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

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