Zone leader in Suwon

Well as of last week, we are allowed to wear just a white shirt without a suit jacket when we're outside. Which was great for 6 of the days this week, but then there was also the day with torrential downpours... All I can say is, I'm glad that my shoes don't have holes in them yet, because we walked through a whole lot of puddles this week.

Despite that, things are going really well! The beginning of this week was full of goodbyes in Incheon amidst very fancy dinners, I'm definitely going to miss Incheon. One of the guys that we are teaching there even held my hand for a little bit, which is not actually weird here, it just means that you're really close, so I was honored.

Also this week, I got a new start in Suwon! Suwon is a city South of Seoul, it's still a pretty big city, but you definitely can tell the difference from Seoul here. Samsung's headquarters are here, so a significant percentage of residents here work for Samsung. As the Zone Leader though, I get to travel often to other parts of the surrounding areas, which means I'll finally get to see some Korean countryside after all this time in the city.

I'm serving with Elder Karlson for the next 6 weeks, he's from a city near Denver, and only has 6 weeks left before he goes home. We live with two other missionaries, Elder Young and Elder Lant. Elder Young was my companion in the missionary training center, so it's fun to be able to talk about the same things we talked about in the Missionary Training Center, but in Korean this time.

I introduced myself at church on Sunday, there are about 80 members of the congregation here and they are all really great. I'm really looking forward to being here, hopefully I can spend a little bit longer than 3 months here this time.

Anyways, all is going great! The work is busy, the people are nice, the Korean language is hard, this church is true, all is as it should be. 

Have a great week everyone!

The world just became 10X more beautiful

Hello Everyone!

This week has been great! It's warming up quite a bit here, so luckily we can wear just a white shirt from today onward, no more sweating in a suit coat :)

Also this week, all the cherry blossoms bloomed, so the world just became 10x more beautiful. They are only in bloom for about a week or two, I think the name in Japanese(sakura) is a lot more famous, but they are called 벗꽃(beot-kkot) here in Korea.

This weekend, we got to watch General Conference, our church's biannual worldwide broadcast, which was super good! The missionaries sat in a different room and watched it in English, which I was fortunate for, because watching 10 hours of straight Korean that I can't understand very well would have been a challenge. I'm not sure if I had a favorite speaker, but I enjoyed the multiple talks that taught about humility, and especially about being both a perfect leader AND a perfect follower, just like Jesus Christ. This weekend, I was just especially grateful that this church is led by a living prophet today just as in times of old, and the fact that he will never lead us astray from the will of God.

As far as the work goes, all is well here in Incheon! We weren't able to meet a lot of people this week, but everyone in our area is doing well and we're teaching lots of great people. Unfortunately, this week in Incheon will be my last...

We got transfer calls this weekend, and I will be moving on Wednesday to 곡반정(gok-ban-jeong). It is in the city of 수원(Su-won) which is the southernmost part of our mission. I can't seem to stay in one city for very long, but I get to see lots of different parts of Korea which is cool. THe area I'll be in has a lot more countryside, as opposed to Incheon or Seoul which are all city.

I'll be serving with Elder Karlson, who only has six weeks left on his mission. I was also assigned to serve as Zone Leader while I'm there. The 115 or so missionaries in our mission are divided into 6 different "Zones," which helps with organization and distribution of missionaries. So for each zone, there is two Zone Leaders who help train, serve, evaluate, and watch over the missionaries. Usually it is a more experienced missionary called to do so, but I'm going as still a pretty new missionary. I've been a little apprehensive about my ability to help these missionaries that have been doing this for 3x as long as me, but I have faith that the Lord wants me to serve there for some reason that I don't quite know yet, so there I will go. I'll let you all know how it goes next week, wish me luck!

Have a  great week!

-Elder Bigelow

Coagulated cow's blood

Hello Everyone!

I hope you all had a great week, and for those of you that watched our church's General Conference broadcast, I hope you enjoyed it!

As a clarification, I have not actually watched General Conference yet. Because of the time difference, they show it at our church one week later. So I will watch it this coming weekend, no spoilers please!

And after this week, we are allowed to wear just a white shirt without a suit for the next six months, which I think will be a relief since it is really starting to warm up here. And all the missionaries here love to talk about the humid summers of Korea, one of my companions even said "Prepare to never be completely dry for about 4 months." I'll keep you all in the loop...

We do volunteer work at a welfare center that provides meals to the elderly every week, and they give us a free lunch after we do so. And I think that is where I get to try the most new Korean foods. This week's menu items were:

설짓국: A soup filled with some vegetables, along with coagulated cow's blood.

