New companion - 41st email from Hong Kong

Dear all,

Yes, Elder Sharp is gone. I'm sad to lose him because I really enjoyed serving with him, and we had a lot of success together, but I'm now thrilled for my chance to serve with my new companion, Elder Bagley. He seems to be ready to do anything asked of him, and is happy to learn. He's my fourth Utah companion, and seems like a really nice guy. He has actually been to England before; to Manchester. He's a very big fan of football, so he went for a month for some kind of "camp" up there. My morning exercise may get a lot more exciting from now on, as he seems excited to go playing every day for the half an hour we have to exercise.

He's rather new on the mission, but is a little older than most new missionaries, as he's already 20. Before his mission he worked as a sound recorder, and apparently made the choice to serve after a lot of thought and prayers. I can see a lot of maturity in him, and feel that we will do well together.


This moves makes for some interesting changes to the district. One of our Sisters is leaving, and the other one, Sister Corbridge, who was in my MTC group, is training. Plus, our district leader has moved and so Elder Bowen, who came in with Elder Sharp, has his second companion in the field, Elder Forney. Elder Forney is two moves younger than me, so the district is very young right now, Sister Corbridge and I being the oldest missionaries. I'm fairly certain even we haven't been here that long yet...

Another surprising change has come with two new unexpected roomates in our flat. Elder Sardoni and Elder Cabrinha, two Mandarin speaking Elders, have been moved in with us. It will be rather cramped, as our flat is just about the right size for the four of us, but it should be fun and I'm sure I'll learn from the two of them. I haven't seen them much today as they're up at the Temple with a "Mainland baptism" - someone from the Mainland who came down just to get baptized. Elder Sardoni seems pretty thrilled to be living with us, as their last flat was way outside of their area. The Mandarin Elders get the entire zone as their area, so living outside of the zone was a rather big frustration for them.

I hope Tim heals quickly and I will pray for him - I certainly don't want him to miss camp! But I'm sure by the time you read this, he'll be healed up fine. I haven't seen anything like a YM Camp here; they have youth conferences and different things every now and then though. And of course, the Summer Missionary program. Speaking of which, Brother M is indeed now back home.

Elder Volk, having overheard me mentioning my looking into universities at last mission conference, told me there was a random 2005-2006 BYU prospectus lying around in his apartment, which he gave me when we dropped of Brother Mok on Monday. I've looked through it a little bit, and I must say this much at least - every single person I've spoken to keeps telling me that BYU's animation program is amazing. I sat down to chat with Elder Bagley about ourselves and the moment I showed him the prospectus and told him I'd looked at the animation program, he started singing its praises. From what I've heard, it has a 100% hiring rate in big name animation companies, like Pixar.

There's also the Chinese program, which is also good, and I could study Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) as a "minor" at the same time as studying animation. But having explored the prospectus, animation is really the only thing that appeals to me that they have to offer. I wouldn't want to go there for anything else.

As far as other options go, English in some way, for example, journalism (more print-journalism than film-journalism) appeals to me. I'd like to be a journalist, perhaps using my chinese in that way. That's really all I've been thinking about for now. English Literature would be fun, but I don't see that providing a very profitable job.

Anyway, all things are still going well here. We met with Mr S to teach him about the Sabbath day yesterday, but having already had a lesson about it in church, he had already decided to keep this law. He said something interesting that I really liked - "If God is with me, I'll willingly do anything He asks." That is certainly the attitude I enjoy to see people have.

In Hong Kong, there's a lot of negative feelings towards the Church from other religions. Many other ministers don't treat us particularly nicely. Mr S's daughter is 18 and goes to a Protestant church, and her minister told her some not very nice things, after which she worried for her dad. He told her that he'd been to the Church, he'd met the members, and he knew the things she'd heard weren't true. This week, she took him to her church to meet her minister, who then told him a lot of false things. He left from that meeting in their church with a greater testimony that ours is the true church, and told us how interesting he thought it was that other churches would attack other faiths like that, while we did no such thing, and bear testimony that ours is the truth, rather than others are false.

So all things are going well here, and I'm looking forward to serving here with Elder Bagley. It should be a very exciting moves, as we help Mr Sou prepare for baptism (I just wish we could interest him family as well!) and help our other investigators grow as well.

Love you all lots and lots,

Elder Matthew Loffhagen

羅 長 老