"Dewivvewin' Fwy-oh's" 🎵

[The title references this episode from Tumbletown Tales - a Canadian classic!]

October 23, 2023

Hey everyone! How are we all doing? How's the good ol' Halloween prep going?

I saw a couple posts here and there about the Solar Eclipse! Did any of you get to see it? I heard it was pretty epic. I don’t think the eclipse path went over Canada, and if it did I wouldn’t have seen it because it was so cloudy last Saturday. We did get 2 or 3 days of blue skies though, and one other day of rain! That was kind of a nice contrast to the overcast that I’ve seen most of my time here so far.
Missionary work looks just slightly different for me than I imagined it. We don’t do a lot of the stereotypical knocking on doors since there aren’t any close communities of Chinese speakers - they’re mostly dispersed throughout all the suburbs. We do a little street contacting here and there, which isn’t very effective. So alternatively we hung up flyers for English class on Tuesday. . . and Wednesday. . . and Thursday… and every day this week and probably every day next week, etc. It’s REEEALLY monotonous but it is (believe it or not) the most effective way of finding people who are interested in the gospel. At least the most effective that we know of. It also brings back a lot of Tumbletown Tales references that are funny to me.

Aight, enough of that depressing banter – Some silly little things from this week include the following:
I’ve seen two pipe organs in Calgary so far, one at our church with the mandarin branch, and one at the Stake Center that I got to play on P-Day. There weren’t a lot of stops, but the sound was really cool (pedals went down to 16').

I had a glimpse of heaven this week, and I am fortunate enough to receive many more. After every Tuesday District Council, we go to a little “Italian” pizzeria for lunch and for $3.00 you can get a FAT slice of - wait for it - DÖNER PIZZA! It sounds wild, I know, especially for all you who are asking yourselves “what’s döner?” but trust me it’s so good! Other food adventures include my first time at Tim Horton’s on Saturday. Not too shabby.

Gettin' Timmie's

 
There’s a member family that feeds our district pancakes every Wednesday. They are some of the most helpful, most hard working members I know of (perhaps even better missionaries than the missionaries :\ )

The Zone Leaders live down the street from us and on Wednesday evening they pulled a grisly prank on my companion. They came into our apartment and said they were told to do a device-audit of my companion’s phone. He was really freaking out since he just got his Facebook back, even despite the hyena chuckling coming from the zone leaders. It was kinda scary in the moment, but looking back it’s a little more funny.

Now the meat and potatoes of the week include the following:
We found a lady on Tuesday to join our English class! She’s working really hard to raise a family and also learn English and also try and get her husband over here from China. Imma keep her in my prayers for sure.

There’s a lot of classes at the church on Wednesday, and we met a guy named Mohammad after one of them. His family’s Iranian, He’s a scholar at the University, and he’s one of the most sincere truth-seekers I’ve seen! We had an awesome little conversation about eternal truths found in both the Islam faith and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. What an inspiring guy.
Thursday was So. incredibly. s l o w w w. It had its moments though; we went to the northmost train/bus station in Calgary, and one lady actually accepted a flyer from us!! That’s a huge win in my book, I hope she contacts us soon about it.

All of our 2 lessons we have every week happen on Fridays, where we teach Jun and Winson. Jun is kinda on a plateau where he wants to learn more about the Church, but he’s really hesitant to be baptized - and there’s not a whole lot more to teach him. Winson is really busy studying business at the University, but I think he's slowly opening up to more of our invitations. Both lessons were about the Book of Mormon which was really cool. Big testimony builder for sure.Friday was also cool 'cause we got a lot of service in! We helped an old German lady from Kaiserslautern who's in the process of moving into a new house. We also helped a Taiwanese member with her lawn, and she and her friend treated us with some Popeye's afterward. They were surprisingly witty and fun to talk to.

