February

Elder Groves From the MTC

Elder Groves Stole my Camera 

Downtown 

I stole Elder Groves Tie 

My Desk 

                                    They like to name the restaurant weird english names....

View of the City 

I got My birthday Package!!

January Pic's

I got mom's christmas package...

Outside the stadium

So Much Kimchi.....all we have in the fridge cause thats what members give us ha 

View of downtown from our apartment

December

Bridge by Bro. Holly's restaurant

Robert Holly is a super famous white guy in Korea...Hes on TV all the time and he is a member in Nongseong Ward here in Gwangju so He invites us over to his restaurant occasionally.  Super nice guy...He was a missionary in Busan in the 80's and married a Korean and practiced law here.  So She and her son came and visited him...He is so loaded haha.

Thanksgiving: November 29th

Well This week we fasted every other day for 2 meals 1. because we are crazy and 2. To consecrate and be spiritually in tune for baptismal invitations.  We saw so many miracles this week.  This Dad and his 2 daughters have been meeting with missionaries since July and we just committed them all to baptism on the 26th of December!  You could really feel the spirit so we will say many prayers for them so the date go through!  Although this kid named MOON just started meeting last transfer and he has definitely been prepared.  He said he will pray about baptism this week and see if the 25th would be a good date for him.  Definitely everything Elder Medina and I said were directed by the spirit.  I definitely feel more comfortable teaching in Korean than english I've noticed despite having a much smaller vocab haha.  Anyways,  this is all to make a new record for the mission.  We need 30 baptisms by the end of the year to set the new mission record for baptisms in a year at 200!  So we're grinding super hard right now and President is going so hard trying to achieve it since it's his last year.

Special Thanksgiving 

November 15th

So New developments...Transfer calls came in.  My trainer is being sent to the mission home and Im staying in Gwangju and am getting a new companion.  So Im already going to be trainer broken in transfer 2 haha.  Im super happy I get to stay in gwangju though, its like the promised land for the church besides Incheon.  People are super nice here and the city is really nice, despite everything being expensive haha.  So I met Elder Brown at the hike and he is cousins with the Farias's in Spokane North Stake!!!  So he was super happy I knew them and he was trained by Jason Lee!  Small world haha.

 I know the area pretty well but not great...I only know where like 5 members live anyways haha.  Yeah Gwangju is nice, but its not that big haha...The zone does go to the ocean because we have Mokpo in our zone.

Apparently my heel is hollow and it got worn down to the point when it rained its a lake in my left shoe ha

November 8th

I'm so sorry I didn't email last week, but President Shin made all the missionaries in the 3 southern zones go on this hike up to 내장산 so its an hour away and we stayed til 3 and by the time we got back we didn't have enough time :/  It was really beautiful!  wasn't much of a hike haha...Koreans buy hundreds of dollars of hiking gear for this and its basically a nice stroll up to the Buddhist temple on the mountain.  

Elder Ellis and I 

Train ride back to our area

This week was super hard, we are super poor now because we had to pay $10 to go to the hike, then we had TNT so we had to travel up to Daejeon and that cost $25 and only 1 investigator came to our stakes halloween party on Saturday. 

Our investigator Yoon Wan Sheek  윤완식    Hes such a punk but awesome!

 4 of our investigators came to church, they always do, but none of the other 5 that said they would came :/  Keeping commitments is the hardest thing for them, so finding teaching time was rough this week haha.  We just street contacted a ton and member visited but basically all of our appointments dropped on us this week.  I want our investigators to gain a testimony and find peace from the church but they cant when they don't "experiment upon the word".  If theres anything I've realized on the mission it's the importance of commitment keeping!  

The language is still super hard, Im starting to get more comfortable having long conversations with people but Understanding is still almost impossible right now cause of the southern dialect haha.  It's difficult to make out clear words that they say lol ESPECIALLY old people!  

Oh Yeah I almost forgot, So we were downtown near the bus terminal and not many people were out so we tried calling investigators but no one answered so we didn't know what to do so we prayed to find someone to teach.  We walked for about 5 minutes and then we saw this building that said Zingoo Baseball Academy in this sketchy part of town.  We walked in and this guy saw I was white and so he gave me a bat and told me to come hit some!  I was so surprised!  I was pretty nervous since I hadn't held a bat for 4 months but he just started throwing me batting practice and like 5 other guys came out of the office and weight room and started watching.  I starting batting and its like I never stopped playing haha, I was smashing em' and after like 30... we stopped and he said in english " Wow, Nice Bat" and the other guy who ran the place took us over to the front after i put my jacket back on and he said he wanted to let me come in and practice and its usually $360/mo. but he dropped it down to $100 and said to come back.  Obviously we aren't going to go back everyday but we want to go back and see what kind of work we can do through them!  Cool stuff, plus The Kia Tigers are the team here and a good amount of people seem to love baseball :)  All the kids do!