Good luck with Ofsted! - 14th email from Macau

Dear Mum and Dad,

Thank you so very much for applying for me and getting all of the university stuff sorted. Now the fear of missing the deadline has passed, but I'm now just going to have to wait patiently and hope for the best as far as responses come. Hoping and praying for acceptance!

By the way, please thank Mr Bourne profusely from the bottom of my heart. I'm amazed at how much he managed to think of to say in my support. I'm also amazed at how detailed the records at Herschel must be, as I could see him mentioning specific pieces of work in there. There are a few comments that won't help all that much (such as mentioning that my work wasn't always on time) but I can't really argue with the truth. I just hope that whomever is reading the applications doesn't feel like he's just trying to think up good things to say about a lazy student - in all the talking about "challenging opinions" and "creative views", it could be taken that I just argued with the teachers a lot. Again, not necessarily something I can deny.

Good luck with Ofsted - I'm sure it will go well. Mum, you are a superb teacher - I maintain that you are, in fact, the best teacher in the world.

The language is progressing steadily, but I've not really gotten anywhere with Mandarin. Unfortunate, because we're still without any Mandarin speakers here. I just have too much to do. The final language award, the Language Legend, has only been awarded to a handful of missionaries so far, because it is very difficult, and I'm wondering if it's even worth it, because a knowledge of three thousand characters won't help me much and I could do with working on my spoken Chinese instead. But for the moment I'm still pushing forward.

Good luck to Jess at the YSA dance this Friday - they are completely different to youth dances, Jess, so do your best to meet new friends and have fun :)

Last Sunday we baptised J, our investigator of a few months now. His friend Y performed the baptism, but it was a struggle for him because the font wasn't very full, and J's foot kept coming up. It took four tries but he finally did it and now J is baptised. J bore a solid testimony afterwards, which helped to calm my concerns, because I've always wondered where his testimony actually lies - is it really in God, or is it just in his friends at church and in the future prospect of BYU? But his testimony showed that he did indeed know the Book of Mormon to be true and he was thrilled to be a member of the church. Now the responsibility for him will fall on his friends here, but many of them are also recent converts, so we missionaries will keep a close eye on all of them just in case.

Tuesday and yesterday were adventures - we (the Zone Leaders, the other District leader here and I) went back to Hong Kong for a leadership meeting. It was a lot of fun - Patron Housing, across from the Temple where we usually stay, was packed full of a group from Mongolians. I am very impressed by them - despite being very, very poor, Mongolian Saints come all the way down to Hong Kong very regularly. The group who came featured a lot of missionaries, all of whom are natives to Mongolia and have never been to the Temple before. Part of their MTC experience is a solid week in the Temple as the get endowed and, in one young man's case, sealed to his dead parents. They were all thrilled to see us, and enjoyed speaking English with us as best they could (they spoke pretty good English actually). It was fun to see how great their desire was and how blessed they are by the Hong Kong Temple - it's not close, but it's closer than Taiwan! It's a great blessing to the Asia area, and I'm so thankful that it also happens to be my Mission Home.

Time's running out now. Again, good luck with Ofsted, and good luck to Dad with his counselling course. Very special good luck to Jess at the YSA dance and good luck to Tim in whatever he's up to.

Lots of love,

Elder Loffhagen