낙지: Octopus. There were octopus that were about 3 inches tall, served in a nice sauce

I did get a little sick this week, although not from eating the above foods. This weekend was accompanied by a small fever, but it's all good now. And before I got sick, we did get to teach a lot of people this week! One young man in particular, we are teaching in English because a English speaking family introduced us to him, so we are teaching him in their home. This week, while we were teaching, he decided that he wanted to get baptized! So we're working towards that in about a month, and we're super excited for him. And we have several others that we are meeting with that definitely could be ready to be baptized soon, so things are going well here!

I hope you all have a great week!

-Elder Bigelow

I decided to disown English

Hello everyone, and happy Easter! This weekend was another great opportunity to remember the Savior's sacrifice for us and our God's Plan of Salvation, what a blessing!

One privilege that we had this week was serving an older woman in our ward, she doesn't come to church often but we found out she needed some help fertilizing some planters on her roof. It was a great time, although the fertilizer was composed of food scraps that had been accumulating for about a year. So the fertilizer was more of moldy black sludge, that smelled very strongly of rot and manure. So we got to mix it in with some dirt for about 2 hours, we all smelled terrible after and I felt very bad for the people riding the bus with us, but being able to serve those who can't always help themselves is the best.

This past Saturday, our ward had a badminton tournament for the whole ward. Badminton is pretty popular here because the courts don't take up very much room. It's quite a different racket than tennis so I didn't do so well, but we had a great time. I also got to try a new sport for the first time this week, it's called 족구(jok-ku). It's like volleyball but with only heads and feet, it's a blast.

Some cool things I got to see this week:

-The ocean (a little ironic that I've been living in a coastal city for 2.5 months and haven't seen the ocean yet, but a member of our church took us to the edge of the city, and we got to teach a lesson there.

-A Buddhist temple (There is a temple on the top of just about every mountain here in Korea, so our investigator drove us up to one, it was definitely a cool historic site).

Also this week, I decided to disown English. My companion and I have been trying to only speak Korean for these 6 weeks together, as I mentioned before. However, this week we weren't doing so well. We were still speaking Korean about 80% of the time, but we just weren't diligent enough about it. So I decided to make a more serious commitment and to Speak Korean for the rest of my mission (with exceptions for English class, English-only speakers, translating, etc.). And that has really turned things around for me. I think it will take a lot of dedication on my part for the next 17 months, but I really want to gain greater access to the hearts of the people. So I'm trying it, but it will definitely take some help from the Lord and future companions, I'm excited though.

Korea doesn't do a whole lot for Easter, but we do cover an American congregation that does American Easter in full force. They have a potluck after church every week, but this week was a special Easter feast, and one member even had a bag of American Easter candy for the missionaries!

Most of my time in the past 10 weeks of being in Incheon has been spent finding new people to teach, with no real results through it all. But this week, things completely turned around. This week, we found 6 new people to teach, and were able to meet with all of them. They're all really great people, and one of them was somebody that I talked to on the subway, which is super amazing. All of the work we have been doing is now being rewarded with blessings, my companion and I have looked at each other in awe several times the back week because of the complete change we have seen. For me, it's a great reminder that missionary work is really God's work, and everything that happens is up to Him. And I'm so grateful to both be able to serve the people here and our Father in Heaven, I really couldn't have asked for a greater week or a greater opportunity than I have to serve here.

Have a great week everyone!

-Elder Bigelow

Bishop Causse

Hello everyone!

Well, Spring has come to Korea! Things are starting to warm up, this week we went out most of the days with just a suit on, which surprisingly feels so comfortable after wearing a giant coat all winter.

Last week I mentioned that a man who may have been slightly drunk treated us to some snacks from a street vendor... This week we ended up eating a full meal with a man that we just met who may have also been a little drunk. We were waiting for someone we were supposed to meet one evening, and another man came up and started trying to speak to us in English, like a lot of people do. His English was pretty limited though, so the mode of conversation quickly turned into Korean. My companion had to take a phone call, so I was talking to him for a while, and he invited us to go sit down and eat dinner with him (which is surprisingly common here). I told him we couldn't because we were meeting someone in a few minutes, but at that moment my companion got off the phone with the person we were supposed to meet with, who ended up cancelling. So he said that it would be fine if we went to dinner with him. So, we sat down for a nice meal with him, and invited him to learn about the gospel with us. We're not sure what will come of it, but he may end up wanting to learn English with us later, which would be great.

Also this week, I met the presiding Bishop of our church... My companion and I went to the church to make a quick copy before a lesson we were having. So we walked into our church building to find Bishop Causse and several other members of the quorum of the Seventy in our church building. They were touring the building and seeing how it was working out, so they actually asked us a few questions about how the building was working out for church members and others that we meet with, we definitely had quite the unique experience this week.

