What Happens When: "you do a lotta huntin"

Hello Everyone!

This is "huntin''' week. which means we go finding and try to locate less active members of our ward that have been "lost" for years. In Cambodia, technology is probably about 30 years behind. Smart Phones are not a huge craze here like they are in America. almost everyone (us included) gets by with a little nokia brick phone and a sim card that has a specific amount of money on it to use each month. this makes communication really difficult in this country, but we try to make what we have work. So in Cambodia when someone gets baptized and becomes a member of the Church, we take a picture of them, draw a map to their house, and their info goes into a binder we call CBR. Convert Baptism Record. This is the only record keeping we can do because we don't have electronic tech to do so other wise as missionaries. The CBR book is full of every single member of the church in cambodia, and every mission area has its own binder. The tricky part is, almost everyone goes inactive at some point, so we try to find them again using their CBR. This week we found 5 more houses from the pencil drawn maps from 5-10 years ago. That was a real miracle. Some of these maps only have landmarks that say "by the house that sells stuff" so we rely a lot on the Lord to guide us to these people. Haha I've learned a lot of patience and prayer can help you find just about anything. anyway, we have been busy hunting down people all week and we hope to help them come back to church with us. I now am an older sister in my mission family here. Sister Fields is still my mom (trainer) and we got a little sister this week, so we are now a trio. Sister Thoun is serving with us. She is actually serving a "mini-mission" until her visa comes and she can go to the MTC in the US. She will be serving in the Nampa Idaho Mission probably around march. She is so cute and a great cook. Our house has now become the party pad since Sister Y moved in with us as well. Everyone is teaching me how to cook Khmer food! lots of veggies and pork and fish sauce. As missionaries, it is easiest to eat a stir-fry of some sort for every meal. That might just be Khmer culture anyway, but I love it! Hopefully I can learn how to make lots of good food here. This transfer is going to be so much fun! Last week I started teaching piano here! so in my past life, i was a music teacher. and I thought I knew how to teach pretty well, until I came here and now have to teach in Khmer. Teaching music lessons to a group of people in khmer is the hardest thing yet! haha it is so much fun, but we don't have really any resources in khmer, or a piano to practice on... so that makes it a bit difficult. I can only draw a keyboard so well... and music vocabulary isn't even english, so they are learning all sorts of words when they get me as a teacher. The goal is to teach members and investigators so they can someday learn how to play hymns for church meetings. Right now, we have 4 students so far, and I think more will be coming as we keep going. It is the best hour of the week! I forgot how much I love teaching music!

We had this super awkward couple of days this week. We pick up our new companion and take her with us to meet a referral. Our referral came from this Vietnamese member who speaks a bit of khmer, but she is way hard to understand. We couldn't understand anything she was telling us on how to find her to meet her, so we got way lost. We were walking back and forth down the street we thought she said to meet us on, but we just couldn't find her! so we stopped and said a prayer, and asked some young girl if she knew the place we were looking for. She got some guy to help us out and eventually we walked all the way out and around the block and the Vietnamese lady was right there waiting for us! miracle#5847. She told us she had a Khmer friend that wanted to learn with us so the next day we ""dopped" (let her ride on the back of our bikes) her to the referrals house and we sat at this table and waited for the referral to come meet us. We started talking to this lady at the table and she didn't seem interested in the least, It was super awkard because none of us knew what was going on, But our Vietnamese friend kept making us talk to her. Turns our that was actually the referral (we think) and it didn't actually go so well... it was super awkard. And then we got to our next appointment with our golden investigator KimSia who is on lesson 5. two new girls that came to piano lessons wanted to join in on our lesson with Kim Sia so of course we let them, because they had never learned about Christ before and wanted to learn more, But the lesson we planned to teach KimSia was about temples and baptisms for the dead. which are two very amazing special things, but if you don't have any Christian background, it's probably way hard to understand. Anyway, we continued to teach KimSia and the new girls anyway, and they all seemed to actually like what was going on, so we just went for it. Then, right after our lesson, we all attended a baptism that the elders had set up. So these two new girls learned about temples, baptism, ancestor work, and piano all in 3 hours. They gave us their information to keep in touch, and I sure hope they keep coming :)

We say "prepare the road" a lot here, especially when talking about how God prepares a way for us. He definitely is preparing the way for us every day as we try to find people off penciled in maps and come in contact with new people everyday. It is so cool to see what happens when we find someone who Heavenly Father has been preparing to hear the truth. They are so ready and just soak it all in. I love being a missionary! and I love Cambodia!

I hope you have a great week. Be safe in the snow, and I'll be safe with my sunscreen!

Love,

Sister Haddock

When the innertube in my tire got a hole in it, this guy fixed it for a whole 30 cents. he blew up the tube, put in a bowl of water to see the air bubbles come up where the whole is, and he they clamped the tire in some metal and lit it on fire for a few minutes! quick cheap fix!

This is one of my favorite foods they call "kah" it is like the "beef Stew" of cambodia and so good.

We helped our Less-Active with her work yesterday when we dropped by to invite her to church. She fills these rice-season packets and counts them to fill the yellow plastic bags.

when there is heavy traffic, just drive on the sidewalk. That's ok too.