Adam's First Week in New York!

Sooo first p-day out here in New York, and I haven't gotten stabbed! Woohoo. Right now I'm currently in Dyker Heights and I must say sometimes I forget that this is still America with all the Chinese people here. I found out why we have the most baptisms in our area is because that the Chinese people here want the baptism mostly for a Green Card, and so past missionaries would go ahead and baptize them anyways because they just want the numbers, our current district is trying hard to fix that so we have a term for "green" investigators and so we're working on that, as well as we're working on getting more overall ward activity just to yeah.

My new companion is Elder Wallis, a great guy, funny too. The weird thing is that our district is 8 people and we're all within the same apartment building so we have a lot of district unity going out and tracting sweet sweeping (advertising english class and what-not). A lot of the elders say that my Chinese is phoenomenal for the amount of time I've spent learning it and that it's great that I'm not like other greenies and are scared to use their chinese for the first week, but I just started talking right away. Our district was in kind of a lull because the past 5 weeks have all been service so we're working hard to get back into more diligent Church work.

One of our investigators name is Kelvin, he's 12 and his dad is a less active member, and oh my gosh this family situation is pretty terrible. 4 minutes into meeting the mother as she came home, started about an hour of criticizing their kid to us, basically the missionaries are something of therapists for this family. They shared many stories about how much of a liar he is and he's unwilling to change and can't focus, my heart was aching that these people had no reserves in railing on their kid with no problem. So, definitely praying hard for that family.

We also have Gao Di xiong Brother Tall, he's a "green" investigator but slowly and surely we're trying to help him get more interested in the gospel and give it more meaning to him to be baptized other than just receiving a green card.

Then we have Zhu Zai Kan, he's a bit of a quiet guy and we can really only meet with him on Sundays but he's progressing pretty well, and his baptism is set for the 23rd.

It's been a pretty easy adaptation into New York, it reminds me a lot of Los Angeles, so no real problems there, continuing to make strives in the Chinese language and I'm going to work harder on learning the written and reading portion of the language.

Not really anything else to share at this point other than I'm working hard to stay obedient and diligent, which is kind of tough since the older missionaries have kind of gotten relaxed so it's part of my duty to help get everyone back to working hard.

Love you all!

Mission Address is

85-69 60th drive
Elmhurst, New York 11373

it'll just get forwarded to me from there.

Elder Wong