July 1, 2012

Hey everybody,

So the first full missionary week in Sindang is over. It was a pretty awesome week! On Monday we went to our Bishop's house and had dinner with the family of the missionary who I replaced. His time is up to go home,  and he flew home a couple days ago. But on Monday we had spaghetti with them and the Bishop's family and then played games. It was super fun. There was one game where you sat in a circle, and one person rolls a dice. Everyone has a piece of paper and a pencil. While the person rolls the dice, only the person to their right can write, and the goal is to write numbers from one to one hundred. When the person rolls doubles, the writer has to stop, he passes the dice to his left, and he starts writing. You go around in a circle like that.

It was super intense, and I barely won. :D It was really fun. Thursday was fun too--we always go to this house to teach their kids English and do a spiritual message, like Family Home Evening. We taught the kids the "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" song, and then On Saturday we had game night with our ward. Actually only a few people came, but it was super fun anyway. We played crab soccer and a game called Signs, and it was just super awesome. The ward is great, and I really like it.

I learned this week that I should really not judge people as  much as I've been doing. This guy came to learn English from us, and he walked into the church and was asking me english questions from the moment we walked into the classroom. I explained several times that we teach 30 minutes of English and 30 minutes of explaining about our church, but he proceeded to use almost an hour for english and kept going back to it even during the gospel time. Basically I felt like he didn't care about why I was in the room and he was just using me to answer his english questions, so I was pretty irritated. But then I realized that we as missionaries sometimes do the same thing to other people who come in for english--we do a shoddy job of teaching them english because we care more about teaching the gospel. That's not right either. So i decided not to judge people and just worry about doing my best to serve in any way I can, while still doing what I came out here to do.

well, that's about all. Today is a crazy day, so i don't have tons of time, but thanks for everything you all have done for me. I hope you have a good week!

Elder Matt Dean