Hmong Funeral Rituals and Eating Chicken Feet

April 18: Today the Assistants to the President (missionaries who assist our mission president in training missionaries and such) came to our apartment at 6:00 am to do morning exercise and studies with us! It was really fun to see them and study with them.

April 19: We had a very successful day finding people to teach today! It is really cool to see people have a desire to learn more about Jesus Christ!

April 20: Today we were able to go on exchanges with our Zone Leaders for a little while. I was able to learn a lot and really enjoyed the exchange!

 April 21: We were able to meet a lot of people today! We were also able to see something pretty cool. We saw some Hmong people folding spirit paper into boats. They then burn the boats. This is a Hmong funeral ritual. Every boat that you burn is worth one dollar in the spirit world according to Hmong tradition. We asked who passed away and it turns out it was someone we had met a few weeks earlier so they invited us to the funeral but it isn’t for another month. It is also really far away so I don't know if we will be able to make it. It was cool to learn about the culture though!

      Also, I was able to eat khob Piaj (kaw bee-a) for the first time today! It was super good and it had a chicken foot in it too so I was able to try that for the first time as well! The chicken foot was really good and the khob piaj is basically Hmong Chicken noodle soup. Eating a chicken foot might sound weird but it is actually really fun. You have to try and suck the meat off of all the toes and it’s like a little game hahaha.

Spirit Paper and Boats

April 22: Today we were able to meet with a lot of people. One of whom is a woman in her 20's who just moved from Laos. Her husband went to Laos about a month ago married her and then moved back to America. She has nearly no knowledge about Christianity but she says she wants to learn because she said she believes in God. It was really cool to meet her and to help her learn about Jesus Christ! 

April 23: This was an amazing Sunday! 6 of our investigators came to church! 5 of which it was their first time coming to our church and 3 of which it was their first time coming to church ever! It was really cool to see all of them! We were also able to celebrate the birthday of a 7-year-old girl and her family who were recently baptized in January! It was a really fun day!!

Hope everything is going well back home!

-Elder Yskes

Easter Week and Snow??!!

April 11: elder Bagley got really sick from the goat so we stayed home a good portion of the day today. I was able to go on exchanges and to teach later in the day though so it was still a good day!

April 12: So today we took our car to the shop at 8:45 to have it fixed because the key fob broke and it turns out our main computer in our car's programming is not reading correctly so we have to get a new one. We weren’t able to get our car back until about 2:00 because they said they had been working on it all day. Turns out all they did was read the computer and order the new part (a process that takes less than a half hour). It was upsetting that we had to waste so much time but, oh well, what can you do. After we got our car back we went on exchanges with some other missionaries (we switched companions for the day for training purposes). It was way fun!

April 13: Today was a crazy busy day with tons of teaching appointments! Awesome day!

April 14: Today we met some awesome people! We were able to meet an Indian man who didn't speak much English but really wanted to learn. We gave him some pamphlets and scriptures and he said he would have his brother read them to him because he was a translator! Way cool!

April 15: Today was a long day. Lots of work to be done and never enough time. It is amazing here in California though!

April 16: Easter! Today was pretty much the same as every other day but it was Easter so that is awesome! We were able to share about Jesus Christ and his resurrection on this special day! 

So sometime this week (I think on the 13th) it rained and hailed a ton and flooded our apartment complex parking lot! Also, the hail looked like snow! Fun!

-Elder Yskes