Asia Area Mission: January 2012

GONG HEY FAT CHOY ! May you all have health, happiness and prosperity in the year of the Dragon.

The Fireworks for the lunar new year celebration in Hong Kong were awesome. They went on like this for a good 30 minutes.

This past month has come and gone quickly. We are almost at our 4 month mark already for our mission. We have been busy working together with our 13 Assistant Area Auditors to ensure all the Stakes and Districts in the Asia Area are prepared for the year-end audits which are to be done in February and early March. Three new Assistant Area Auditors have been called. One in Beijing to cover the four English speaking International Districts in Mainland China, one in Singapore to cover West Malaysia and one to cover East Malaysia. We have had an initial training session with the new AAA from Beijing and will be orienting the other two new ones right away. Just found out this week that the AAA for Southern India, who we just trained in November has been called into the District Presidency. So we will need to have him replaced and a new person trained. Priesthood leadership depth is very shallow in most parts of the Asia Area so good people are in high demand. This will no doubt be a continual challenge for us to stay fully staffed. But this is why we are here.

Details are firming up for our annual Assistant Area Auditor training conference to be held here in Hong Kong March 9 & 10. We have learned that Elder C. Scott Grow of the Seventy and Chairman of the Church Audit Committee will be here to participate in the training sessions. So we will be busy preparing for that event over the next month. On February 8 we are scheduled to travel to Bangkok, Thailand to do some training in the Bangkok Stake and to do a couple of year-end audits. This will be our first foray outside of Hong Kong. We will take a couple of extra days to see some of the sights.

We continue to enjoy working in our Branch assignments and our weekly temple assignment. Also, Jolayne has been called as a counselor in the Hong Kong International District Primary Presidency and she has also been asked to do some one on one ESL tutoring via Skype with some full-time Church employees working in various Service Center offices in the Asia Area.

Our Branch Family Home Evening Group

These are wonderful, humble women who come here to Hong Kong to work as domestics to support their families back home in the Philippines. The Branch becomes their family here. When Elder Dallin Oaks was here last year he challenged these women to put a plan in place which will allow them to return home to be with their families as they are living here in an unnatural state. Some of these women have been here for more than 20 years and only see their families once every two years. There are thousands and thousands Filipino women working here in Hong Kong. Many of them do find the Gospel here and join the Church, which becomes a great blessing in their lives.

The past few weeks have been quite chilly and since there is no central heat our apartment, we sit around a little electric heater to take the edge off. One day last week it got down to 6 C - coldest here since 1995 they said. It is the humidity that makes it feel cold.

Our monthly couples outing in January was to Lantau Island where we rode the Ngong Ping gondola to the top of the mountain to visit the the Big Buddha and Po Lin Monestery. The Big Buddha is the world's tallest outdoor, seated bronze Buddha. There are 288 steps to get up the hill to the base of the statue. We then took a bus to the other side of the island to the Tai O fishing village - part of which is built on pillars/stilts over the water. We had lunch at a little authentic Chinese restaurant. It was really quite grubby and needless to say Jolayne and I had a hard time finding something on the menu we were prepared to eat. Next time we will pass.