Week 8: September 2, 2019

你们好!

This week was honestly kind of uneventful except for flight plans!! I'm leaving the MTC on a week from today (September 9) at 5:45 AM. I go to the SLC airport and at 11 AM I'll be on a flight to Atlanta, Georgia. Then after about an hour and 15 minute layover in Georgia I'll fly straight to Manchester where I'll arrive at about 7 AM England time! And I don't mean to brag or anything, but guess who's travel leader for my group??? That's right, me. I'm pretty big time, I know. Also guess how many people are in my travel group? 1, just me haha. So that'll definitely be interesting and maybe a little lonely. But I'm sure I'll be fine, and I'm so excited to go to England! I have a total of about 11 hours of flight time. The MTC's been great, but it has been 9 weeks so I'm so excited for a change! 

I for sure know my mandarin is not perfect but I know it's improving so much! We have 5 TRC's a week-one with a member and the remaining 4 with nonmembers. This week started off really hard. The first TRC with a nonmember was probably the hardest TRC I've had yet-I couldn't understand what she was saying, and I couldn't say what I wanted to in Chinese. So this week, I've  worked harder on Chinese then I have any other week. I've been pretty much spending all my free time on memorizing new vocabulary. And by the end of the week, I had improved enough where I felt like I was able to understand what they were saying, and able to answer questions. It's been super hard to see improvement for the past 3 weeks or so, but I know I am improving, little by little! And I hope when I get in the field, my Chinese will continue to get better, even with the very small population of Chinese speakers in England. I'm also excited to start to learn how to read and write characters!

I wanna talk a little about the devotional we had last night, it was super cool! Sister Ulrich spoke, she has a PhD I think and has written a bunch of books. She talked a lot about mindsets-Growth vs. fixed mindsets. It honestly helped me so much because I realized how much I need to change. Basically a fixed mindset is when you think things are hard just because you're inadequate. With that mindset we give up easily, don't try to change things, etc. Whereas with growth mindsets we believe our brain continues to get smarter and get connected, and we rely on effort rather than genius and things like that. So basically fixed mindset is bad, growth mindset is good. And this devotional was really good for me at least, because I realized how much I've been living in the fixed mindset, when I should be in the growth mindset.

My next email is probably gonna be right before I leave the MTC or when I get to England! 我爱你们!

-Elder Ensign 

Cool picture of a sunset from my classroom

Here's a picture of my district with the Fung's! They're members of my branch presidency and are honestly so cool! They're both fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. Everyone in my zone loves them, they're super cute