Taiwanese members at Popeye's 

We got a call on Saturday that a lady in the hospital requested a priesthood blessing. She was in her 70s and suffered from a stroke in her home. The hospital had nowhere to park (classic) so we did a good amount of walking, but eventually we made it to the right room. It was so interesting that even though the Canadian hospital was sketchy as H*ck, there was still a really peaceful spirit in the room during the blessing. It was a really cool experience and she was so grateful.

Enjoy the warm weather while you can everyone! Tomorrow it's about to reach a high of 12°F/-11°C :\

Take care you guys! Love you all!
-熊長老

Photos:

park inside Calgary city

Nose Hill Park, Calgary

 le Temple

lovely Canadian healthcare

"show me a sign"

Coldture Shock

October 16, 2023

Top o’ the mornin’ to ya, eh!'

Well folks, I MADE IT TO CALGARY!!! Boy what a week it’s been. I think I’m gonna have to break it down day by day. *gulp* Buckle up everyone, this is gonna be a Dickens-length email, so here goes!

Monday was wild. We finally got a good time to do our laundry! We were in and out within the hour! We most definitely got volleyball in as well (unfortunately I was not smart enough to take any pictures). We were assigned to help out with dinner that evening. My job wasn’t too bad though - Elder Logan and I got to dish out rolls like crazy. Then came…the CLASS PARTY (woot) which was combined with the Cantonese District!! It was really fun to hear their testimonies and also see how much everyone hates post-Kahoot wall-sits (true story).  

[Evan's explanation: anyone who wasn't in the top 3 after a round of a quiz game using the Kahoot app, went to do wall sits.]

Tuesday morning gave us a workshop about leaving the MTC. They put on a surprisingly funny play for us about entering the mission field. I got a solid “novice” score on the Mandarin Evaluation aka the “How well can you play Telephone in Chinese?” test. I got an entire 1 bag packed before our devotional (dubs).

Our devotional speaker was none other than ELDER GERRIT W. GONG!!! Some things I learned include:

--Elder Gong really likes dad jokes (a man of my heart)

--In the perfectionist world we live in, we’ll be much happier if we focus on being perfected in Christ, not in the world’s eyes

--Christ was the only one capable of laying down his life and regaining it with a resurrected body (Somehow I had never considered that we can’t resurrect ourselves after we die. I start to wonder now if Christ’s grace and saving power extends beyond this stage of mortal life).

--Jesus Christ makes Happy and Forever possible! Happy is too short if our most cherished relationships end after this life, and Forever is far too long if our pains and miseries continue after this life.

Wednesday graciously treated me with some nice food from the MTC cafeteria. Breakfast was French toast, lunch was beef French dip sandwiches, and dinner was not French but it did have some good chicken and gravy though. This was the second day in a row our morning class was cut short because of departure meetings (R.I.P. Brother Birch’s class, we will always remember the good times we had learning Chinese, playing 二十問題, and doing pushups). The meeting today was kind of a recap of our arrival meeting, but this time they showed a clip of an Elder Holland devotional where he very passionately preaches about how the mission changed his life. Classic, and still cool. I packed yet another whole 1 bag this afternoon and had one last tutoring with Elder Green, our blind service missionary friend from Wuhan. He’s so cool! 

Our last class was very bittersweet. I’ll just say there were a lot of little miracles that came out of that class.

I said goodbye to some cool people after class (some I never expected to meet) and commenced the finishing packing…after a little trim and some mild tomfoolery with our good friends going to Hong Kong.

On Thursday I finally finished packing…at 1 AM *tugs shirt collar* which gave me a solid 2½ hours of sleep (woot). I pulled up to our class building to check out around 4 AM, and gave everyone a last little bear hug. I honestly lucked out so hard with this MTC district, and I dunno what I’m gonna do without them. They’ve built me up so much, I’m so indebted to them.

. . .Luckily Elder Logan had the same MTC departure plan as I did, so we had a lot of fun missing the bus together and working our way through the airport (stay cool bro).

