47th week in Taiwan

(from the email dated 13/14 November, 2011...)

I gave Elder Kasner a little taste of what it means to be a Sanford this morning and made him some awesome French Toast. I also made some delicious Apple syrup to put on top of them. I kind of made up the recipe, but it was basically just boiling chopped up apples with a bunch of sugar until it got thicker. yeah. Simple but good.

So sorry that last week was a lame week for emailing. This week, when I sent my president's letter it did the same thing, but I was smarter than the computer and I saved a copy of it so all I had to do was copy and paste. YEAH!

Sounds like your week went nicely...

We have had a chance to study alot about family history as a part of missionary work. I'd be pretty interested to get a few pictures of you with your family when you were all young and if you have them, it be cool to see pictures of your parents with their parents. It be fun to talk to people and show them the pictures names and a few stories to get the Spirit of Elijah burning in them. Yeah, and I kind of already have the Spirit of Elijah burning in me and really want to know. Thanks!!

We have seen miracles with a Zhang Sheng Feng. He is the blind guy that came to church last week. He is very sure on his baptismal date of the 26th. After talking to his care taker and giving her a copy of the Book of Mormon, she very bluntly rejected to learn more, but I think that most of it is a language barrier, so we will be praying for the gift of tongues this week. However, the mother did bring him to church. She couldn't stay for very long, but she did say that she would get time off to be able to come the whole time. So that should be good. He is getting ready for his interview on Saturday. He is awesome.

... How about the Christmas Choir thing. How is that going? I am getting just a little bit of Christmas fever. Little bits here and there when I see little displays in the bakeries and when I drank some hot cocoa at night while writing in my journal. Christmas will sure be something this year. I can't wait.

YEah! I hope that you have a great week,

-Elder Sanford.

Having fun-T46

All LDS meeting houses have the same look to them. I'd like a close up of the EXIT sign above the door. I'm guessing this is a Preparation Day activity. Pingpong in Yuanling...of course.
HEy Family!!
So yeah, I pretty much failed this week at emailing you all. I spent a good amount of time emailing President Bishop. Giving a good accounting of what you are doing to your leaders is very important. And after slaving over that letter for a long while and pushing the send button, a lovely little screen popped up that said... "ERROR IN SENDING". And that lovely little letter went poof. Yeah I pretty much was crying while rewriting it really fast.
Here are some bullet points .

-Elder Kasner and I saw a miracle with Brother Zhang coming to church. A blind man who we only invited to church. Elder Kasner led an amazing first lesson that I was very proud of and Brother Zhang accepted a goal for the 26th
-We had previously through the week had all of our other progressing investigators drop. Which was sad.
-We fasted to be able to work better with the ward. We will be sitting down with five families from the ward this week and seeking referrals by teaching the message of the Restoration.
-Pei Ke's were low due to dropped investigators. We exceeded our goal for other sitdowns and lessons to recent converts and less actives as well as lessons on the street. Good week as far as diligent work goes.
-Elder Kasner is amazing. He did the first Evaluation for Phase 1.
- We had a great activity with the ward. We broke our fasts right after church together and then it was my pleasure to give training to the 25-30 people that were there. Then we paired up and went to work. My companionship alone received 11 referrals from the members that came. We are going to focus on working with these referrals and publicizing what fruits we are going to see to increase the wards faith to do missionary work.

I also went through my 'DRAFTS' box and found out that I'm super pro at pushing the send button some times. Sorry.

I will make sure to spend some good time emailing everybody next week individually. I'm sorry.
LOVE YA ALL!

He's a handsome boy! ( Not sure about the tie though... ;D)

a little about me

Here I am in the middle of catching up with all of Colby's Mission letters...but I should tell other stuff. I, Jamille, started radiation on 31 October, 2011. Daily I'm thankful that in August I got a mammogram & that the technician really looked at. They had me come back for an ultrasound and performed a biposy on the spot. The day after June turned 13 (30 August) I got word that I did have Invasive Ductal Carsinoma. I was not surprised and also not happy, but I didn't feel all "Doom and Gloom" either. I knew things would work out as they were supposed to, and I just needed to take the most optimistic approach.

I had a Lumpectomy on September 12. My surgeon is none other than Jennifer Tittensor. She is amazing. She performed a fairly new operation method. I had a teeny radioactive seed implanted in my cancer. During the operation she used a Geigher counter and found the cancer and scooped it out, some of the surrounding tissue and the three lymph nodes nearest the spot. A test was run on the nodes. They were clear which means the cancer hadn't spread to other areas. HURRAH!!! All of the cancer is out of me! Another test was done and they determined I would not need chemotherapy. Radiation is enough to keep the cancer away. I feel almost guilty that my cancer experience has been so bearable...Don't get me wrong--I'M THANKFUL!!!! I just wonder "Why me, Why did I get this, the "easy version" of cancer and others get it full on hard!???" I'm so oooo thankful that I got what I got. I don't think I would've been able to handle it, had it been any other way! Thank you Father in Heaven!!!

