1-19-15

Hello,

So the beginning of the week was kind of busy then we slowed down later on in the week.  So on Wednesday we were pretty busy. Had interviews with President Barrow in the morning and then later in the day we had 2 appointments with member that we had set up. The first one was with a single guy and we just met him at the church. When we called to confirm that morning we realized that the number we had for him was no longer an existing number so we didn't have any way to confirm, but luckily he stilled showed up. We just talked, found out more about him, his conversion story. We then just talked about the Book of Mormon with him. 

The other appointment was a couple for dinner. We went to their house which turned out to be super nice. They don't have any children so they had a pretty nice place. Super delicious dinner, some meat and some fried shrimp/sweet potato/squid, and kimchi and of course rice. The meat was super good! They also put some figs in with the meat sauce. Figs are super delicious, they had bought them from Iran I think. We shared a message about testimony and ways to build and share. We think it went pretty well. They also had chickens that they raised. We didn't see them but they said they were on the roof of their apartment building. They gave us each one of the eggs from the chickens and we ate them (they were hard boiled). Pretty delicious.

Later that night when we had finished planning and were getting ready for bed the lights and all electronics suddenly went off in our apartment. The whole buildings electricity had gone out. Luckily we found this little flash light in our house that worked so at least we could see. That was probably around 9:35. They eventually got whatever was broken fixed and got the power back on around 10:10.

This Sunday we started to take the sacrament to an old lady in a different hospital than the other lady that we take the sacrament to. Our Sundays are pretty full. Church, lunch at church, then 2 people to take the sacrament to. Then missionary correlation meeting and another different planning meeting, then visits with the branch president and then dinner then done. It passes by quick.

So this past week we spent a lot of time at home cleaning up old records. Organizing and calling all the old numbers of investigators. The phone numbers changed a few years back, but there was some way to call that number if I had a conversion formula. For example the old number was 019-345-5678 and the new number is 010-2334-5678.   So after thinking about how I could figure out the formula I figured that the phone stores would probably have a list for the conversions. So I went to the phone store, asked, and got the list. So now we will be able to contact past investigators that I thought we might not be able to contact because the old number "did not exist". Also going through the list of members that we have and calling all the record's phone numbers and trying to visit the houses. While doing these things we hope to be able to find old or even maybe new people to teach.

Another funny story. On the January 1st I was on exchanges in a different area but on that day we get a text to our phone from a guy saying he wanted to eat dinner with us. We didn't have the number in our phone so we had no idea who it was. So we couldn’t (my companion and other missionary) meet him because they were busy so they said maybe another time. So we texted that person this past week again (thinking that it might be some new investigator), we asked them to meet. They sent another text saying "did you mean to send this to me?" and we said 'yea'. Then right after we sent that that person calls us, after talking a little on the phone we find out that he was the Bishop of another area! He had texted us the other week because he thought we were the missionaries in his area so he was super confused why we were asking to meet. Super funny and kind of disappointing because we thought he was a new investigator!

Friday we went looking for a less active member in one part of town. While looking through records we found an old record of his with a map to his house so we took the map and nothing else to go find the house. We found the area and tried to follow the map. The map wasn't drawn very precisely (13 year old map), so we couldn't find where the house was. After looking around for about an hour or so we finally found it. (It was next to a restaurant that sold dog soup)(lots of dogs in the 'yard') well we realized that he probably doesn't live there anymore because someone else seemed to live there based on what was written on the door. So we left. Actually 30 minutes into looking for the house we asked our branch president through text if he knew if the guy had moved or something. About an hour after we left he texted us back telling us that the guy had passed away. We had no idea that he had passed away because it did not say anything in our records at all! Interesting experience.

Yea, I love missionary work! It is the best!

Well sorry it was kind ended with a kind of sad story...but I hope you have a good week!

Love,

Elder Frampton