I'm not very good at remembering to take pictures, but hopefully that will get better as we get to Nepal.

This week has been exciting as we are starting to find out a little more about our mission. We have talked with an Elder Gibson at Church Headquarters and he will be sending out a big packet of information which we should receive next week. We have also heard from Elder Ko, Area Welfare Manager located in Hong Kong. We welcomed us as part of the Hong Kong Welfare Area Humanitarian Work and gave us the names and email addresses of the couple we will be replacing.
 We have corresponded with them several times and they are answering all of our questions. (We have many). We got a long email last night and found it full of helpful information. I will share some of it:

Elder Borland said that right now the days are still warm, especially outside in the sun. They said there is no central heat in the homes. They do have one space heater and therefore in the winter they do lots of layering. They are just starting with the cooler season and it goes from now to about February. They said it usually stays quite mild outside during the winter but the house gets cold. The night air in winter is colder, thus the house is cold. The interior of the house gets cold because the walls are about 12-14 inches of brick. They said it is a very comfortable home. It is several stories high, counting the decks on top. I can hardly wait to post some photos of it. We understand that the Branch Welfare Office is on the lower floor of the building.

The flowers bloom all year long and sounds like there is a caretaker of the yard. There is also a lady who is a counselor in the Relief Society Presidency that if we want, and this is optional, will do our cleaning, washing dishes and clothes and serves as our guard. The home is surrounded by a high wall with a locked gate. This woman and her 16 year old daughter live on the property and they said this might sound like a large, sprawling lot, it is not.This missionary couple said she is very good and very willing. They said they are kept very busy and just don't have time to do those type of things.

They said there is no way they can prepare us for the transportation over there. They usually travel by taxi and said that it can get pretty interesting with a normal four lane road (there are a couple of those but most are much narrower) that has six or seven lanes of buses, taxis, motorcycles, trucks and what have you going all over the road. They said you will come to think nothing of having a vehicle that is traveling in the opposite direction pull right out in front of you and then swing back at the last moment. They said now they just smile.

They told us we will be teaching an English class three days a week, for 1 1/2 hours each day. They said it was a wonderful experience and that we would love these young men and young women within the first hour of knowing them. They range in age from 15-22 years of age and they are wonderful, respectful, and every other positive accolade you can think of. We will look forward to that.

It sounds like there are some good markets within a fifteen minute walk or so. There is a grocery store about a 10 minute walk away and has just about everything we will need. Maybe not everything we want, especially if you like beef. Also Sister Borland found a nice outlet for meats. It is clean and has a good selection and are pretty high quality. This past year they installed a small restaurant and the Borland's eat there several times a week.

All the information was very interesting to us. We will continue to correspond with them till we leave the MTC and hope we overlap just a bit in Nepal. We can hardly believe this is all happening and we stay excited.