translating

i attached some common foods that we eat here. this would kind of be a fast food meal. on the left we have something called 'o dang,' its definately not my favorite. my first korean companion would call it a fish hot dog becuase thats exactly what it is. its ground up fish compacted into a solid form, kind of like how hot dogs are made. in the middle is soon-day. its made similar to a sausage but a little different. they jam rice and noodles into cleaned out pig intestines and cut them up into pieces. in the same dish is cooked pig liver. i actually like it over the fish stuff. on the right is my favorite of the three. its called duk poke-e. duk is really good, its made out of rice but its a squishy white substance. kind of like a marshmallow but a lot denser and not sweet. they cook it and dump a red spicy sauce over it. this was my dinner last monday.

this week our zone put on a music fireside for the stake we serve in. yeah our whole zone is one stake. its called the masan stake. we spent saturday proselyting with members and inviting them to come to the fireside at night. we also visited less actives and invited them. the turn out wasn't very impressive but we got a few less active families to come so it was exciting. i loved the spirit that comes from singing hymns of the Lord. very powerful.
at sacrament meeting the next day i got asked to translate for a foreign lady named ariana who is going back to the US. they asked her to give a five minute testimony a few minutes before the meeting so we had no time to prepare. i was really nervous because it is probably one of the hardest things to do. not only is speaking in front of a big ward hard but translating someone else's talk into korean without knowing what they are going to say is a lot of pressure. so of course i prayed and asked for help from Heavenly Father. the lady and i stood at the podium and alternated as she spoke english into the mic and i thought for a second and translated it into korean. the thing that i was most worried about was that a lot of the Koreans in the ward know english so it would be really easy to see how bad i am at korean. well the translation went a lot better than i thought it would and it was actually kind of fun. it has been fun to see my growth here as a missionary. not just my knowledge of the gospel but my faith in the power of prayer and gifts of the spirit. i believe the the Lord helped me deliver Ariana's testimony to the ward and im grateful for his help.

Love,
Elder Wells

the circus and a sri lankan

this week was awesome. i'll try to attach some pictures. wednesday was presidents birthday so the mission had a surprise birthday party and we all went to busan and did a combined zone conference. (except for the missionaries on jeju). its the first time i have met up with the missionaries in my mtc district since we flew here together in october. it was such a good day. then on thursday my companion and i were walking on the street and we met a guy from sri lanka. i dont know if im spelling that right, its that one island below india. he was really happy to see us and we talked for a while in broken english and korean. ive heard that there are a lot of sri lankans here to get jobs and stuff. elder anderson an elder from my mtc district actually baptized a guy from sri lanka. anyway so we made an appointment with him and met the next day. we talked a little about God but his made focus is to find a job. his dad died in a tsunami and he has to send money back to his family but he has an injured back so he cant find work. we are trying to help him but we probably dont have the resources to find him a job so we might teach him korean. i hope we can, it would be a good service project. the only service we do usually is teach english class.
oh i do have some bad news though, the girl from canada stopped meeting with the sister missionaries. she said that her parents didnt like her meeting with us. ive found that it is kind of korean culture to obey your elders and listen to your parents; even when you're 28...its alright though because the gospel is still true.
the work is moving on slowly but surely here in chong one. i love it. i almost forgot about the circus. ive been to a few circus' on my mission so it wasnt that exciting. i attached a picture of me holding up my seat and fan (a piece of carpet and cardboard). the sister missionaries brought a girl from south africa with them. her name is elsa and she is hilarious. anyway gotta go

love,
Elder Wells

A week about Hero's

I feel like i was just sitting at the computer yesterday emailing. i cant remember what has happened this past week. everything has just started to become a blur. lets see..ah yeah now i remember, this week we had zone meeting and our investigator that owns subway catered it. he is a really nice guy that lived in the phillipeans and stuff so hes good at english. his business isn't doing very good so we thought we'd help out by having him cater our meeting. it was a big hit because missionaries dont get to eat subway here very much. i think the best part about it was that brother gwan got to see our church building for the first time. he is a little shy and says he doesnt want to come to church until he is ready. he has a lot of faith though. when we watched the restoration dvd with him he said he wanted to have the same experience as Joseph so he told us he was going to go into the forest and pray.
we also met with a less active police man this week. a few weeks ago he gave us a tour of his office and all the different police departments that run the city. we went into a room with a billion tv's that control the street lights/traffic and we also went into the room where people answer 911 phone calls. it was really cool. actually made me think about becoming a cop. i dont know. anyway this week we met him at his house and i shared a message from this months liahona. i dont have the article on me so i dont know who it is by but its about role models. we talked about heros and i told them that when i was growing up, my brother and i liked batman. my brother liked batman so much that one time when my grandma called him sweetie he said dont call me sweetie, call me batman. (that was hard to translate into korean but i think they got it). eventually my brother went to college, served an honorable mission, got married in the temple, and became my hero. i feel that just as the article says, if we watch what our role models do we will know what to do when it is our turn to make decisions. im glad i made the decisions i did and that im here serving the Lord, our ultimate role model. I know that Christ set a perfect example for us and that he did it out of love. He did it because He wanted to. I know that it wasnt easy. i dont know how He did it, i just know that He did.

