Transfers

Dear all,

Yay. Transfers came this week and stuff is changing and all that. The call was supposed to come on Saturday night, but President said he wasn't ready to send it out because there was one missionary that wasn't in the right place in his plan, so the call came on Monday morning. This never happens. So I'm flushing (meaning neither my companion nor I were in that area this last transfer)  into Mandarin West (the area I hung out in for two weeks last transfer) with Elder Canon (a white guy who's going home in 12 weeks.) This is crazy for a couple reasons. One is that president usually hates flushing missionaries into areas, and doesn't ever do it unless he really feels he needs to, and the other is that President never puts two white Chinese missionaries together. Never. I don't think he's ever done it in his nearly 2 years here. This is the first time. I hear from Elder Furness (who was companions with Elder Canon before he came to the branch) that Canon really struggled with Chinese at the beginning of his mission and hasn't really gotten very good at it. He's still probably better than me, but definitely not anywhere close to native, so we're gonna have some fun figuring out how to communicate with people. It'll be quite the transfer. 

In other news, Elder Leung is coming back to Central with Elder Furness (Elder Leung spent 7 consecutive transfers here last year and is now coming back. This also NEVER happens.) I think he's pretty happy about that though. 

All in all, a unique transfer experience for us Chinese missionaries. 

In other other news, we had stake conference this week. It was all in English and not many people in the branch came, but all the talks were really good. I sang in the branch choir again. I'm getting really good at reading hymns in Chinese now. 

We met with Zhang Ning this week to teach him about the Word of Wisdom. We were afraid that he was gonna argue with us about tea being good for the body since he's a Chinese doctor and knows way more about that kind of stuff than we do. We were surprised to find out that he had already stopped drinking tea since we passing mentioned that we don't drink tea in one of our earlier lessons, and that the Word of Wisdom is actually very close to a lot of the philosophies in Chinese medicine. Pretty crazy. 

That's it for me.

Love you all, 

Elder Hadden

Pictures!

Biodome pic from last week

Biodome pic from last week

Biodome pic from last week

White Christmas that we had on Friday (7 April) It's still winter here.

We saw a big green light in the sky the other day. I thought it could have been the Northern Lights, but it was in the western sky. Probably aliens. Spooky.

Selfies in the snow.  Elders Hadden and Furness

Mormonspeak

Word of Wisdom: The Word of Wisdom is a law of health revealed by the Lord for the physical and spiritual benefit of all people. On February 27, 1833, as recorded in section 89 of the Doctrine and Covenants, the Lord revealed which foods are good for us to eat and which substances are not good for the human body. He also promised health, protection, knowledge, and wisdom to those who obey the Word of Wisdom.   In the Word of Wisdom, the Lord revealed that the following substances are harmful:  alcoholic drinks, tobacco, tea and coffee, illegal drugs or misuse of prescription drugs.