June 22, 2007 - The Circus & It's Hot

The Circus! Or the “Tsirk,” as we say in the good ol’ US of Mongolia.

Here are the new Enkhtaivan missionaries and the girl who hooked us up with the circus tickets. Yes, the LDS connection can get you places even in Mongolia. She’s a branch missionary and she’s leaving for the Provo MTC this next week, but more importantly, what exactly is her connection to the circus? She used to be the ropedancer girl. How many missionaries do you know that used to make a living spinning 40 feet in the air, hanging by their teeth from a ribbon?

Here are Sister Otgontuya, me, and le tigre. I didn’t get a picture of the boxing bear cubs because it was just all kinds of embarrassing. The words “animal rights” crossed my mind more than once, but other than that it was pretty cool. Oh, and there were some crazy Russian clowns that ate fire and walked on glass and the like. And I got free ice cream for sitting quietly and being a good missionary. This is what I call a good p-day.

I’m teaching at two places this summer. One is a language training center that I used to teach at with Sister Hunt back in the Khailaast period. There’s one student who still comes that was there before. The other place is a mining company and I haven’t been able to set up a summer schedule with them yet so I don’t know much about them.

The new branch is great. Our branch president is a young YOUNG guy who just got married. He is a returned missionary who served in America. We are teaching the new member lessons to his younger brother’s friend at his house. It was just weird to be at my branch president’s and have his mom showing us his baby pictures with him saying, “Mom! Come on, do you have to do this?” This area is definitely a lot wealthier than the other two branches I’ve been in. Everyone in the branch president’s family is a member and they all were able to go to Hong Kong and be sealed together in the temple.

Yesterday was hotter than heck, and it also just happened to be the day that we were going with the branch missionaries to do service at an inactive members house. We walked 40 minutes in the scorching heat, sweating bullets, just to get there and have the guy tell us he didn’t have anything for us to do today because the well was closed (we were going to go get water for him and his family). We shared a scripture and then sweated our way back home where we didn’t have time to shower before our next appointment. Luckily the nights are still nice and cool.

We’re teaching this one 14 year-old girl whose father is a return missionary that has since gone inactive. Her parents both want her to be baptized, though, so she’s meeting with us. She already knew most everything about the church before we started teaching her, and she even said she already had a testimony that the church was true. As we taught the first lesson my companion urged her to pray and receive an answer again. She seemed kind of doubtful, but when we met with her a few days later she was really excited. She said, “I prayed again like you asked. I prayed for a really long time and then I started to feel so good inside. My eyes were closed, so it was dark, but I felt like I was full of light.” It was really great.

Here’s one more picture of my comp and one of our mountains! That’s all for this week!