Some other good news for this week is that the work is starting to really pick up here. We are getting much more busy, and we are starting to be able to meet with lots of really good people. It definitely took a lot of patience and a lot of faith, but the work we have been doing is starting to produce some real results, which makes missionary work much more fun. We are teaching someone who is trying to receive an answer or communication from God, so this week we taught a lesson about being patient and trusting the Lord's timing, because his plan is always bigger than our own. And because we're teaching that principle to other people, it is something I am really trying to internalize, especially when it seems like results are few and far between. But regardless of results, I'm super happy to be here in Korea, and even happier to be doing the Lord's work here.

Have a great week!

Korea is the absolute best

Hello everyone!

I thought I'd start off with something fun this week. As I mentioned before, English is the language that all Korean students have to learn in school. Most people can't speak it very well, but regardless, things with English writing on them are pretty popular here. Lots of shop names, shopping bags, notebooks, etc. have English writing. However, most of the time it is pretty apparent that it was not a native speaker that wrote it, some of the words used or the grammar patterns are a dead giveaway. But one thing that is almost always right is the spelling. However, this week, we stumbled on an exception to that trend...

Because of course you have doors that are fixed, and then you have doors that you can fush and pull...

Anyways, all is going well here in Incheon! We're starting to meet with more people that we can teach, which is definitely progress. And we meet lots of great people on the streets, even those with rather dynamic personalities. This week, we met a man while walking that may or may not have been drunk, but we walked with him and had a good conversation, and he was very grateful to us for coming to do missionary work in his country. In fact, he was so grateful that he decided that he would treat us to some food from a vendor on the street. So we went in the little booth, and he told us to just eat to our heart's content. After we ate a few snacks, we told him thank you and that it was plenty, but he kept insisting that we eat more. And he was a lot older than us, so we kind of have to do what he says, but then it caused him and the person and the worker to get in to a small argument, because he kept trying to make us eat more after he had already paid. His excuse was that we don't speak Korean so we don't know anything (as we were speaking to him in Korean), but luckily we were able to convince him that we were done eating before things escalated too much. And we even gave him a Book of Mormon before we parted ways.

Besides that, there isn't much to report for this week, other than that Korea is the absolute best. We don't meet a lot of people that want to learn about our church, but everyone is so nice, and the members of our church are some of the greatest people I've ever met. And as far as learning a language goes, that really has been the biggest source of motivation for me. Wanting to be able to connect with these people without the barrier of language has helped push me more than anything else, and I can't wait to be able to do that better. This is the true church of Jesus Christ, and I am more aware of that now than I have ever been as I share that simple truth.

Have a great week!^^

-Elder Bigelow 

His plan is a whole lot bigger

Hello everyone!

This week has been good! This week was transfers, so Elder Bryner went home and I am staying in Incheon for the next 6 weeks with Elder Woolwine. It was nice to be able to keep working with the same companion because we didn't have to waste time in getting to work over here. And we are trying to accomplish some pretty ambitious goals this transfer, including speaking only Korean to each other for the entirety of the next 6 weeks. There are exceptions for when we teach English class or meet with English speakers, but besides that it's all Korean. It's always a little hard to do, but it definitely helps with Korean, especially since you don't have to switch your mind from English to Korean when you need to talk to a Korean. So maybe ask me again in 4 weeks how I feel about it, but no complaints at least for now.

셀카(saer-ka) = Selfie

Elder Rossi, he has a condition called OSD (Obsessive Service Disorder)

I think one of the hardest things about being a missionary in Korea is trying to successfully visit somebody briefly. We tried to deliver some cookies to some members outside their door this week, and before we knew it we were on their couch with a plate of pastries, tangerines, and an offer to eat dinner with them. So the next member we visited, we had to revise our strategy and stay outside the door no matter what. Korean people are just so nice and generous, I can't handle it.

Probably the strangest thing I did this week was eat dinner with a purely American family at their house. It's the first time I've done it since I got to Korea, and it made me remember just how different the culture can be. First of all, you ALWAYS take off your shoes when you enter a home (and even some restaurants). So of course, we took off our shoes at the doorstep, but then had a small panic attack when they just wore them into the house. Another thing about Korea is that as a male and especially as a missionary. We never shake any female's hand. I'm still not exactly sure why, but it it just not right here. So when the American mom offered to shake our hands, we had a second small panic attack. But I think we acted normal enough for them to invite us back at some point (maybe), and I have to admit it was nice to have some lasagna and homemade American style bread for a change.

Besides that, not much else is new here. I've been doing a lot of translation lately for the English kids in our ward, which is still pretty hard especially when there is a substitute and she doesn't slow down at all, but you figure out how to manage.. We still haven't found anybody new to teach yet, which is pretty rough since we've been searching for so long. But one thing I've learned here is to trust in Heavenly Father's timing, because his plan is a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more important than ours. 

Have a great week everyone!