The Airport brought me to a remembrance of just how divine food is outside the MTC. Even more of a tender mercy, however, is the fact I got to see Doctor Ellis and his family!! It’s always nice to see some friendly faces at an airport (even dentists).

Our “Take Off” was successful (heh) and two hours later I found myself flying lower over Calgary, which was just as rainy and cloudy as Salt Lake. My prior reading in the Book of Ether about the land of desolation didn’t help any upon arriving among grey skies, dried up grass, and mostly fallen leaves. I was fortunate that Canada’s one border patrol guard let me through to meet up with the other missionaries–who then proceeded to speed through downtown Calgary to meet the mission president. I learned a new equation during that ride:

        1 meal + 2 hour flight + back of a crowded SUV = 1 nauseous Elder Baer

This equation was solved with some time in a nice chair and a Subway sandwich, but was promptly unsolved by getting in yet another car peeling out onto freeway exits.

And this is when the real mission begins.

An elder from Park City took me downtown to a homeless shelter, where one of the tenants had recently passed away. Her friend who is a church member and a first nations citizen (has older history on an Indian Reservation) invited missionaries to say a prayer with some candles in preparation for a funeral. This was a real eye opener to the poverty in Calgary and a great first experience for the mission. I had another really authentic mission experience right afterward falling asleep in a stake meeting. We met up at the mission home that night for some taco salad, a questionnaire, and a chance for me to accompany everyone singing “O Canada” (which, to my surprise, does not even mention maple syrup). We hit it big at a Super 8 motel, which brought me to a remembrance of just how divine a pillow and mattress is outside the MTC.

*deep inhale*

On Friday we went back to another church where the mission president finished some interviews he started the night before. I met my trainer Elder McAfee, who’s been in the mission a little over a year now. This is his first time training a missionary and he also just got some privileges back this transfer…so this’ll be a good fresh start for us both.

We had two lessons where I got to meet our friends Jun and Winston. Jun is really cheerful, speaks really good English, and really likes our church. He’s very hesitant to be baptized because he wants to learn more, but it seems like there’s not a lot more we can teach him? I only saw Winston on Zoom and he's pretty busy with college studies, but otherwise doing well. We got my credit card working and bought some meager vittles for the weekend. We ended the day by going to the church to get our [posteriors] whooped in basketball by a bunch of middle-aged Chinese people. (They were cooking at the 3-point line, holy cow!)

On Saturday we set up some chairs and vacuumed in prep for stake conference. Saturday was a little slower–ate some lunch, did some language study, made some weekly goals. We had the brilliant idea to head up to campus to talk to people…but there was no classes happening so no one was there. no one. UCalgary was 100% post-apocalyptic on Saturday. We did see some other people though. This nice Chinese lady talked to us on the phone for 30 minutes when we were making random calls, so that was kinda cool.

Yesterday (Sunday) was nice. I got up early for a nice, quiet study. Stake conference was pretty good–and Jun showed up! That was such a delightful surprise and he looked so happy to be there. At least, at the post-conference luncheon he was pretty happy. We spent two hours outside trying to help a family change all four of their tires, but we ended up standing around not knowing how to help, because a) my companion and I speak about the same level of “novice” Chinese, so we didn’t know what they were saying most of the time, and b) they had two screws break off and get wedged in the same tire bolt, and we couldn’t think of who to call that could help. The family eventually just sent us home–kind of humiliating.

We hung up some fliers for English classes that we teach 3x a week. That seems to be our best resource of finding people interested in Church, since a lot of people who are trying to learn English have very difficult personal/family lives as well. We wish the best for those friends.

Okaaaaay… Welp, after that good novel and a half, I'm sure you're all tired of the sound of my text, so I'll let you get back to it. I hope all of you have a fantastic week! I’d love to hear what’s happening down south in the tropics! Also if any of you in Utah spot Elder Sheffield give him a warm hello for me! He’s the GOAT.

爱你们！ 下周见!

