Monkey Mountain and other adventures - 51st email from Hong Kong

Dear all,

Thank you for a wonderful email this week. I got a lot of messages this week - one from an Elder from our MTC group who went home early, one from Tim and one from the bank, telling me how much money I had this time last week. Good good.

So we just got back from Monkey Mountain. It does exactly what it says on the tin - there are monkeys, on a mountain. It was a Zone activity, we all went up there and played some games together and saw some wild monkeys. That was fun. They get pretty close, but you have to be careful because some are really mean, and judging from how much they were all scratching, they all probably had fleas. But either way, it was a real "Wish Tim Were Here" moment.

This week has been a good one. We've had a lot of exchanges. One of the responsibilities of a District Leader is to go on exchanges with the members of his district and give a little training, so I've been off with Elder Forney and Elder Chugg this week. Next week is Elder Nelson and Elder Hedin.

There's a great range of missionaries in our District. Elder Nelson is brand new, being trained by Elder Forney who is a little younger than I am (younger in a missionary sense - he's actually a convert, and currently 22). Elder Chugg has been in the field for about 6 months now but spent almost all of it in Macau, which is, from what I've heard, nothing like Hong Kong. Elder Hedin used to be the Assistant to the President and goes home in two weeks. Plus we have two Sisters; Sister Oler is in her second Move and Sister Opie was in my younger group at the MTC. Oler and Opie are far too easy to get mixed up, so I'll normally try and call them by their Chinese names of Lau and Dang. I had a pretty hard time last Moves living with Elder Bagley and Elder Forney; they were far too close for me to remember one from the other.

Sister Turney's story is very moving. I can imagine how hard Sister Missionaries on Temple Square with only a short period of proselyting must have it. If you don't have something amazing happen in that short period of time, you may not get to see the effects of your service. But I think that they're amazing, and their hard work really does help people. A sister who served in the Oakland California Temple Visitors Centre came home from her mission a few months ago and she and her boyfriend (who as a Hong Kong native who was called here speaking Mandarin, and then was Assistant to the President, is somewhat legendary) had us over for dinner. You could tell that she was really mission trunky (as in she wanted to pack her trunk again and go back) and was so thrilled to have serve. She told us stories of how her proselyting area was a very rich, built up area and it was very hard to find investigators, so the ward organized a lot of activities, like plays, to generate interest and get people to the church.

Last Monday, I went to Seminary here in Tai Po. When I was on exchanges with Elder Forney, we felt impressed to invite two less actives we were teaching to come to Seminary. So we promised we'd go too, and it had a good old familiar Seminary feel. Early morning, tiredness, lights out so as not to wake up the others who were still sleeping. The thing that made it nice was that it wasn't really, really cold. That was the hardest thing about Seminary back home.

Typhoons here are not that big of a deal. Tai Po is really sheltered, so if it's really bad on Hong Kong Island, it doesn't really affect us very much. We live on the first floor of a big giant cement building, so we're not in danger at all. the frustrating thing is when a typhoon hits and we have to stay inside for the day, but that's all it comes down to; nothing too worrying here. Hong Kong is very safe in many ways; good protection against the violent weather, almost no crime and a very well worked out pedestrian system. I'm not sure about England (I never really thought about it) but here it's illegal to cross the road at a zebra crossing if the little man is red (Is that a zebra crossing? I can't remember). So while most Chinese people break the rules and cross with reckless abandon, we stick to only crossing when it's green.

The problem is, nearly every crossing in Hong Kong is a Zebra crossing, so you always have to wait for the light.

Anyway, time's almost up. I love you all lots and lots and will continue to pray for you all.

Elder Matthew Loffhagen

羅 長 老