So Much Has Happened!

 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 

Settling In For The Long Run

Loa Buddhist Temple

 Look at the trees in this pictures, it will give you an idea of how huge it was.

 Three of the Loa missionaries. I'm with Elder Holm and Elder Coomes.

 A picture of us talking to President Hammond.

 Elder Seibert messaged me from home with his giant dog. He lives in Minnesota.

 A random family visited our ward on Sunday and brought a bunch of school supplies for the kids. It was so cool.

There was a major flood in the place where we teach english.

 The sign outside the building.

 We teach English to the government officials and their families. 

Letter:

Sooo I am finally in Laos now. It was a long time coming, but I am here and I am settled in. The first week which I was in Laos, I learned a ton. 

First of all, Laos is not like Thailand. There are definitely some similarities like the prominent religion being Buddhism, but for the most part they are super different. One of the biggest reasons for this is that Laos is a communist country. Communism has had a major impact on the church here in Laos and has made it extremely difficult for missionaries to do missionary work. We are not allowed to proselyte at all. No speaking of the church, or Jesus Christ, or the fact that we are missionaries. We call each other by out first names everywhere. The only time when we are allowed to teach anyone about the gospel is during a two hour block on Sunday which is the same two hours that we are allowed to attend church. So in the second hour after sacrament meeting, we have to get investigators into a room where we teach them. 

There are 2 wards in all of Laos and each ward gets about 80 people to church each week. There is only 1 church building in all of Laos where both wards attend. We still only have 2 hours where they can both attend church, so ward 1 has sacrament meeting first hour and ward 2 has class, then they switch and ward 2 has sacrament meeting for second hour and ward 1 goes to class.

This last week we taught an investigator named ປອງ (Bong). He was so awesome. That was my first time meeting him, but I could totally feel his faith. Bong has a baptismal date for the 18th of this month. After that, he has agreed to let us teach his nephew who comes with him to church.

A question that might pop into your head (cause it sure did pop into my head when I first got here) is "how do you find investigators if you can't proselyte at all and follow all these other strict rules?" Well that all lies in the hands of the members, and we have the best members here in the world. Laos is the one of the highest baptizing areas in the entire mission, and it is because the members here understand the missionaries can't proselyte, so the members pick up for our slack by inviting their friends and family members to church and to learn. Not only does the area of Laos get a lot of baptisms, but the retention rate for all of the new people who get baptized AND stay in the church is extremely higher than in Thailand. (Not saying anything negative about Thailand though. Laos is just amazing.) 

One thing that surprised me was how different the languages between Thai and Laotian actually are. I heard it was mostly the same before I got here, but I only understood like 10 percent at first. It kind of freaked me out because I thought it wouldn't be too hard to switch over to speaking Laotian, but I'm definitely gonna have to work on it. I was texting a member who lived in Thailand and said, "Hey, what are you doing today?" in Laotian and he didn't know what it meant. That surprised me.

The differences that we have to get used to here in Laos are extreme, but the strength of the gospel in the members make it all worth it. I will try to tell more stories about it in the future. The history is very interesting. 

Love-Elder Barron 

I made it to Laos!

Elder Pastores in the hospital. He is about to go into surgery. He didn't feel much pain at this point. That all started after the surgery. 

I took a selfie from the hospital room. 

Pretty cool view.

This was my companion after the surgery. 

He was glad it was over.

They wouldn't feed me in the hospital, so I was really hungry. The members are trying to feed me through the phone. 

Random pics after church.

Hospital room view.

LOOK! I found Sarger while shopping.

Shokun, one of my investigators who was baptized, teaches a Korean class and we attended to learn a bit from him. It was fun.

Our luggage piled in the hospital. 

I took a 3 hour nap on this cement bench. After I woke up, I noticed that pink sign, it says no sleeping on this bench. No one bothered me.

I thought it was funny how they sold food here. You could also buy toilet paper right next to it.

About to go into Laos. Here we go.

There is a Laos flag and a communist flag right next to each other.  Yes, Laos is a communist country.

Update:

This was the hardest week of my mission. I'm just going to basically draw it all out and go through my week day by day. 

So it all started out last Monday. I was in the hospital with Elder Pastores. There was definitely something wrong with his kidneys, but we didn't really know what it was exactly, so he got a biopsy on them. Basically what they did was turn him over on his back and got a huge syringe and stabbed him seven times to get some samples of his kidneys. Elder Pastores was in a lot of pain so we stayed in the hospital until Tuesday and then we came home at about noon. 

We had to stay home at the Bangkapi house which was in Bangkok and about an hour away from the hospital. We stayed there in the house all day and night until Wednesday afternoon when Elder Pastores felt good enough to leave the house for a little bit and we went to the new and improved scripture class called ชั้นเรียนแห่งความสุข​ which literally translates to "class of happiness". One of the members runs it and there are tons of people that go so that's great. 

I was really thankful for the other two elders who were serving in Bangkapi while we were stuck in the house because they were nice enough to drop by and bring us some food every once in a while even if it was out of their way. I also got to talk to Elder Pastores a lot during this time and we got to know each other well. I'm super glad I was able to do my best with him through this rough time. 

Thursday morning, we went back to the hospital to get the results from the biopsy. Basically it wasn't great, but it was definitely better than it could have been. Some of Elder Pastores's kidneys are dying, so he has to take some steroid pills for the next five months. After that we were invited to Presidents house to have some lunch with him. We also got to do some interviews with President as well. During the interview, President told me that I will be heading to Laos on Friday, (which was tomorrow back then), so that was a little of a shocker. Really fast change of plans. 

