03/30/11 Rence, Alcris, Elder Edwards's Blood Sugar

Hello my family,

I don't know if they count as the family you were praying for but I am so happy that we will be baptizing Rence, a mother of three and wife to a member named Irwin. She was investigating a whole year ago when I was here last time. They are a Filipino family with two really cute boys. Their daughter, which she had a month or so ago, I have never seen. Its so crazy that I have been away from Macau for so long that a woman could get pregnant and have a baby in the time that I was gone. Anyways, because it is so hard to arrange a time for her to be baptised because she can only come basically every other week, we are taking advantage of her maternity leave to get the appropriate amount of four Sundays in a row. Also a member named Josephine referred her son Alcris, who has a baptismal date already, we meet with him quite often. I wish I could speak Tagalog so that I could explain things in a more clear way to Alcris, but we have really awesome fellow shippers who help us with translation stuff.

In the Mandarin neck of the woods,we are kind of struggling, I know there are families that are Mandarin. The other day I contacted a mother and daughter who were speaking Mandarin together, the daughter was wearing a school uniform indicating that she lived there. The little daughter was quite bratty to me and the mother just told me that she wasn't interested.

The Mandarin family that has a new baby that I contacted a week or so ago won't answer their phone. I guess there are Mandarin families here but finding a prepared one will be hard. I think working with Filipino families is way better than working with student girls. We do have several Mandarin speaking student girls but they don't come to church when they say they will and always have the excuse of having tests and homework to take care of. But we have a ton of excellent fellow shippers for them, if we can just find some good ones.

I hope that I can continue on boldly talking with everyone I can. I find it hard to open my mouth at times, even in a place as relaxed and friendly as Macau. I hope Elder Edwards won't lose trust in me as a senior companion because my finding/contacting skills aren't where they should be. My teaching lessons skills and baptising skills are about average I think. We really get along, I hope I don't kill him from neglect, he has diabetes you know. I delayed his lunch yesterday for about three hours because I couldn't find a restaurant that didn't cost a lot at the casino areas.

The first councilor of the "Cantonese" branch who is from Taiwan and has Cantonese about as good as mine, ran into us while we were in the Venetian. It kind of looked bad to run into missionaries in a casino area. I gave him the alibi that I was hungry and then left the scene as fast and awkwardly as I could. I should have just told him that my companion has diabetes and that he needed to eat or he could die. Then bother Lin probably would have bought us lunch or something. Instead we walked around looking at expensive restaurants and wasted a lot of time all the while Elder Edwards' blood sugar was dropping. We eventually ate lunch about two hours later at a cheap rice box stand.

I hope you can appreciate how much of a fiasco that was.

Anyways, I think we will be fine, this is the land of promise.

I love you all,

Hua Zhanglao
PS now we have a phone and can do alot more work.

P.P.S. from Stephen's mom:
I wrote a whole letter to Stephen on carrying food with them and making eating a priority. My brother had childhood diabetes, so I am worried.