Jacob Dyer Missionary Blog: March 2, 2015

Two baptisms this week! Great time with them. But we lost one of the recent converts already! She moved to Irvine, so we won't have her here for Church. We handed her off to the missionaries in Irvine though. They came to the baptism, which was nice of them.

Baptism group photo

Baptism photo 1

Baptism photo 2

We were at one of the Chinese recent convert's houses this past week, and their daughter had a project on Hellen Keller. She practiced in front of us, and in her small speech she said, "Since she was blind and deaf, she was better than all of us." I laughed a little too hard.

We had to deal with lots of immigration issues involving our investigators this past week. One of our investigator's family was coming to visit, the mother and father of the wife, who are in their 60's. But they never showed up. Turns out they got sent back home to China - never made it past immigration. Apparently the immigration lady had fluent Chinese and did not need translation (something that all the Chinese people were very VERY surprised about). Apparently the grandfather is sick or something and the immigration lady said I don't care if you die here, you're not entering America. Very rude!

I've learned a ton about Chinese people's immigration techniques to get US citizenship. One of the family's we're working with is filing for political asylum right now. I had to translate a letter from the FBI about their fingerprint processing. He said in China he had a really great life, better than “white people in China” (his words), and here he's the lowest. He asked me why he though he did it. He said it's because his son, education, the environment (clean air), and opportunity.

We helped them do the Kindergarten application for their five year old son today. We waited for a couple hours with them at the school to translate. He was the happiest guy on earth when it was done, jumping up and down because his five year old got into school (he's the really really huge one, I'm going to have to get a picture!). He was so grateful, he said he loves us because we're very "pure" (Elder Murray and I). We don't have ulterior motives or anything.

One of our recent converts got a cross necklace for her baptism from her Aunt. It was funny seeing her wear it at church where there are no crosses anywhere.