Friday, we went to the train station. We waited there for a few hours and then got on the bus with all my luggage. It was a sleeper bus, so in our little space where we sat, we could morph it into bunk beds. We went to sleep on the train at about 10:00 pm. I thought I would wake up at about 5 or 6 in the morning and be up by the northern part of Thailand. That did not happen. 

I woke up to Elder Pastores saying his kidneys were about explode. He told me he was in so much pain he bought he was going to die. It was pretty scary. I didn't know what to do at first, but eventually I ran up to the front of the train and told one of the workers running the train that there was someone who needed to go to the hospital. Luckily we were close to the next stop, so he stopped the train and we called an ambulance and drove to the nearest hospital. This was a very dramatic experience and I am not going to give all the details, but we went to this tiny hospital and the doctors and instruments didn't seem very up to date or clean, so we called another ambulance and drove 1.5 hours to a bigger hospital. It still wasn't the best, but it was definitely better. They took Elder Pastores in to the hospital and gave him some pain pills and he basically fell asleep until morning. 

I was waiting for him in the waiting room which was actually just outside. Randomly I got a bloody nose, (I don't know why, I just think my face has been feeling kind of dry lately or something.) So I ran inside holding my nose while blood is getting all over my hands. I asked the doctors for a tissue and they started freaking out. (So basically this room I am in is pretty big and is filled with about 15 hospital beds and every bed is occupied by a patient.) I am holding my nose and the doctors grab my arm and bring me over to a bed. There is this lady who is sleeping and probably 40-50 years old and the doctors say, "Get up, get up! Go sit over there!" So the lady gets up and just goes to the corner of the room and sits down. This whole time I am trying to explain that it isn't that bad, I just need a tissue and I am fine, but they don't listen.  So they lay me down on the bed and I am just still holding my nose. 10 seconds later, a doctor comes up to me and sets a big bag of ice right on my face. Like an ice pack completely covering the top of my forehead, my eyes and my nose. I was so confused with what was happening. My nose kinda stopped bleeding out because I was laying down. It stopped after about 5 minutes. I was only laying on a cot/bed thing for a hospital, but dang that was so comfortable because most of the last week, I have been sleeping on couches in a hospital, busses while traveling, or a train. Not to mention is was 3 in the morning at this time and I hadn't slept hardly at all.  I was actually sitting there laughing on the bed (probably scaring the doctors) because I had no idea what was happening to me in the middle of nowhere in Thailand, and I should have been in Laos by now but was emergency delayed by all this. I conked out right there on the bed with a bag of ice on my face and being careful not to touch my white shirt with my bloody hands.

I woke up about 30 minutes later because my face felt frozen. The blood on my hands was for the most part dry by now. All the doctors were working on other patients in the room at that time, so I just took the ice off my face and walked around all the cots to a sink and washed off. Right after that, the doctors told me they were taking Elder Pastores into a back room where they keep the more severely sick or injured people. I followed them rolling him around into the other room bringing all of our 2 suitcases, 2 backpacks, and a guitar. Elder Pastores was still sleeping pretty well, so I just found a place where there were no people behind a wall in the hallway, set all of our stuff down, and slept on a concrete bench. It's amazing what can feel comfortable after you have been deprived of comfort for so long. 

I woke up at 6:30 am and immediately called the mission nurse to let her know what was going on with Elder Pastores. She told me she wanted to send the president's assistants (AP's) up to us in the mission car to pick up Elder Pastores. That sounded like the best option at this point. We were 2 hours away from Bangkok. We waited until about 11 am until the AP's got to us and Elder Pastores got discharged from the hospital. I was so thankful for the AP's because they brought us food and I was so hungry haha. Elder Pastores went back to Bangkok with one of the AP's and the other one was assigned to continue on my trip up to Laos. 

I was with Elder Walker. He is so nice. We straight to the bus station and bought tickets, but the soonest tickets going where we were going were at 10 pm. We went and got some KFC (for my last time in Thailand) and we waited for the bus while doing some studies/sleeping with my face in a book. The bus was really late, so it came at 11 pm, and then we rode up to Nong Khai. 

So if you look at Thailand, it looks like an elephant. You can see the ear, head, neck and trunk of it. Nong Khai is the very top part where the neck is. Nong Khai is the closes area where the Elders serve in Laos, so everyone who goes over to Laos goes through Nong Khai. Elder Walker and I got there Sunday morning. We didn't have time to cross the border into Laos, so we just went to church in Nong Khai. The members there were awesome. After church, they made a huge, delicious meal. Then the members offered to help drive us to the border. That was really nice. We finally got to the border of Thailand and Laos, we found the Laos guys who were helping me across the border, the members said goodbye to me, and we were off. The people who helped me get across the border were Elder Jorgensen and Elder Eckersley. There was a ton of confusing visa stuff/passport stuff, but after that we got to the part where we actually cross. Elder Jorgensen and Elder Eckersley took my suitcases and stuff on a bus and crossed the huge bridge that way, but I rode my bike all the way across the bridge. It was so cool because along the bridge there were a ton of Thailand flags, but right at the middle of the bridge, all of them changed to Laos flags. (This is a tradition that every new guy gets to do.) It was so cool and the feelings going through my chest were amazing. On the other side of the bridge, (I didn't know this would even happen) there was a big sign that said "switch over to the right side of the road now." Apparently you use the right side of the road in Laos. 

I got to the house Sunday evening, and that's basically the end of the week. I am officially in Laos now!

-Elder Barron