Week 83: Speech at Newcastle University!

Hello again!

Great news! We saw a bit a sun yesterday! The most we've had in the past 2 or 3 weeks! And it was SO NICE!!! I hope it continues... Looks like today isnt going to work in our favour :-/ Oh well!!

So this past week was quite the experience! For starters, we had zone conference and we went over to the York zone once again to recieve instruction from President and Sister Lindley. It was fantastic, and it was lots of fun being able to catch up with past missionaries/companions.  We also recieved quite a bit of instruction that I feel will be of great use to the missionaries in the zone.

Im sure you all are wondering, especially since its a kind of a ''out of the ordinary'' type thing, about how my speech went at the University of Newcastle. So, I'll just give a bit of background.

Currently in our teaching pool, we have several chinese university students who are studying translation as their major (English-Chinese).  When I first arrived here in Newcastle, Elder Burt and Elder Thomas (who I had replaced) had already agreed to speak on any aspect of our religion at a small chinese conference at the university for one of the classes.  Since there would be many speakers at the conference, we were both given 15 minutes each, which would be basically cut in half because to each of us would be a chinese translator, who would interpret for us to the class. So really we were given about 7 minutes to speak. Now, Elder Burt and I both found this as a wonderful opportunity for a missionary tool, and so we both decided one of us would speak on what a missionary is, and the life that they live, and the other would basically give a breif summary of lesson 1 (The Restoration). I'll be honest with you, being in a room filled with chinese students with them all intently listening to you was quite intimidating. But we did it! And it was a great experience. Elder Burt spoke on ''The Life of a Missionary'' and I spoke on ''A History of God's Dealings with Man''. Both topics were quit intriguing to the chinese, as some of them had little or no knowledge on the subject of christianity, and we both at the end felt quite great about what had been said. It was also quite interesting to speak for about 3 or 4 sentences, and then have the translator say exactly what you said, only in a completely different language. It was also a very special experience at then end of my speech, when I was able to bare my testimony to the class (minus the ''in the name of Jesus Christ, amen'' part) and then hear it translated into chinese :) I definitley felt the spirit at that point :)

Also this week! We both broke a new personal record for number of tea- appointments in a day! On Saturday, Elder Burt and I were fed by members/investigators 4 times! Usually, being fed twice is a challenge physically! But we pushed through it, and came out victorious in the end. See the pictures, we held up our fingers for which meal it was...

Pic #1 Liberian (African) breakfast at
our scheduled investigator, Zinnah's home.

Pic #2 English Lunch about 3 hours later at the Hoben's home.
(Sweet and sour chicken, English style)

Pic #3 Chinese Dinner about 2 hours later,
pork and sausage at Li Run's home.

Pic #4 Again, African food at an investigator's home,

 this time, one hour later, tomato rice and chichen.

By the end of it, we were done with food. I felt SOOOOOO fat. But its okay. We survived ha ha and what a challenge! (The last one was by far the most difficult)

This week! Mission conference! The WHOLE MISSION is getting together for the visit of Elder Jay E. Jensen, of the Presidency of the Seventy, in York!  We are alls pretty excited, even if we do have to get up at 4:30am tuesday morning in order to get to the meeting in time... Ugh. Wish us luck!

Love,

Elder Gabriel G. Spencer

PS You can expect photos from the conference next monday! The photographer will email them to us this week.