The subject line may be a little misleading. What I mean by Ups and Downs is that this whole week has been one big up, but there have been a few unfortunate things that have happened.
I guess I can start by telling a little about the areas. The chapel is in Tai Po. It is a little city that is smaller than anywhere in my last area. Then the rest of the places in our area are out in the middle of nowhere up on mountains. I was reading a real estate sign that said there are more than 60 villages in just one of our areas. The other one has even more.
We have been doing a lot of finding lately. But neither my companion or I have any idea where anything is in our area. We have two of the biggest areas in the mission. His last companion didnt ever really leave the main city area and so we have just been exploring a ton lately.
It has been good, except for we have run into a HUGE problem. EVERYONE in our area things we are some evil cult who was sent to China to do horrible things to the people here. There are rumors about us everywhere, and it does not help that in every school here they have had assemblies about the "mou muhn gaau" and how evil we are. Our latest task has been the APs asked us to find out the names of the schools so president chan can come visit them.
When we are walking around finding, people will literally duck their heads and run as fast as they can past us, then we can hear them talk about how scary that was. Luckily, we have been able to still find a few new investigators and have been able to help the few investigators they have. But it is only a matter of time until they face anti. Hopefully they come talk to us about it instead of just disappearing once they hear it.
Well anyways, we have had some fun exploring for villages. This morning at 3 in the morning we woke up and went to a mountain and hiked it to try and find a village that we could go finding in for our P-day morning.
At about 6 in the morning we found one. I took some pictures. It was half deserted, but there were still some old people living there. It literally was in the middle of nowhere, and I have no idea how the people got there or their houses. Then, we had an extremely traumatic experience.
While walking through the village, we walked by a box. out of the box popped two little kittens. They were meowing and walked up to us purring and pushing against our legs. I took some pictures of them because they werer really cute. Then we were trying to find some sign of human life and the cats followed us. The Sheung Shui missionaries came with us that morning and Elder Mariano really liked the cats but was worried about them getting lost because they were following us. We finally lost them and kept walking. We found a road and walked across it and heard a noise coming towards us. We saw a makeshift car/tractor thing booking it down the road. Right before it came, one of the kittens ran across the road and CRACK! It went right under the wheel. It made us all want to throw up it was so sad and gross. We decided we were all too exhausted from hiking and so we hiked to the closest main road abuot an hour and a half away and took a taxi back home. I have been scarred for life.
I have been eating weirder food than normal. We live right up against mainland, I have pictures from the roof of our apartment looking into Shenzhen. I have heard that up here there is some weird food. I heard right.
I was running kind of low on money for the month so I spent the rest of it on groceries so I wouldnt have to eat out because its cheaper to cook our food. Well that was a bad idea.
We walked into our apartment the other day and it was INFESTED with cockroaches. They were everywhere. They were in the couch, on the counters, in the cabinets, and even frozen ones somehow in the freezer and fridge in our food. I have no idea what happened but we have spent the last few days killing them left adn right. Every night before I go to sleep I kill tons of bugs and spiders and stuff on the wall and ceiling above my bed because it creeps me out sleeping with them right above and next to me.
So now I have no food adn barely any money. I feel really bad, and the other kids in our apartment are doing the same thing, but could you maybe put some money in my account so I can eat food that has not been infested by bugs? :/ I am really sorry and next time I will not buy all my groceries at once now that I know what can happen outside of the temple apartment.
So with the little money I have I have been eating at really cheap street vendors. I have been getting some type of chopped up sea creature dumplings in soup with snake and cow skin floating around. Its really not too bad so I cant complain. But I only have enough to buy about three more days of food. Today I am going to try and buy some groceries with it and hope that it doesnt get infested like the food i bought last week....
Luckily we will be deep cleaning our apartment next week. So hopefully we will kill allof the bugs....
I have been exhausted with everythign going on lately. Elder Mariano said it is extremely rare for President Chan to have a missionary go senior before he is on his 7 to 12 move. So sometimes I wonder why I am on my 4th and in an area like the one I am in. But I am very very grateful because of how much I am learning, and how much I am needing to rely on the Lord for our success. Because we try to do all we can, but we couldnt have any of the success we are already having without His help.
I love you all and hope you have a fantastic week!
Love, Jordan :)
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