2-16-14

Well this past week was pretty eventful. Me and my comp have been so tired these past couple days. It started out with this one investigator, 김우진(kim oo jin), contacted us out of the middle of nowhere and wanted to meet with us. Apparently he met with the missionaries a ton last transfer but right when I got into the area we could never get a hold of him. So we were able to meet him a couple times this past week and hes really awesome. He has a pretty tough

life and really opened up to us. It really made me see all the

blessings I had in my life because of this church. It really made me thankful. 

When I first came to Korea I expected it to be so different.

But the people here are the same as everywhere else in the world. Everyone is just trying to make it by, and they face many challenges that we all do. To see the way some people live is very humbling. Its very sad because in Korea once you become older it is basically impossible to find a job. So a lot of older people have to scrounge around in the trash to find things either to recycle for money or to use.

We are able to work on this older ladies farm once a week. Her name is 김순히 (kim soon ee), and parts of the farm look legitimately like the Indiana Jones area in Disneyland. Its really cool. The work is pretty tough but its fun too. 

After last weeks service she took us out to eat to some restauraunt. And the food there was really strange. It was

February 14, a friday. And i guess thats some kind of holiday here. So they had this special food that we got to eat. And it was your usual rice but it had like nuts and like mushrooms or something in it. and then we had a nice little seawood soup and some fish. And then they brought out this weird pizza pancake thing. And it was filled with like shrimp and seaweed and maybe like a squidish type of meat. It didn't taste to bad though. Just very strange. 

So anyways this holiday, I'm not sure what its called, happens once a year for like some kind of cultural harvest thing. What they do is they get a giant tree and put other trees around it and some hay and stuff. And then they light it on fire. And the fly kites too. So there was like this one stranded of like 50 kites going way up into the air. It was a pretty interesting day.

On that same day we got a call from the Sisters in our area. They said that they had gotten a call from some guy saying he wanted to learn english from foreigners. In korea we teach english a lot. We have a class once a week in this area, and in other areas they have like 3 a week. And we also offer to teach english privately to people. We teach 30 minutes of english and 30 minutes of the gospel. 

Anyways so we got a hold of this guy and planned on meeting him on friday. the earliest he could meet was at 7:30 so we had to take a bus ride over to 사천 and met with this guy and this firend that he brought along. This guy is super weird. We arent completely sure how open he would be to our message but i guess well find out. I guess that he has a "wife" who is Philippino and lives in the phillipines. Hes never met her but they text a lot. Ya strange. So basically the whole time we translated english text messages that she sent him into korean. His friend was actually really cool though. We were able to share a quick message but since it was so late we had to cut it short. We didnt get back to our house until like 9:40. We had permission to though so its ok. 

Nothing much else happened other than that. This past week has been really awesome for me. We were actually able to meet some people. I still haven't been able to teach like an actual lesson yet but i feel that i will be able to soon. Korean is coming along really good. Im now able to understand a lot of what is being said now. My speaking isn't the best but i can tell when something doesn't make sense. I guess thats improvement. 

So things are going good over here in Korea. I hope you are all doing well. Stay positive and look for opportunities to serve. This transfer ends next monday so then i will be half way done with training. Its been fun. Have a good rest of the week. Ill talk to you all soon!

Elder Maccarthy