–Elder Baer

Photos:

Last class pics

Last class with Brother Birch

Last class with Sister Hutchinson

MTC Plaza pics featuring friends from another Chinese district, Elder Smith from Australia [not found], & MTC President Calderwood

Elder Kimball is Nice with the razor

Missin' the bus

-A rainy glimpse of Salt Lake (compare with a rainy glimpse of Calgary)

My Mediterranean diet

New attire

"Is everybody gone? My cheeks are killing me."

[Link to reference in title.] 

October 9, 2023

你好家人和朋友！

How is everyone? Surviving? I hope so!

Big shout out to all of you nerds who were part of Utah All-State Choir! I still cherish my experience at All-State spending time with a ton of freaking cool people from my school and being part of such a great performance in the Tabernacle. The choir I'm part of now has some different members and the performance venue has some different songs, but I really think the overall message and feeling is remarkably similar.

Quick mini soapbox: Have you ever noticed how the pitch rises at the end of a live piece of music? I thought a lot this week about how similar that is to how smoke rises from the menorah or the tabernacle altars, or how our prayers rise to meet the ears of God. I'm always amazed with the connections between music, psalms, and prayers.

Y'all, we've been having WAAAAY too much fun lately. On Thursday we discovered beach volleyball in the field by Provo temple that the missionaries have access to, and it feels like we've been doing nonstop volleyball since then. We've been playing with a new Chinese district every day, so it's been fun to get to know the Mandarin and Cantonese districts even better. We've also been having too much fun harvesting snacks and other random garbage that the Elders on our floor leave behind. A pair of "drunk" goggles (the kind that mirrors everything upside down and also halves your peripheral) is a particular favorite among our district and friends.

Speaking of being left behind, I was actually talking about ME! Not really, but sort of. We've had a district of Elders going to Samoa on our floor for the last 6 weeks or so, and they just left this week. They really made the residence hall a great place and were really inspiring. I'm gonna miss our friends from Australia, New Zealand, and Green River (and Ridgeline's very own Elder Christiansen)! Safe Travels!

Speaking of traveling, you know when you're about to beat the boss on level 9 and conquer the game, but then the power goes out and none of your progress has been saved? Well that was Elder Logan's experience with the travel office as a bunch of his travel prerequisites were invalid and he had to pay a whopping $500 to get a physical at the Health Department near campus and resubmit a lot of other info including an ecclesiastical endorsement. This included a lot of talking to a lot of different front desks who kept saying "Thanks Mario, but the Princess is in another castle." Amidst all of this he's been temporarily reassigned to Richmond, Virginia, so New Zealand won't come for another transfer. He's such a winner though for his patience and unbreakable cheerful attitude. Our prayers are with him as he ventures into the unknown. We especially pray for his family back in Hawaii at this time.

The Strictly-Chinese Challenge has been slowly taking damage, but the effort is still there! . . . most of the time. If anything, my mouth has started to feel weird from constantly making Chinese mouth shapes.

Our Tuesday Devotional featured Sister Emily Belle Freedman who just spoke in conference. Quite impressive to give speeches back-to-back like that. She had a really cool insight on the word endurance - the prefix "en" often refers to something "within,"  and the root word "dura" refers to something firm, solid, & steadfast. So when we say we "Endure to the End," We're saying we stay firm, solid, & steadfast within for the rest of our time here on earth (and maybe even after?) She also, like many other devotional speakers, brought up how inspiring a worn out pair of missionary shoes can be and what that represents. Even more evidence that "the worth of soles is great in the sight of God"

Unfortunately, MTC Pasta has continued to disappoint. I don't think the staff knows that penne is in fact not the same thing as macaroni shells *cue Italian dope slap*

I finally found a nice violin!! Elder Hart and I were doing some music in a room we stumbled upon that happened to have a mural from the Washington D.C. Temple? Really strange find. Elder Hart also notified me on Tuesday that he had an audition spot reserved that he didn't know whether it was cancelled or not. We showed up on Thursday with a piece we pulled together the day before, and then they said we were playing for a Sunday Evening Devotional.

