Not much time to write my email today, the lines for the computers are insane so everyone only gets 20 minutes. Ever since the Typhoon hit a few days ago, the power has been out in most areas of the city. Nobody has running water either and there is still debris all over the city. Walking around on the street is still quite a horrifying sight, many people are now homeless because of their houses being completely leveled.... luckily our house has extra space and we've been able to take 2 families in. The only bad thing is doctors and hospitals are so overwhelmed, we still haven't been able to go to get Elder Skinner's head treated. When our windows broke, a piece of glass flew in and slit open his forhead. We've washed it out but he definitely needs stitches.... Luckily, that's the only injury out of all of us. Definitely the craziest week so far of my entire mission.....
NAH! Haha, I kid, I kid. None of that is true EXCEPT for the fact that a Typhoon did in fact come blowing through the other night. We had heard about a typhoon to come from our investigators we were meeting with. Apparently it was called Typhoon Matmo and was, at the time, hitting Taiwan pretty hard. Then, it was expected to come burrowing through Korea, but not as strong as it hit Taiwan and also not over Daejeon. We, on the other hand, would just get the tail end of the storm. But still cool, huh?
As the night came, so did the rain. First it was just drizzling, but it started to pick up heavily after we had gotten home. We went to bed with it raining, but there was still no wind. THEN, all of the sudden, we were awakened by a loud crash at 2 a.m. as the wind blew into our house (all of our windows are always open because of the heat, and they are massive floor to ceiling windows because we live in a really nice high rise apartment building) and knocked over the guitars. The gust of wind then continued, slammed all of the doors in our house, blew around all of our papers and books on our desks, and also blew the wet pouring rain inside as well. We frantically got up and shut all the windows (except for a small one in the back -- if we were to close ALL of them, our house would become an oven) and just laid down back on our beds, errr, floor mats. The storm then kept us all awake for the next hour or so as it blew through the city. I can't even image what it would've been like if we were in the center of it... I hope everyone in Taiwan is okay.
Anyway, going outside the next day was incredible. I have never seen the sky so clear in Korea before. Usually, it's really smoggy because of all of the pollution, but the storm just cleared it all up. But, we literally had no time to take the beauty in because of how busy we were. EVERY DAY this week was full with 3 appointments with 3 different people all in 3 different cities that require traveling for an hour to get to each one. We have used over $100 this week on travel alone (usually, missionaries only have enough money to use $30, but we are somehow managing/replacing meals with travel expenses). Anyway, all of our hard work paid off when our 30-year old investigator ended up coming to church on Sunday. We had told practically everyone in the Ward that he would be coming and that when he did, to kill him with kindness. Luckily, they did exactly that and he ended up staying after church for over an hour just chatting with everyone, or, being chatted to by everyone, haha. As we were walking him out, he told us that he was debating whether or not to actually come to church that morning, but he now felt as though he made the right decision. "I'm going to come to this church every single week now, I promise" he said, and he rode off on his motorbike with a smile.
....Can anyone say, "baptism"?
SO, we're going to meet with him again tomorrow, and then he'll come to church again, and then in 2 or 3 weeks, we'll be filling up the font. Until then, we still have a lot of work to do in all other areas of the work. Wish us a good week! Hopefully another typhoon will come and spice things up again.
Elder Graf
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