Water the Crocs! ! ! ! ! It's HOT!

Hi DAD!  Happy Father's Day again!  A little after the fact.   

I wanted to put my note it a cute color, too... I love blue. 

It's straight up hot here. Sometimes I pour some of my water bottle into my crocs to cool everything off a little (it's amazing; if your feet are wet, your whole body cools down--I guess you taught me that back when you taught me to wear wool socks skiing... and dry socks camping), and I have an old fashioned fan that my last companion Sister Wong taught me to open real-Chinese-SNAP style. It's so cool. BUT STILL HOT.

 Thanks for the photographs, Sister Mercado!

We had a couple new miracle students (one was just walking along and I said HEY! DO YOU WANT TO LEARN ENGLISH? and she said... really? and then CAME ALL BY HERSELF to where we said we'd meet the next day.  

Two others saw our English class poster and called US looking for "Baahk Siu Je" which means "Miss White"--we made an appointment, but then the girl telephoned us in the train station even though she was LOOKING right at us because, ---

--her words not mine, "I thought you were Chinese on the phone" YES!)

One of them is only 9 and long limbed, skinny, super energetic but still pretty quiet--and I realized fondly that he reminds me of Aidan. THEN I realized... oh no. Aidan doesn't look like that anymore! ;)

 I'm so thankful for the opportunities the church gives me to serve and help and give to others. You always taught me how important that was... and the church has given me the time and place and opportunity to put that concept to work. The gospel part of the church has taught me to have patience and love for others--I think that knowledge comes from sacrificing for them, I think... It's funny how connected the gospel is to "family values" ... and sad how selfishness and vanity can just empty people out.

I see that all the time here... people just emptied from being too worried about image and wealth and status and angry birds and blah blah blah. 

Thank you for teaching us the value of pure goodness for its own sake.

I love you! And I took a video for you... mb it will work?

Sister D

Okay, it didn't work :P

Second part:   AT THE PARK YESTERDAY--We prayed on Friday for confirmation about where and when to schedule to go find. We got to the park and it was BLAZING HOT (4 to 6 times hot is pretty hot now, starting at 5:30 it cools down a lot) and no one was out. But we met O., a really quiet kid just sitting studying on a bench--form 1, means he's only like 13, usually we don't talk to kids and especially not boy-kids, but the park was EMPTY of human life and we're "talk to everyone" missionaries.  

It all started out with "No, no thanks, I don't believe in anything, fine, you can sit down, but I have no interest" but then --as we kept testifying and talking and smiling--he eventually opened up enough to let one little sentence of his soul peek out:

"Do you think God could help me find friends?"

I JUST ABOUT STARTED CRYING. It was so ...stinking amazing. Here we are thinking we're just bugging people sitting next to this kid who doesn't want us there in the I WANNA DIE heat and sweat is running down everything, but then he just shares this one little sentence.

 And I know that God sent me here to find O and assure him that God can be his bestest friend EVAH!

 I'll follow up on that story when more story happens. ----------