From the Land of no swimming and moon cakes!

something torturous...is that a word?:

last preparation day our zone went to the beach in park island. it was beautiful and sunny and we played volleyball, ate food, made sand castles and all that good stuff that is done at the beach....accept swimming of course. it was torture. especially when it was really hot and so tempting to just run and dive in. that's self control my friends.

something that doesn't taste good:

It is mid-autumn festival here in Hong Kong!!! yes, i know it's only august, but they celebrate things for a long time here. Which means lots of celebrating and lots of food and lots of members giving us MOON CAKES. they are the worst tasting thing i have ever had, but we eat them anyway because it's part of the season. I would compare it to fruit cake. not in taste, but in the fact that people give it to you and you are kind of obligated to eat it. they are very intricately decorated cakes that have almond paste and a cooked egg yoke in the middle. they each weigh about 1 pound because they are so dense....(did i spell that right? my english is terrible these days)...anyways, hopefully we can avoid them as much as possible, but in the mean time we will just smile and swallow and enjoy every last inch of almondy, pasty nastiness!!!! yum!

something organizational:

Last week i promised that i would explain more about the new plan that we will be starting here in Hong Kong on September 1st. Hopefully i can explain it clearly, but before i say anything, i have to say that i am so excited for it to start. it is time consuming and will take lots of coordinating and organization, but i believe it will clean out a lot of our records and make us more effecient as missionaries. President Chan, our new mission president, use to be the chief of police here in Hong Kong and he is a very organized and lay down the law kind of man if you know what i mean...:) he is so good for all of us as we all need a little kick in the pants to make more miracles happen here. he is the one the wanted us to do this plan and it has been approved by the area authority and even supported by the quorum of the twelves as it has been done in Whales and had great success there.

ok, so it is called the 100% home teaching plan, mostly because it's purpose is to have the missionaries work with the members and help them do their visiting and home teaching, while getting to know the less actives and part-member families in the ward, thus increasing the unity with missionaries and ward members while also helping us find new investigators and strengthening the families that are already in the area. Here in Hong Kong, HT and VT is kind of a joke. barely anyone does it believe it or not. mostly because people are so busy...not that that should be an excuse. missionary work cannot happen unless there is a foundation already there with the members. so, we are backtracking and trying to get that foundation going here in Hong Kong. there are many, many many less actives. the ward i serve in has about 60-70 active members. the list we received of all the members in the ward has about 500 names on it. yes, crazy. so, for the last week, my district spent hours organizing and cleaning out all the records (in chinese of course) according to where they live. we had a native person helping us, but it still took forever! now that we have that, the bishop gives us a list of 150 households that he wants us to visit. these can be active, less active or part member families. we then go on splits with ward members (preferably their HT or VT) and visit 4 families a week per missionary. so each month, i will visit 16 different families/housholds with members. between my comp and i we will visit 32 and within our district 64. we now count these as official numbers too. the point is to each month tell the bishop that we can guarantee that at least 64 households will receive visiting and home teaching. Hopefully as we encourage members to do this, they will feel and see the need for it and will be more motivated to lift and teach their fellow ward members. It also strengthens our relationship with the ward, teaches them how to be missionaries, gives us the opportunity to teach and and helps us meet those who really need us and those families that have nonmembers. THe ward records are being cleaned out like crazy and we have the opportunity to start from the bottom up and really get the wards involved and doing more missionary work themselves. this program will go for 7 months- until end of next march, which is just 6 weeks before i go home. crazy! i hope to see many miracles come from it, but i think the benefits might not be seen for a while until we get it going. they are cutting down on the number of missionaries here a lot, so it is time for the members to step up to the plate and help us do the work. President chan is inspired! wish us luck! wahoo!!