Hong Kong is Awesome

Whohoooooo!!!!  I'm finally in Hong Kong!  We arrived in HK Tuesday night.  We met President and Sister Hawks at the airport.  They are both so nice!  And Sister Hawks likes to feed us yummy food!  We had orientation all day Wednesday and a bit on Thursday.  On Thursday morning I met my companion and trainer, Sister Gartlitz (Ge Jiemei).  She is from Utah and only has 6 weeks left of her mission.  We moved into our apartment, but then found out that we were gonna be moving to a new apartment the next day.  In our first apartment we lived with 4 other Tagalog sisters (fun fact...there are more Tagalog sisters than Mandarin sisters in HK) in a part of Hong Kong island called Wan Chai.  So yeah, on Friday we moved into our new apartment.  We live in North Point on HK Island.  Since we are Mandarin our whole area is HK Island.  It's HUGE!  But, we are lucky! because, unlike all the Cantonese missionaries we get to go to tons of different places.  Our apartment is tiny (as expected), but it's cute!  This morning we came out and found a huge cockroach just hanging out in the hallway outside our door.... We live on the 14th floor so we have a fun view!

North Point, Hong Kong (random picture from the internet)

On Thursday night we had my first lesson!  It was with a lady who had been found by some Cantonese sisters, but since she spoke Mandarin they turned her over to us.  We did the first lesson and it was great!  We have another meeting scheduled with her tonight. 

On Friday we were trying to contact a referral, but when she wasn't home we decided to try a former investigator that no one had been able to get a hold of for like 6 months ... and she was HOME!  Her husband is less active and they have the cutest baby boy!  She was so excited to see us and we had a great lesson with her.

On Saturday we were out finding.  We went to somewhere (I still don't know the names of anything) ... but basically it is a waterfront promenade.  As we were walking we went by this lady and I noticed that she was teary and kept wiping her face.  We said hi, but nothing else and then she sat on a bench and we kept walking.  We kept going down the promenade and I just kept thinking about her.  I told Sister Gartlitz that if she is still there when we turn around then I was gonna give her a hug.  So later, when it was time to turn around we passed by her and so we went up and we asked if she spoke Mandarin.  She said no but that she can speak English (Cantonese is her first language).  So i asked if she was alright and I asked if I could give her a hug.  She said yes and when I hugged her she just kept crying and held on for a long time and kept saying "thank you thank you".  We talked with her a bit and shared a nice message and tried to comfort her.  She was so nice.  She kept saying that she felt like God was trying to teach her something (she didn't really tell us what was wrong, just that a bunch of stuff was going wrong at the same time).  Eventually we had to go, but we prayed with her and the spirit was just so strong.  I hope that we keep in contact with her.  But, even if we don't she called us angels and I know that whatever we did helped her.  That's just one example of how I have already (in my 4 or 5 days out in the field) seen the spirit leading us!  It's amazing!

On Sunday we had church!  We go to an all Mandarin branch!  It's pretty fun.  We had an investigator with us at church.  She is awesome!  She is a college student from China here in Hong Kong.  She loved church and then afterwards we had a lesson.  It went great.  When we gave her a Book of Mormon she was so happy.  She was like "Wow really! for me?" and then she hugged it!  She is great and I really look forward to meeting with her again!

Basically, Hong Kong is awesome!