This year started off on a good kick! New Year's Day was quite possibly one of the funniest days I've had on my mission so far, which bodes well for the new year. We had a lesson with Chow Taai, a 60-something blind and almost deaf lady, and brought along Chou Ji Fung, the tiny 13-year-old boy who called us 3 times freaking out about the end of the world, to fellowship and read scriptures to her. They live in the same apartment complex, so we hope we can build an unlikely friendship between them and give him the opportunity to exercise his priesthood power by serving her and going over regularly to read scriptures to her. That lesson was definitely one of the funniest ones I've had on my mission. We go in there, and tell Chow Taai that we've brought Ji Fung with us. We have him hold her hand, since that's how she knows when people are there, and he introduces himself, but he has to tell her about 6 times where he goes to school and what his last name is, and she still either couldn't hear it or remember it. Then since she rarely has visitors and just sits by herself in the dark all day, she loves to talk when people are over. Sister Cook and I about died laughing watching Jau Taai just ramble on about things while holding Ji Fung's hand, while Ji Fung has his head thrown back in complete exasperation because what she's talking about is completely unrelated to what we were just teaching her. By the end, she had forgotten Ji Fung's name, so we tell her his name, when tiny, looks-like-he's-8 Ji Fung interrupts and says "No, no, no, you can call me BROTHER CHOU." It was so funny. Right after we had Chow Taai say a closing prayer, and she says "I'm so grateful that Sister Heaton and Sister Chou could come and visit me." Sister Cook, Ji Fung and I had to bite our coat collars to keep ourselves from just dying with laughter. At the end Sister Cook was like "Chow Taai, this is Sister Cook! I've been here the whole time! And Ji Fung is a boy!" and Chow Taai just started laughing and was like "I'm blind, you know!"
AND THEN. Same night. After we go visit a part-member/less-active family with the Mandarin elders, we're waiting at the bus stop to go home, when we see an old popo pushing this enormous cart of cardboard. Now, Popos in Hong Kong and Macau are always pushing or pulling around cardboard because they can sell it to get money, but this cart was the biggest I've ever seen, like the size of a car, almost, and there's a tiny 4-foot-something old lady pushing it down the middle of the street. We decide to go help her out, (to Mandarin Elder Chan's embarrassment) assuming she's almost to where she needs to go, come to find out that she wants us to push it 2 bus stops away. So there's 3 white kids and native pushing this enormous popo cart down the middle of the street with cars swerving around us and a tiny old lady trailing 20 feet behind us yammering on in a barely intelligible mix of Mandarin and Canotonese. This college-age kid passing us on the sidewalk just looked at us and started laughing and shaking his head, and the American Mandarin elder (Elder Wright) says "this kid's just thinking 'what are these gwailouhs (white people) doing pushing the popo cart？You don't push the popo carts!” and the kid just starts laughing harder because he totally understood. We finally got it to its destination, got on a bus, and then ended back up at the bus stop where we were originally waiting, and the people we were waiting with before got on, so we didn't even miss a bus for it! I'll see if I can get Sister Cook's picture of us-- we look like pioneers pushing a handcart. It was crazy.
Then on Wednesday, we were street contacting in this area where we had never been for about 20 minutes before a lesson, when all of a sudden it was like we were celebrities. First this little boy saw Sister Cook, and just was staring at her wide-eyed and open-mouthed as he walked away with his family. Then like 5 seconds later these 2 school girls see me, grin and wave to me, then run away. This this Filipina gave Sister Cook the thumbs up out of nowhere, and then we passed a park full of Vietnamese nannies, who all at the same time looked over at us and started waving. It was the weirdest thing-- I seriously felt like I was in a TV show or something. Unfortunately, all the people who randomly loved us just kind of ran away, so we couldn't talk with them. But we were like "Let's come finding here more often!"
Then on Thursday, in a moment of bravery or unwise-ness, Sister Cook prayed for diligence. No less than 30 minutes thereafter, all of our afternoon appointments called and cancelled, and we had 4 hours of finding. Luckily that morning I had just read in Mosiah about the people of Alma submitting cheerfully to their burdens and to the will of the Lord, so I was determined to stay cheerful, and it actually worked! We didn't find many people willing to listen to us, but we stayed cheerful throughout. We did meet a group of school boys and told them about our free English class, and one of them says, "We don't need, we are English is pretty good," and we were like "Actually, it's not. Come to English class." They were funny kids.
One of our investigators, Ivy, also accepted a baptismal date this week! We were talking about faith, and she was pretty hesitant at first b/c she didn't feel like she had enough faith, so we said "if you want to have more faith, you have to exercise it. Will you exercise faith by preparing yourself to be baptized on this date?" and she accepted! Yay!
Anyway, thanks for all the email and the love! And thanks to all the ward members, etc who sent Christmas cards!
Love,
Sister Heaton
P.S. The pictures are places around Macau and the Popo cart.
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