Mainlander Barbecue et al - 52nd email from Hong Kong

Dear all,

Certainly the most eventful thing this week was a ward activity we had on Tuesday. Normally on Tuesday we have a ward Family Home Evening which is organized by our ward mission correllator and his family as an excellent activity for our investigators, recent converts and less-active members. But this Tuesday was a national holiday - it was the Ghost Festival here in Asia. I have seen two of these holidays now and have as of yet to see a single ghost, or anything remotely like a decoration or celebration. Supposedly all of the celebrations happen at graveyards, so we haven't seen much of them.

Anyway, our ward's Seminary teacher, Sister L W, is an amazing Sister, and an amazing member missionary. She's teaching at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, and she has been teaching Cantonese to a bunch of Mainlanders who only speak Mandarin. She decided that it would be fun to have a nice fun activity all together; the ward and the students, and invite the missionaries to come and, well, teach preach and baptize. With a lot of people from the Mainland, it really is that easy. As I've said before, they come down in droves to hear the Gospel without even much of anything about the church.

We invited the Mandarin Missionaries as well - a good idea, as the students have only been learning Cantonese for a month or so. Still, some of their Cantonese was pretty much spot on already. Others struggled and sounded a little MTCish. It was very strange being on the other side of a conversation I normally have regularly; "Your Cantonese is so good! How long have you been learning for? Wow! You've learned to fast! Amazing!" The more Chinese I learn, the more surprised people seem to get that I've been learning for only a little more than a year. On Tuesday, roles were reversed and I found myself having better Chinese than most people there. Most of them could at least Sik Teng (understand) pretty well, even if they couldn't quite Sik Gong (speak) yet. It's an interesting principle of language learning I've discovered - if two languages are similar enough, you can speak back and forth in the two of them without knowing the other person's language very well, but still understanding what he says.

Most Mandarin is still a mystery to me, but every now and then I Sik Teng'ed a word or two. If I got really stuck, I got them to write down the word they were saying, because characters are the same in both languages (well, mostly - there is that pesky simplified that makes things harder) and I could read enough characters to figure it out.

It was a really scary experience, though - a little step outside of missionary work. I wore jeans for the first time in almost a year, and could been me slipping back into pre-mission mode just a little simply from wearing more rough and tumble clothes that would afford to be torn a little. In fact, all of the members also thought that it was really weird to see me in jeans. But the bunch of Mainlanders didn't have any idea what Missionaries did or what we normally look like, so we were just cool white people to them. Therein lied the biggest problem - it would have been very easy to forget that I was a missionary and we weren't just a bunch of YSA out on an activity.

I can see how the adjustment to life at home might be tricky. But I'll worry about that when I get that far.

I shall have to write Elder Crowther and ask him what on earth they were thinking having him drive? Did they get him his full license or was he still on his Provisional? I'm rather glad I don't have to worry about that here, as only the Office Staff get to drive. The thing is that they all have to drive big huge vans, because they're normally only used for carting around luggage and furniture.

Anyway, I love you all lots. Talk to you soon.

Elder Matthew Loffhagen

羅 長 老