Week One In England!

Hello! Hello!

I finally made it to England! Woot! The first day was kind of crazy-- I was told by my trainer that we had two appointments that day. Whaaaaat? They waste no time throwing you in to the real world. My mission president is great! As I told you over the phone at the airport, my first area is LIVERPOOL! This is the same area Sister Merrill has been in since she arrived in the field. We share the same flat. There are currently 5 of us living together and they told me that this is really rare but I love it. Sister Merrill is in a trio because we have a sister who is on a mini mission for two weeks, Sister May. Love her. She is super adorable. She won't be able to do the real deal for another year and a half because she is only 17 but she is so ready to serve a mission.

My trainer is Sister Lou and she is great. She is from Singapore and she has been out for almost a year already and has been all over the Manchester mission and this is her first time in Liverpool.
She speaks Cantonese as well as Mandarin ( Cantonese is WAY different from Mandarin),which comes in handy because we have already run into people who speak Cantonese and she has been able to talk to them. I do not know that they speak Cantonese until after the fact so I usually panic that I can't understand a word they say until Sister Lou tells me that it was Cantonese and then I feel relived. It is pretty hard to understand Chinese still but I am being patient until I acquire this skill.

So...my first day. Well, let me start off by saying that I had been keeping track of the weather on my missionary portal and for the past three weeks it was nothing but sunshine here, rare for England. however, the day I arrived, it rained none stop. Welcome to England, Sister Jordan! haha. It was fun though and I got to break in my new raincoat. When we arrived at our flat Sister Merrill and I had a lovely little reunion. Sometimes her speaks turns super British. It's pretty funny. I can feel myself doing that sometimes too already. Our first appointment that we had was with a family that has 6 children and the mother speaks Cantonese, not Mandarin, but they all know English. Thank goodness. We didn't get to teach much because the children were bouncing off the walls. You know how it is. They kept asking for Sister ''Marrio'' (how they say Sister Merrill's name, haha) but I think they are warming up to the idea of us being their new missionaries. My trainer and I are whitewashing our area which means we fully replace the missionaries before us and teach all of their previous investigators but luckily all of our investigators seem ok with us taking over. Our second appointment was with a young lady who is going to be baptized on the 10th of August and so we are just finishing up teaching all of the material before baptism. She is so ready for baptism and so willing to keep all of her commitments because she knows it is what her heavenly father wants her to do. She as well speaks English.

 My second day in Liverpool, the sun came out again (angelic chorus). We met with the one young lady again who is getting baptized next week. We are supposed to have daily contact with our dated investigators (investigators with a baptismal date). We also went back to teach the family and this time was little less chaotic but nevertheless a challenge to get them to focus. We taught them children's hymn book songs, prayed together. Progress.

I am assuming that most of those we teach will know enough English so that I can use the words I know. This makes it easy to forget using Chinese but if the lord sent me Chinese speaking, I am going to try to speak it. It's a process though.


All five of the sisters taught relief society yesterday. We also went to a member's home for tea (dinner) and they fed us a typical roast meal with roast, chicken, mashed potatoes, roasted potatoes, and sliced potatoes. Yum. Gotta love having so many types of potatoes haha.

We ride the bus everywhere we go. I have had so many opportunities to bus contact and sit next to and talk to so many different people of the area. Yesterday in particular, my companion and I met a young man and we got to know him pretty well in just like 20 minutes. He aspires to be a journalist/ political writer and is trying to move to New York in February. We gave him a pass along card and got his contact info as well. The bad news is, we do not really get to teach English speakers :( I hope we will get to meet with him though because we both adore him.

My jet lag wore off pretty fast which is a miracle. iIonly almost passed out my second day but I made it through with divine help.

The ward members are great, the people of Liverpool are great, those we teach are great. It is actually not too hard to understand their accents here and you know how much I love English accents anyway.

Sorry, this week's letter has been kind of a jumble because something different happens each day and it is hard to write about everything. I will get better at sending emails, I promise!

Love you all! Cheerio!

Sister Jordan

Oh, and from left to right:

Sister Hubbard, Sister Merrill, me, Sister Lou, Mister May