Thailand and a Branch Activity

So lately, without a church, we have not had much to do in our free time. We kind of just roam around or hang out with the deaf kids. We don't have any place to teach anyone, so we really have nothing to do a good portion of our time. This has lead us to switching this up a little bit. So we decided we would send two Elders to Thailand to work for the week and the other Elders would just work to cover the extra classes. So, I was the lucky one and got to go work in Thailand for the week. So, Elder Saunders and I went over to Nongkhai to work all week. 

It was a lot of fun to do missionary work all week. It was even more fun that Elder Parish (my trainer in Thailand) just recently moved to Nongkhai, so I got to switch off with him on Sunday. For the rest of the week Elder Saunders and I just worked together. We had some pretty good success at building up an investigator pool while we were there, and all of them came from street contacting, which is usually quite ineffective. We got this cool investigator named Fon. He has been learning with the Jehovah's witnesses for 4 straight years but has never felt any desire to join their religion. We taught him a few times and are now in the process of reading in, and praying for an answer about, the Book of Mormon. 

We got one other serious investigator while we were over there. His name is Pet. He is actually a Lao person but he is from up north so his Lao was quite hard to understand and he had a hard time understanding Elder Saunders and my 2 month version of Lao. We met with him twice and he really wants to learn everything so that he can follow the commandments and everything. The hard part is he is a little hard to keep on topic in any way, so teaching him those very things can be hard sometimes. 

Being in Thailand was kind of weird. It is pretty hard to be switching languages so frequently. It takes a little bit of effort to separate the two languages. The other Elders say after a while it will be really easy to just switch back and forth but I am not quite there yet. 

We went back to Laos on Friday. It was a good day. We got some solid contacting. In the morning we found some random service to do I helped this guy get his motorcycle running and we got to clear all of these branches and stuff out, at a Buddhist temple. Then we got to bike back to Laos. That was fun, biking over the Friendship Bridge (the bridge that runs from Laos to Thailand)

Today we went out to this waterfall river thing and met about 60 of the members there. It was awesome to see all of the members and see that everyone is still doing well. All the members were playing at this really cool river, it had a rope swing, a 15 foot platform to jump from, and a zip line that you hold on to then drop in the river. So that was fun to watch. I was a little sad that it is a rule that we can’t swim. It would have been fun to try some of the activities.

So that was this week. It was a pretty exciting and fun week. 

-- Elder Cheney

ฉะนั้น, หากเจ้ามีความปรารถนาจะรับใช้พระผู้เป็นเจ้า เจ้าก็ได้รับเรียกมายังงาน
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