Love,
Elder Wells

Kim Bop

This week we went to a members house for dinner and made something called kim bop. kim means sea weed and bop means rice. its probably the most basic meal in korea and everyone eats it. if i had to compare it to anything, i'd say it looks a lot like sushi but it definitely doesnt taste like it it. when i first came to korea i really didnt like it because it was such a disappointment. i was expecting sushi and got rice and vegetables. but now i like it so its all good. one of the members we were making it with decided to make an extra huge one and challenged me to eat it. so thats what the picture is of.

its a new transfer by the way and im still with my korean companion, Elder Jin. this makes it 5 transfers with koreans and 3 transfers with americans in the country. very ironic.

the investigator from Canada canceled her appointment with the sisters this week so im not sure where she is at with everything. we are praying for her though.

we have a 14 year old investigator named no june u who is doing good. he brought his friend to one of our lessons and when the friend couldnt come to the next appointment, he brought a different friend. it was awesome. if our investigator can do missionary work, so can all of you! we have been working with him for about 2 months and he has been progressing slowly. we've taught him baptism and challenged him to think about it. it was fun to teach the principle of baptism and explain it at a level that he could understand. i have learned on my mission how basic and powerful the first principles of the gospel are.

thats all for this week.

love,
Elder Wells

1 down 1 to go

this was the best picture i could come up with for the weekly email. i wish i could have taken a picture of this guy in action but he didnt move while i was around him. he is the local pest control man here in chong one. there are a few of them and they ride their motorcycles around shooting out crazy white smoke, apparently to kill bugs. one time we were riding our bikes down an alley and one of these guys started charging us from the opposite end. as he passed we tried to ride through the smoke but it was so thick that we had to stop and let it clear. we probably shouldnt have inhailed the smoke.

well i can't believe its been a year. wow. to say the least it has gone by way too fast. my mission, something i have waited for my whole life, is halfway done. kind of scary. after studying this language for a year i would have expected to be somewhat fluent but lets just say..im not. does it bother me? no, not really. i believe that i have done all that i can and that the Lord has made me as sufficient as he wants me to be. it doesnt make it easy but i have grown to accept it. i know that i have been blessed in many ways here in Korea. it was cool to reflect on the past year and see how much i have grown. to see how much i have learned about the gospel and life in general. i feel like i have learned how to treat people and to love/respect them regardless of what they do or say. it took a few months and a hard companion but i really learned a lot about what it takes to truly be charitable.
I got to talk to my mtc companion, Elder Bennett, on the phone the other day and he asked me out of this last year, what the best part of my mission has been. i thought about it and i couldnt answer him. i didnt know. but i figured out yesterday what the best part of my mission has been. i was sitting in sacrament meeting next to a less active teenager named ho dong ho. i love this kid. he got baptized last year and knows the church is true but struggles with coming to church and stuff. yesterday he got up and bore his testimony, probably for the first time. i imagine the feeling i felt was similar to that of a parent watching their child bear their testimony for the first time. i was so proud of him.
that, ive decided, has been the best part of my mission. not this one experience alone but all of the times i have been able to see people make good choices and come closer to the Savior. unfortunately since im not in the highest baptizing mission in the world i dont see this happen very much but i think that since i am where i am, it makes it all the more rewarding.
love Korea
love the work
love the Lord

Elder Wells

ps to update you on the girl from Canada, the sister missionaries are teaching her so i dont know exactly how she is doing but it sounds like she is good.

well this story is related to the one i told last week about how the girl found us at subway but starts earlier. about a month ago my companion and i were knocking appartment doors and we ran into a girl that talked to us for a little while. she said she wasnt interested but had met some missionaries like us on the street in canada a while back. we asked her how it was and if we could introduce the Book of Mormon to her. we weren't able to teach her much but we gave her a Book of Mormon and wrote down the address. we gave the address to the sister missionaries and they tried to visit her but she was never home.
ok so now back to the girl we set up with the sister missionaries last week that got taught in canada. we went to the appointment too so there were 4 missionaries there and while we were all introducing ourselves i told her my name and she started to quietly laugh. i asked if my name was funny or something and she said "no, it's just that your name is on a book at my house." i was really confused for a while but eventually we figured out that the book of Mormon we gave to the girl a month ago is the sister of this new investigator. so we had already met the sister of this girl and introduced her to the gospel. i dont know if this story makes sense because i dont remember how much i told you last week but there have just been a lot of crazy connections and it seems like this girl is meant to have the gospel in her life. it is pretty much following her around. we are also trying to get her sister to learn. i have faith that it will all work out.
besides that investigators are doing ok. we still meet the teenager that has a lot of problems in his life and isnt attracted to girls. we stopped meeting with him for a while and he changed a lot. he isn't the same around us which is a good thing. but at the same time he says that he has no faith and doesn't believe anything we teach him. we are working on trying to build his faith but he just wants a sign or something that proves God lives. it is tough because he rejects our testimony of Heavenly Father and wants to see for himself. as for me i know that God lives and that there is proof of it all around us.

Love,
Elder Wells
ps this is a picture of a few families in the ward that got together to have dinner