Burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrnaby

Family,

Well, just like that it's been another week. Time is flying by, I have to say. Days go by really quickly when you're on transit, particularly when you have a lot of appointments. You go to one place, teach, then go to the next place, teach, miss a bus by 2 minutes, run, be half an hour late for a dinner appointment, that sort of thing, and before you know it you're planning your next day. And as you go throughout the day, it feels like we're perpetually making calls to schedule appointments and get members to come to said appointments. Which is sometimes like pulling teeth, but hey. They've got their hearts in the right place.

This week we managed to have a lot of success on the streets of Burnaby. Our area has 2 general areas that you can street contact. Metrotown, which is a massive mall, and parts of Edmonds, which is an area with some bigger apartment complexes and some busier streets. Those areas have missionaries in them all the time, and so we've been shaking it up by doing what we used to do in Vancouver, plotting out where all of the hundreds of less actives live and then picking a few in an area to drop by and then doing some contacting in the area that they live in. It's fun. One time we were walking to visit one, and a mini-van pulled up and offered us a ride. We got in and they asked where we were going. We told them the address, and they just pulled into the garage. Which was weird, until we found out that it was the less active we were going to drop by. Probably not the best to get into random vans, but the guy had a baby in a car-seat, so we figured it would be fine. Plus, we can help the ward clean up their member lists, because over half don't live where the list says they live. We would try to add the less actives that we find on our own to the ward lists, but for some reason, to move records, you need to have a date of birth. And we can't figure out how to suavely get that information.
Us:"Hi, we're missionaries from the Church of..."

Less-active cuts in: "I'm actually a member of your church already. My name is Steve Soandso, but I'm really not interested in talking with you guys right now."

Us: "...What's your birthday?"

Anyways, I digress. It's good because in contacting all of the less actives, we've found a few part member families. (You wouldn't think that Muslims and Mormons would be two to hit it off, but we've found two such families.) We're teaching this Muslim guy, Shaikh, who is married to a less active LDS lady, Patricia. Shaikh doesn't seem to be actively practicing, but he still holds the belief system. He's from Bangladesh, and he talked about the culture of his home and the religious practices that they had there. They have speakers throughout cities to call people to pray 5 times a day. The first one is at 5 am. And, however they managed to make it work out, they both still hold their religious beliefs and are happily married. We taught Sam (which is what Shaikh usually goes by) the first lesson yesterday. I've never considered not needing to wake up at 5 in the morning to pray a truth of the Restoration, but we'll take it. We're working with another part-member family, where the Mom, Sabrina, is the only member. She converted by herself 4 or 5 years ago, but is struggling with a belief in God and is reading a lot of evolution literature. She wanted to know if the church library had any books on "creation science or cosmology". We told her that the Book of Mormon had all the "creation science" she would need. In any case, we're going to be teaching her and her family the lessons and we're excited about that.

Other than that, the work is going well. Mark, our 10 year old investigator, has a date for the 22nd now. The only concern is that the bishop is worried that he won't have the support that he needs to stay active, since his mom is less active and his main support would come from the other members of his extended family that live in the same home as him. Difficult questions, sometimes. You don't want to baptize somebody who can't keep the commitment, but you also don't want to delay somebody's baptism unnecessarily. We're going to set up an appointment with the bishop this week to meet with Mark's mom and uncle, and we'll see how things settle.

Otherwise, life is good! I had some more Ethiopian food the other day. I tried bubble tea for the first time. It's this drink that you can get without actual tea in it. They pretty much just put big tapioca balls in flavored milk. Asians love it. Sister Harper is buying is expensive things that we don't really want. Like... a very pricey-looking bottle of "rice wine vinegar". She apparently is going to buy us a coffee grinder so that we can grind nuts for salads or something.

Well! I hope that you all have a great week!

Elder Blotter