As I write about this, it's not easy. All of my emotions about this whole ordeal are still close to the surface. SO many people have helped so much, without asking they've stepped forward to offer rides and meals. Listening to me babble... It's been so nice. It's strange, too, that others whom I wished would've talked to me, to see how I am in the very least, have said nothing, nothing at all. It's weird. I feel awkward even mentioning that, and yet it's true. We all deal with stuff differently from each other...so I need to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Fast forward to now. I will have my radiation appointments until the 15 of December. Things look good. Radiation makes me a little queasy for about 30 minutes. It has given me a "sunburn" and made me tender. It makes me tired too, but I can live with that!!!! Naps are nice! As soon as I'm done with radiation I will start taking a medication, for years apparently. I think it's called Tamoxifen, or something like that. I think I'll wait to take it until after the holidays. What if it makes me sick? I'm handling tired and tender ok, but if this other stuff gives me the urge to regurgitate I'd rather wait until after Christmas.

This letter came AFTER week 45, but it was talking about week 44

" ...Nope, our trees have no autumn. Just green all the time.

 So the time is a little short. But I'll just say that this week has really been great. My companion is super great at testifying and telling people how much the church means to him. I am giving him as many chances to do this as possible. Last night we went and visited an active member's family just to introduce Elder Kasner and ask for a member referral, but ended up that the non-member father cooked us dinner. Really cool guy. We are going to teach him more this next week. All over the place, we are finding cool miracles. I am loving it. I can see that the Lord really does love his missionaries and helps them out.

 I'm glad to hear that your birthday went all well. We had a party here for english here aswell! It was really great and alot of people showed up. I was incharge of doing it all, but I didn't plan super well. That being the case, I saw the hand of the Lord work miracles as we had a very wonderful turnout. and everybody had a very fun time. I'm interested to see how many people come to this next week's english class.

 Well I've got to write the other's quickly. I hope you have a wonderful start to your next year of life!  Loves

 -Elder Sanford. "

In case you were wondering ...

We received this email from the Mission Office. We've had people ask about packages, so here's what we've been told. (By the way his address is in the rightsidebar...Scroll to the bottom) He'd enjoy a letter anytime!! We email him weekly, but I'm not sure how often he gets "real live letters".

Dear Parents,

Each year many of our missionary’s parents send a package to their sons or daughters at Christmas time. We want to do all we can to make sure none of these packages get “lost in the mail.” Here are three things you can do to help your son or daughter get their package:

1. Do not use any mail service other than U.S. Postal. No Fed Ex. No UPS. No DHL. Why? Taiwan’s mail service is very good, but they will only Forward U.S. Postal mail and packages.

2. We highly encourage using the “Flat Rate Boxes” available at your local post office. In nearly all cases they are actually more inexpensive, and they are very easy to forward from our mission office. Odd shaped packages are hard to “re-write” an actual missionary’s address on them for forwarding.

3. Get your package off early. Most packages take about ten days from the states. Holiday mail in the U.S. could easily add more time to that.

We love serving with your missionaries and we wish you a wonderful Christmas, knowing your missionary is faithfully serving the Savior, whose birth we celebrate.

Sincerely,

Sister Liston 劉姐妹

Taiwan Taichung Mission Secretary

T45

(from 30 October, 2011)

... I'm training Elder Kasner. And boy is he sharp. He's really doing great in testifying and inviting people to be baptized. This past week, we focused alot on increasing our number of Investigators with a Baptismal Date. This week, we are going to be focusing on Church attendance. We want to get 8 investigators there. I know that we can do it as we have faith and focus. We also are going to be involving the ward alot more. We got a new ward mission leader. He just barely got off of his mission in Taibei. THe old ward mission leader is going to the english ward in Tai Zhong right now. I think that he will probably do a wonderful job at that there. He's a good man.

One thing that I've been doing better and better at that I was super afraid of when I knew that I was going to be the senior companion is planning. It was always a super hard thing for me to do, but I have been able to get a plan done every single day pretty quickly. I do not entitle this to my own ability increasing but that I have been relying on the Lord more to know what to do. It actually comes pretty easily. I really need to start doing better in my journal though. I have been writing everyday, but not in a whole lot of detail . I guess that that is better than nothing, but I'd like to get a little more detail.

...

This week, we got to watch a small segment about using Family History in our missionary work. It was so good. I really want to start using it more in my work. I didn't get it. Now I do. There is a reason why everybody is getting more and more internet capabilities. It's so that everybody can gain interest in Family History and then be baptized. Yeah!!

...I love you and am so glad to write you this week. ...

Your son,

Elder Sanford.

It just occurred to me that I haven't posted in a while. I need to post several weeks of Colby letters. Someday I'd love to take my good friend Jessica's lead and get a BOOK book printed of the blogs. That's one of the reasons why I post most of Colbs' emails--or portions of them. Someday he'll want a record of it all...our whole family will--and most probably his family,too. When he comes home in less than a year it'll be time for him to think about that part of his life. I think he's got all of that on the back burner now. He makes no mention or hint of that at all. He's being a missionary right now, and that's all he has time for right now....and that's the way it's supposed to be right now.