THE LOST ONE What Happens When: You Get Double the Emails, Bridges, and Blessings

From Monday 16 May 2016

Hello! My dear family and friends, I have missed you!

Sorry I didn't email last week, I had too much fun skyping the fam! I hope everyone enjoyed a sbaay Mother's Day! Our wards here in Kampong Cham forgot that is was last week so we celebrated yesterday. They gave out little bouquets of flowers to all the girls, it was way cute. This letter is going to be extra long because I have double the days to tell you about! Last week, we "baan chlong spian pii dong knong pii tngai." That means, we crossed a bridge TWICE in two days . Talk about tired legs. On P-day, we biked over the huge Kizuna Japanese-Khmer friendship bridge and on Tuesday for service, we biked over the famous bamboo bridge to the island. Biking bridges has never been my favorite, but the sight from the very top of the bridge makes it so worth it. The bamboo bridge was quite fun. It is super hard to bike, the bamboo moves around under the bike so you have to pedal extra hard, but it's way cool. They re-build it every year after rainy season. We had a super cool lesson with Bei Bei, a less-active, last week where we shared about the importance of the Book of Mormon and family history. We committed her to fill out the My Family book and prepare herself to go to the temple in Thailand when it is finished. For the first time in all the lessons I've ever taught her, she actually paid really close attention and I could really feel the spirit testify of the truthfulness of our message. She then testified to us and opened up about her family and her desire to help her family members be baptized and to do to sealing work for them. She came to church yesterday and even said the closing prayer for sacrament meeting. I was WAY excited, and she looked WAY HAPPY. The members were super happy to see her back again as well. One by one, the lost sheep of branch 2 are coming back! For May the Fourth, the elders got creative and taught a Star Wars lesson in English class. Haha we have to spice things up a little out here in our small english class. The students actually really liked it, and to keep on the topic of war for spiritual thought, we read about the stripling warriors in the book of Alma. They were all intrigued :) Sister Nit and I are continuing to love being in KC together. I've heard being a trainer can be stressful, but I just think it's loads of fun! We are having a lots of fun together. We have been going out to Phuum Taneang about once a week, and the members we visit there have actually started coming back to church. Hurrah! Some great miracles happened while we were there last week. It was super duper hot that day, and we had just finished our lesson with our less-active recent convert there. She agreed to come to church again and when we left, we prayed that the next few people we planned to meet there would be home. We ended up teaching another member there and after that lesson, we decided to look on this little map to find the rest of the member's houses there. I for some reason could not figure out which house was which on the map, but this old lady just walked up to us, motioned for us to sit down on this old bamboo bench with her. So we sit down, and she starts telling us about Jesus Christ. What? Turns out she is catholic, but really wanted to talk with us. and so we taught her the first lesson. She actually seemed quite interested, so we got her number and will try to find her again next week. Even though she can't read, she liked the "first vision" picture so we left her with a restoration pamphlet, and walked down the street and around the corner to find some more members. It was a way random thing that she just wanted to talk to us, she hasn't even seen the missionaries before, and couldn't have read our tags, but knew we taught about Christ. Then, because we sat and talked to her for about 30 minutes, that gave time for another old lady to walk from her house and sit on a bench where we found her. Turns out her son served a mission and is an active member but she never learned about our church. She didn't want to learn with us, but she told us where all the other members live in that area #blessing. And then, miracle #3 ANOTHER old lady walked down the street and sat down on the bench next to old lady #2 and she acted like she'd never seen us before.... but then like 7 minutes later she told us she's actually a member and all her kids are too, and showed us where her house is. We had a nice conversation with both of them, invited them all to church, and then the biggest miracle of all, IT RAINED. Only for like 15 minutes, but it was a good 15 minutes of HARD rain. It cooled off, everyone in Kampongcham was happy, and a few members from Phuum Taneang came to church that week! We did service at the Island at a super cute old grandpa's house. He is the funniest Om I've ever met. his name is Om Khan. And I loved chopping down his neighbor's pokey trees with machetes. I felt like mulan with my gramaa (sweat scarf.... it's the nastiest most convenient thing ever) tied around my head. I love doing service here. It's dirty and sweaty, but I love helping the members with their yard work. We also dug holes to put in a fence at another old guy's house this week. There was a large black scorpion under one of the logs, and I learned my lesson to not play with big red fire ants. They bite! The members are always super grateful when we show up in a big line on our bikes to help them. It's a great experience you don't get in the city! Every week we go "english contacting" out in some city roundabout where there are lot of people. We hold a big sign and give out a billion fliers to everyone on their motos as they pass bye. It's super fun and sometimes people stop and ask questions so we invite them to church. Pretty soon here, Kampongcham will have a nice new church building. We are SO excited. Right now, we meet in a super old house that is half functional, so the members are WAY excited, it's going to be a great contacting opportunity too, since it just happens that the church built it in the literal center of town. I hope everyone has a good week, I'm about out of time here. Hopefully it'll rain more this week and the heat will die down a bit! I love you all! miss you! love, Sister Haddock