Winter is Coming

Fall is here, and winter will be along soon in Mongolia. I don't think it got much past 80°F here all summer, which is hot compared to -40°F, which is what we have to look forward to. 

We had good attendance among deaf members and investigators at Church Sunday. One of our investigators came, but he left before we could meet with him. I decided to pray with my companion to decide if we should go to his  house to meet with him, since we had just met yesterday. While praying, I felt we ought to go. We took the 30-or-so minute busride to his house and got there, and he was out. As we were walking toward another investigator, we saw him on the street, and we went back with him! I felt we were blessed for following the Spirit. We had a nice lesson about the plan of salvation and the importance of baptism.  

Another of our investigators is just in the process of learning sign language, but she is making great progress in her ability to comprehend what we are teaching.  The Lord works through the Spirit, and this is helping her learn. We always tell our investigators they don't need to just believe us, but they must ask for themselves.  There can't really be conversion without the Holy Ghost.

I'm a zone leader this transfer, still assigned to teach in sign language. I'm also training, which is interesting. We two zone leaders are in the same appartment along with our two trainees. Mine is Elder Baldandorj and my fellow zoneleader Mainbayar has Elder Erikson.  We are all working on meeting with members in our ward boundaries to find more people to teach.

I started teaching my English class again this week.  This semester I have one class that meets twice a week for 90 minutes each.  Most of my new students (20 of them) have very little English.  My class is a "conversation practice" class, so I have to figure out how to help them converse when they don't have much experience at all.  It will be interesting. We had an opening ceremony on the first day: the principal had me say something inspiring and motivational to the students and other teachers, then some famous singers sang two songs that were very nice, and the year had begun!

Elder Sims and his companion in downtown Ulaanhaatar.