Letters to Santa and a Butchered Head

Hello from week two in Dangjin!

 

This is tiny city, but it is more happening than any one my areas my whole mission.  My companion, Elder Otterson, has been doing everything he could to make this area grow over these past few transfers.  When I came in to join him last week, he had investigators all over the area, dates for people to be baptized, and an extremely popular English class.

 

So that brings us to English class, the definition of my missionary work here in Korea.

 

This week, I decided it would be fun to talk about an American Christmas.  Christmas is celebrated here in Korea, the town is slightly decorated (there's even a big christmas tree in the town's main roundabout), and Christmas music is playing everywhere, but it still isn't done the same way it's done in America.  So we talked about everything together from making snowmen to decorating gingerbread houses to going caroling to watching Christmas movies.  Then, we talked about something they don't really understand - Santa Claus.

 

After talking about who and what he is (they were very amused), I explained the whole concept of "naughty" and "nice" and how the children want Santa to know what they want for Christmas.  And so, I thought it would be fun for all of them to actually write letters to Santa.  They all wrote their letters, put them in envelopes I provided, and addressed them to the North Pole.  I then had them leave the letters behind so the "elves" would come and pick them up after class, deliver them to Santa, and then Santa would write them back in time for class next week....

 

Santa has had quite the fun time reading their letters and responding.

 

So that was fun!  And then, that night, I realized my hair was just simply getting too long.  It was time for a haircut.  However, instead of going to a hair shop (I hate the way they cut hair here), I decided to try out the new clipper my mom sent me and just cut my hair by myself.  Good idea, right?  Well, that's what I thought.

 

After I had buzzer half of the right side of my head, and the front space (and back about 3 inches) above my forehead, the clipper all of the sudden decided to stop working.  NOT GOOD.  I did all I could to fix the clipper, but nothing worked.  I had just chopped off half my head and had no solutions to fix it.

 

Obviously, I would just immediately go to a hairshop the next morning and get it fixed, right?  Yeah, well, remember that one time I told you we had tons of investigators all over town and that Dangjin has lots of missionary activity right now?  Yeah, well, because of all of those appointments, we had simply no time to go to a hairshop, and I had to go around town looking like a half sheared sheep for THREE straight days until we finally had a spare 30 minutes.

 

Haha, it was pretty funny.  I, of course, got laughing comments from everybody.  But it's okay, it was a funny experience.  And we set another baptismal date during that time.  So it's all good.

 

Well that's it for this week!  My hair is cut now, Christmas is coming, and things are going good!

 

Elder Graf