Housecleaning and Final Area

While I need to do some literal house cleaning (my boss gets back to HK tomorrow) the title refers more to other matters. I want to thank everyone who has read or just taken a quick look at my blog. I have been very pleasantly surprised by the number of people who check it out and am very appreciative. My entries are much too long, self-centered, and rambling so please forgive my verbosity. In a way this has turned into my journal for my trip to Hong Kong and also an addendum to my mission journals. The opportunity to be back in Hong Kong and relive the people/places where I spent two years (and look at all my old photos) is something I have loved very much and am thankful I will have a record of it (even if it is too detailed and lacking focus). I would fail law school if I wrote like this!
My last area as a missionary was the Peninsula II Branch. It is a unit with roughly a hundred Filipina sisters who worked in Hong Kong as maids and no Priesthood. The leadership was taken from senior couples and ex-patriot members. Doing international work (anybody who doesn’t speak Cantonese as native tongue) was a really unique experience for me as it is totally different than Chinese work. We spent most of our time working with Filipina sisters and had great success. The style most missionaries use is to be friendly/flirty and talk like a 5th grader as these seem to produce great results. For those of you who know me well, these two characteristics aren’t my best. I still can’t flirt too successfully with a girl even when I want to (and abhorred the idea of doing it as a missionary) and often end up sounding like an old man when I talk who uses weird words. Needless to say I wasn’t the best international missionary. Thankfully I had Burkley Jensen (yes, both of us had college names) as my junior companion and he was an amazing missionary. He worked crazy hard and was very effective without being too flirty or ridiculous (although I did kind of get embarrassed when he’d chase the Filipinas as they would run away from us). I could tell by my second week in international that he should be in charge and basically just let him make the decisions and lead the way. We baptized a few sisters in our time together and taught another ton who eventually got baptized. We only spent six weeks together before I went home in the middle of the SARS virus (with a cold that dropped me down to 145lbs, my mom about cried when I got off the plane with anxiety for my health). I enjoyed my time in Pen II but it was definitely different than Chinese work.
I don’t have any photos of this time so I pulled out one from my departure at the airport that I’ve always loved. Four generations of women and me. The other is a shot of the Black Man where we did lots of finding and a cool shot of Victoria Harbor.