8/22/10 Letter

Dearest family,
I love my companion so much! I've only been with her a week but it has been amazing and I just love working with her. She is an amazing missionary and really gets things done, gets appointments set up, really helps people realize the importance of the gospel and make commitments, and sees things that need to be done and knows how to do them. I am so excited to what will happen to this area with her here. There are things that I've wanted to do here, but wasn't sure how to go about doing it but she has the means and the drive. We are so busy every day and time goes by so quickly. She has great english, but sometimes it is still hard to understand her english, but I'm sure it's also really hard to understand my chinese:) But i love it when we speak in chinese to each other. Every once in a while she likes to use english or will tell me a story in english, but most of the time we speak in Chinese, which i absolutely love. She is so patient with me! But, i love that despite our language differences we both are still about to plan for our investigators, work together, and laugh together. We laugh a lot and it has just been a really fantastic time with my dear companion this past week.
One thing that is funny is that she has had a few american companions so her accent is pretty much an american accent. So, it's funny when we contact together and people say, wow, you guys have great chinese! But, yours is better (pointing to my companion, chinese people are very blunt and will tell you things the way they are), to which she will reply: yes, I'm tawainese. But, I love trying new foods with her too, there are things that regular missionaries still can't read because we focus on reading scriptures, and, well,....we just don't learn food words--- but are little food treasures that my companion knows about, so it's been great to try new things.
Yes, I have been noticing that too, how important our role in the ward is in this area. But I am really lucky and my companion understands it very well and after church yesterday she said we need to start visiting all the members and serving them. I love having a tawainese companion who understands what the members here need.
I've gone on exchanges where two companionships are in the same apartment, but i think that the sister's areas are usually really large so we don't usually have more than one companionship in each apartment, but maybe in the city.... I have always just been with my companion. So we have a lot of room :)
I have noticed more and more the importance of learning in the church and the importance of parenthood. We have a new investigator who is a mom with 4 kids under 10years old. It has been a really interesting experience to go to their house and see how different things are for them. They just really need the gospel in their lives and need to learn how to take care of their family. They are growing so much though and the oldest boy, 9 years old is the best older brother I have ever seen. He is so good and works so hard to take care of his younger syblings. Also from other investigators' family situation, I am just so thankful that you guys love me. That you care about what I do, you care what goes on in my life. There are a lot of things that I have taken for granted in my life that I didn't realize were blessings before my mission. I love you all, thank you.
-Sister allison ko