to Bangkok. We were flying forever and it turns out I don't really sleep well on planes. (This later aided me when I was trying to adjust to the new time schedule.) When we got to Tokyo we were all really excited to have a few hours in Japan. We got off the plane and we were waiting outside the bathroom when this guy comes up and tells us the flight to Thailand leaves in 10 minutes and that it is boarding now. We had to sprint across the airport and barely made it in time to catch our flight, so I didn't have any time to do anything in Japan while we were there. When we arrived in Thailand, it was really intense.  There were so many people walking around speaking Thai, and it was really warm.  It took us a while to go through passport control and everything but we eventually got our bags and met our Mission President. He was nice. Then we got to go outside and we realized that the airport was air conditioned and to add to it, it was the middle of the night in the dead of winter here. The office Elders drove us to the mission office. The roads here are really intense. Not only is everything on the other side of the road, the traffic is crazy with all the cars motorcycles and bikes driving wherever they can. We got to the mission office and got out of the van, and we are standing around taking when the security guard for the area comes up and shows us all some pictures from off of his phone. The first picture is what looks like a fairly large snake with a bulge in the middle. The second picture is him cutting open the snake after he had killed it. The third picture is him pulling out a full sized dog from inside the snake. It was crazy; the dog wasn't even a small dog at all. So that was my first night in Thailand.

The next day we spent at the office getting things taken care of and getting trainings and all of that. We got to start talking to people on the streets it was really fun. I got one phone number, but the language was a little rough. The next day we all got to meet our trainers and find out where in Thailand we were going. I got paired up with Elder Parish and we are up in Chiang Mai. I was told Chiang Mai was the most desirable area so that is really cool. We had to travel back to Chiang Mai which was about 10 hours away by bus. We got to the bus station and they told us there were two seats left on the bus that was leaving for Chiang Mai in about 5 Minutes.  We said that would work just fine and at that moment two other Elders going to Chiang Rai get out of their taxi and want to get on that bus to Chiang Mai.  We ask if there is any way they can come too. The person says there is no problem if they come as well. so we all head over to the bus and put our luggage under the bus The other two elders go up in to the bus and then the driver comes up and tells us we have "special seats" he then leads us back to the luggage compartment and opens the door and tells us to go in. So just like that, we ended up spending that 10 hour bus ride in the luggage compartment. It really wasn't too bad.  There wasn't that much luggage down there so we were able to lie down and sleep pretty easily once it got later into the night. 

Our bus got in at 3:30 in the morning and we all went and slept at the Zone Leaders house for the remainder of the night. In the morning, we went to the bike shop to get me a bike. They didn't really have any bikes that were big enough for me to ride on so I am on a loaner bike for now and will probably get one this week when it comes in. We had to go over to our house afterwards, which is actually outside of Chiang Mai. There are three companionships in Chiang Mai and we are outside and cover all of the countryside that still goes to church in Chiang Mai. It is really fun it takes us like 40 minutes to bike to church and we just have a huge area. I am really happy with were I am at. 

Saturday was a really interesting day with a lot of interesting foods. We were biking along this road, in the middle of nowhere, when we see someone outside. We go and start talking to them and they run inside and come out with this pyramid shaped thing wrapped in this banana leaf for us to eat. We unfold the leaf and it reveals a nice blue object and I eat it. It was not that good but I finally got it all down so they brought out a whole plate more of them. We ended up not staying for too much longer so we didn't have to eat any more of those. We kept biking on then someone we stopped by later sat us down at gave us these big bowls of noodles with chunks of coagulated blood in them. That wasn't quite as bad, it was a little spicy but manageable. Then around dinner time, we stopped by this investigator who owns a restaurant. When he sees us, he waved us in and tooktwo fish out of his freezer and threw them on the grill. That wasn't too bad either; it was just weird to be eating the whole fish. 

The next day at church was really fun. We had two, three hour blocks there. It was a lot. Everyone wanted to talk to me because I was the new missionary. The people here are a little bit harder to understand than in Bangkok because they have a little bit of an accent but it was okay. 

It has been a really interesting two weeks and I am really excited to see what else Thailand has to offer. We might be going Ostrich riding sometime in the next few weeks so that is something to look forward to.

-- Elder Cheney

Here is a link to a video of me arriving.  You might have to copy and paste the URL.

https://www.facebook.com/mormonthai/

ฉะนั้น, หากเจ้ามีความปรารถนาจะรับใช้พระผู้เป็นเจ้า เจ้าก็ได้รับเรียกมายังงาน

 ่่้เอ็ลเดอร์ เซนื