Pano of the Mai Klong River dividing Thailand and Laos. This is a view from the church. This is how close we are to the boarder.
This lady is in our English class and she is the daughter of the President of Laos. Her Grand father's picture is on the money in my pocket.
This is the last class Elder Jorgensen taught before going home to America.
Lots of times our students will take random pics of us and send them to the class in group chats. Here's one.
A butterfly caught in our classroom.
We were taken out to dinner by our English assistants to a really nice Russian Restaurant. I got to eat all of these mini burgers myself and it was delicious.
These pictures were taken at the Russian Restaurant. They had these hats for us to wear.
This is at the baptism of Sing Tong.
The little boy up front is Kay his Grandson.
This is a cool sculpture that I found. I think it looks like my sister Quincey when she used to babysit me.
They gave a gift to Kade on his last day of teaching.
It has been flooding here a lot lately.
This is a giant Buddha chillin.
Cool Buddhist steeples.
Lots of golden Buddhas.
We went to this Buddhist temple and they specialized in gongs. This is the the largest one they had.
We had an activity where we all cleaned the church. Inside and out.
We had a FHE at the church and we all played games. It was fun.
Birthday party for Ann.
We sent this picture to his niece
who was having a birthday.
The flood killed all these chickens.
Taken randomly by a student.
Us cleaning the grounds.
Letter:
So here is the deal, I am teaching a ton of English here in Laos. I teach at 5 different locations. Some of the classes are 1 hour and 30 minutes a day and we teach Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or we teach 1 hour a day for every day Monday through Friday. We teach about 4-5 hours of English a day. We plan for 30-45 minutes for each class before hand.
It can be a lot of fun teaching English a lot because we can make friends with all of the students. There are a lot of good things that come out of being a teacher, but I can also see how dang hard it would be. I love being a teacher for free and helping people in this less developed country, but I would never want this to be my career.
These last few weeks, we have been teaching a man named Sing Tong. He is one of the coolest investigators I have ever taught. His faith seems so unending. Last Sunday he got confirmed for baptism and received the priesthood. Brother Sing Tong also brings his grandson to church every Sunday. His name is Kay. He just turned 8 years old. Kay is a really fun kid. Every time we are eating food with the members after church, he follows me around and talks to me. It's way cute. We have just got permission from his parents, so tomorrow on Sunday, we are going to start teaching him the Gospel. That will be fun.
Today, we went to visit a buddhist temple. A lot of temples have some kind of theme to them. The theme for this last temple was gongs. There were tiny gongs that were 2 inches tall, and there were huge gongs that were 8 feet tall. There were mallets everywhere for hitting them too. Seriously, there were hundreds of gongs at this place. Then, last of all, there was the big momma gong. The biggest gong there was 33 feet tall. I looked like an ant next to it. The mallet for it was huge too. It is fun visiting the temples with some members because they know all about the culture and they tell us about it all while we walk around.
This week was great, I love learning more about the culture here in Laos because I still don't know a lot. Love you all! Have a good week.
-Elder Barron
