6th email from Hong Kong

Hello all!

It's been a bit of a slow week this week - slow being a relative term - with the possible exception of Saturday, which was spent carrying toilets to Zimbabwe. I was only carrying a short part of the distance, but that's their overall destination.

There is a charity here in Hong Kong called Crossroads, which takes items from people who don't need them and ships them out to people who do - for example, if a school replaces all their desks, Crossroads gets hold of the old, unwanted ones, and sends them to Mainland where there is a need for school furniture. The man who spoke with us and gave us the basics of what they do spoke literally of miracles - for example, when they were just starting out, they got given so many baby's cots that they didn't know what to do with them all, but only a few days later, they got a call from someone working with flood victims who need baby cots. One time, a bank replaced its computer system and gave the charity all of their computers - but just the processors; not the monitors. They wondered what on earth they were going to do with them until a company phoned up because they were replacing all of their monitors with flat-screen ones, and wanted to only donate their screens - the man said that the miracles just happen constantly. In the ten years they've been running, the charity has grown from just working out of one apartment to a huge complex, constantly shipping huge freight crates all over the world.

The crates that we volunteered to help with were being sent to Zimbabwe; the first they've been able to send there. We helped load some chairs and children's toys, then went to help move some used (and somewhat unclean) toilets over to the sister missionaries, who were busy cleaning them. We carried over tons of them, getting covered in a lot of dust and various other less pleasant things, which was great to do because we were able to help people in Zimbabwe have proper sanitation and therefore saved lives. We talked with one man who'd been there for about two years (everyone who works there does so out of their own pocket and doesn't get paid - unlike Oxfam...) and when we asked him if he enjoyed it, he said "No; but you just think about the people you're helping." It seems that missionaries who have been here a while tend to get a bit depressed due to all of the rejection you get all day every day (just part of being a missionary really), so while I haven't felt that way yet, I'll bear this nugget of wisdom in mind for when I do feel like it's too much effort for not enough reward - I should just think about the people I'm helping, whether or not most of them want my help.

So last Thursday was our Temple day, and was absolutely magnificent. Thankfully, because of Hong Kong's multicultural nature, there are sessions in English, so I could understand what was going on - it's a wonderful temple. Of the three I've had the pleasure of going through (with the exception of Preston, which I don't really remember), it's certainly the most bizarre - we entered on the ground floor, and rode the lift up to the top floors. Our district had been assigned to help with Initiatory work, which was a little difficult because one of the workers didn't speak very good English and had just memorized the words without really understanding them. He asked for one of them if it would be alright if he spoke in Cantonese, which really made it difficult to understand. But the people for whom I was doing work were so interesting. Because of the Chinese culture's tradition of Ancestor Worship, they have records dating back thousands of years; the people I was doing work for lived in the 1200s! There are people with family trees, fully accurate, going back hundreds or even thousands of years BC!

After the Temple, we went to the mission home (yes, it's the same building, but we had to go down in the lift, out the front door, in the side door and up in another lift to get there) and I picked up all the post I've accumulated over the past weeks. I actually pick it up more that once every 6 weeks, as any other time we go to the Temple or mission home for some reason, it's brought to us, and every time President Van Dam comes out to meet us, he brings it with him. In fact, some post came in on Temple day after I left, so another Elder brought it with him and gave it to me a few days ago. I have therefore received this week, one big bag of Halloween sweets - Thank you SOOO much! :) - one letter from Mum, one letter from Dad, one postcard from Timothy, one letter from Chris which seems to have been forwarded from the MTC (didn't know they did that), a letter from Jean Hearne, a letter from Julian and a letter from Suzi. So a lot of post! It's quite nice to save it up for a while and then get a lot at once! Much better than getting one every few days and having many unfruitful trips to the mailroom every day. Thank you so much for your letters, everyone, it's great to receive them. I'm going to reply to them all later today :P

Julian's letter was really great to receive - he says he's planning on starting a Mission Fund! Hurray for him!

Sister Hearne's letter was great too; full of kind inspiration and encouragement. She gave me tons of scripture references and described a bit her missionary experiences, and bore her testimony.

I'm still undecided on the MP3 Player. I had a thought that it might be more cost-effective to get one of those electronic picture frames like we got for Granddad, where you plug in the memory stick and can look through all your pictures. The only problem with that is that all the pictures I want to look through are on my USB stick, so unless you can find one of those frames that has a USB port on it, it won't help much - otherwise, you could buy some SD Cards and go through all the pictures on my computer, putting them on, but that might be redundant and tedious. At least the iPod would automatically search for all the hundreds of pictures I have on there, provided you synchronize the pictures on the iPod with My Documents instead of the My Pictures folder which is the default. I think that the Picture Frame would be preferable as it has a larger screen, if it could be arranged, but if not, the iPod will serve the dual function of music and pictures, and you could even put on the video clips from the little movies Tom, Chris and I worked on. But with the Picture Frame, you could send me out memory sticks full of pictures and I could look at them on the screen - I think I like the idea of the Picture Frame a lot more, but it just means more work for you in sorting out all the pictures on my computer. Unless it can pull the pictures from anywhere on the stick, in which case you could just dump everything onto a 4gig card. SD cards are cheaper than the Sony ones, so it shouldn't be too bad.

Another thing I'd like that I've come to think would be helpful is a laminator. We're always getting things copied over here, but lamination in a shop is so expensive, so my own machine would cut down the price a bit, if only I could find laminator pouches over here so that I don't have to have you send me lots and lots and lots.

One thing I'd like that would make things a bit easier for me - a comic making template. I want to draw little comic strips on paper, but working out the exact angles for little square boxes takes forever. Perhaps you could print one on the computer and send it to me? Nice and big, so I can draw big and shrink it down? Then I could just trace it onto other papers.

Well, email time's almost up. I love you all! One last thing - may I make a suggestion for FHE? Read The Power of God's Love, an article in an Ensign in 2004, not sure which month. Once you've tracked it down, you could all write your thoughts on it and then send a copy of it, with your thoughts, to me? It's been recommended I read it, but I can't get a copy of it. With your feelings on it as well, it would be even better!

I love you all very, very much! I don't know exactly how to say this, but Gai Juk Lou Lik (Keep up the hard work)!

Elder Matthew Loffhagen