Hello!

Hi! 

Happy birthday to everyone in january! lucas, kira, dad, who else? 

Thanks for all the birthday wishes. It was great! I got to wake up at 5 AM and head for the train station and sit in a meeting until 4pm. But the meeting was really good. I enjoyed it a lot. They sang happy birthday to me and this other elder and sister day made brownies. yum. I went on exchanges that day with the temple sisters and Sister Chu and I went to this vegetarian noodle restaurant across from the temple. the bowls were HUGE and they put so much noodles in it. I was going to die. I was so full. But it was delicious. Then we went out contacting and at night we stopped at this really good bakery in taipei called Morita's. She got me a slice if banana bread for my birthday and i got this sesame filled bread for breakfast. yum. so much bread. haha. 

Also school update....they changed all the people who were in the MTC for 9 weeks to have one extra transfer. So I'm supposed to have 12 transfers, but that means i wont make it home in time for school. I talked to president about it and he said he will make sure im home before school starts. So thats good. i was a little worried about that. yikes. Rachel and Alma are helping me sign up for classes. if there are problems just tell me. i should be signing up for them soon since i have a million credits at byu. please pick good teachers and times....aka...not too early like 7AM. no thanks. haha unless you have to. but thank you so much for doing this! you will probably have to look for housing for me soon too. but dont worry about that yet. i have 4 classes that i need to sign up for i think....i also might have you sign me up for chinese too....but we will see if i have time after you sign up the classes. i cant believe its almost been a year! time flies!!! 

Xinzhu has been great. Currently we have no water in our apartment. They shut it off until 5PM. Can't use the bathroom! haha. It has been really cold here because its super windy here. I can't ever get warm for some reason. Also riding the bike in the cold wind is fun. Basically very different from Taidong. But i'm starting to like it here. We don't have very many investigators though, which is sad. I want to change that. I want to fill our white board with names. We only have a handful right now combined in our two areas. We are working hard on finding. President gave us an invite to touch our name tags and invite people to baptism from the start. we need to introduce ourselves telling them our purpose is the invite others to baptism! we need to be bold. I have been going on a lot of exchanges recently and will go on two more this week. Sisters tell me that i'm really bold and blunt with these people. haha. I guess i'm just a blunt person. it helps in finding though. i feel like i should be more bold after president's invite though. yay! I get to go to miaoli tomorrow for zone training. we are in charge of the touching your name tag training. yay! so fun. Then i get to go on exchanges with my MTC companion. I'm excited to serve with her for a day. 

This week, Sister Ashcraft met with one of our progressing investigators Huang JM. It was such a great lesson and we had a good peike. The spirit was strong in that lesson. We taught her the Gospel of Jesus Christ. She is still nervous about baptism though. We talked a lot about repentance and the peaceful feeling we get after we repent. We shared a scripture from Alma 36 and she said, "That is me!" so cool. She just really needs someone to love her and care for her. She has depression problems and cries a lot but she made it through the lesson without crying. I love her so much. 

We also went to go visit our other baptism date Lida. She was supposed to get baptized next Sunday but her boss won't let her have work off. We had a member bring us up to her place with her sister and we talked to her about her baptism. She said that she will have 5 days off during new years so we set a new date for Feb.1. We were so happy she could get baptized on that day! It was a miracle it all worked out. 

This week we had a lot of finding time, but the thing we struggled most on was getting these people to set up with us or give us their numbers. We found a really good investigator last night for the Kaohsiung missionaries. She is golden. But this week week we want to focus again on finding and having people stick. We have been more bold every time we talk to people and inviting all to baptism on the first lesson. It's great! We touch our name tags and know exactly what we need to say. Sister Ashcraft and I feel like we teach really well together. It just clicked from the beginning. I feel like we are really unified when it comes to teaching. I love that feeling. 

love you all!

Sister Chao