 

 

We had a really cool experience in a role-play teaching one of our teachers about the law of chastity. It's a really difficult topic to teach, not to mention teaching in Mandarin, but our efforts paid off and all of us as well as our teacher "investigator" could feel a very strong spirit among us.

I got a little mixed up in my travel plans earlier, but I'm LEAVING THE MTC ON THURSDAY! 4:00 AM BABY! As much as I diss on the meals, I am gonna miss it here. The missionaries, teachers, and leaders really make the MTC amazing. I've made so many good memories, from day one when Elder Groscost's belt buckle spontaneously dived into the toilet, to the infamous panoramas of other Elders. I've got good company leaving with me this week, Elder Gilbert and Elder Hopkins leave the same day as I do! (What is the MTC ever going to do without them?)

 

I'll see you all on the other side of the border. Love you all! God Bless!

--Elder Baer

Photos:

-oh how the Ramen has fallen

 

 

Children's songbook #244

 

 

-pics with other mandarin districts

 

 

 

One last photo of Timpanogos

Mahjong Mayhem

October 2, 2023

 Y ‘ A L L ! ! !

Have you taken a look outside these days!  The Earth is absolutely STUNNING right now!

Also, General Conference though? What an incredible weekend! I hope y’all got even more of a kick out of this Conference than I did! They’ve posted the videos online now if you missed any of it – always worth a re-watch.

There were a lot of interesting topics that kept coming up this time around. A few I noticed include stronger family love, tithing, covenants (Anyone else think this came up a ton? I thought it was mentioned quite a lot, but I also might be the only one at the MTC who thinks so), happiness and eternal perspective. I also heard a lot of NNNICE one-liners this conference like such as (and I may be paraphrasing a little):

“Where there’s a design, there’s a designer” - Alan T. Phillips

“When nothing is expected and everything is appreciated, life becomes magical” - Gary B. Sabin

“When I choose not to be humble, I choose to be humiliated” - Joni L. Koch

“Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal” - Quentin L. Cook

And of course, the classic message from the Prophet himself, “Think Celestial” - Russel M. Nelson

I’m looking forward to reading back over these talks over the next few months and I invite all of you to do the same.

Anywho, this week was in fact another week!

Guys. I cannot tell you how much I miss jazz right now. All morning I’ve been looking out at the crimson red leaves among intermittent rain, and it reminds me of all of my favorite jazz standards recorded by Django Reinhardt, Oscar Peterson, Count Basie, & Gus Viseur (who honestly plays some of the best autumn tunes I know). It’s alright though, I’m “jazzed” to be here, so it evens out.

Elder Sheffield’s mini mahjong set is a smashing hit. Our teacher Sister Hutchingson taught us how to play one time, and now the district pulls it out during any free time. The Cantonese Elders have even been coming in every now and then to play a few games.

Yet another good line from this week: When referring to our friend on floor three, a 280 pound New Zealand rugby-champ, Elder Groscost noted something about how "the Devil checks under his bed for Elder Tooley."

Follow up on the MTC “Cleanse” from last week: Our guy Chris, one of the staff members here, told us during our service assignment (taking down chairs in the gym on Sunday nights) that the MTC had a different spirit about it last Monday that he hadn’t felt in about 3 years. He said the MTC really didn't need all the missionaries to clean it since the staff does that exact job every day, but he said that as we're involved in service we bring the Lord's spirit into our life in a way like no other. Especially as we clean, we make it easier for the spirit to dwell with us. That's really stuck with me in the last couple hours.

Just a week and a half left until I go take my journey into "The Great White North!" I can already start to hear the call of Canadia beckoning me to come. (It sounds oddly like Bob and Doug McKenzie.)

Have a blessed week everyone!

Love you all!

–Elder Baer

Photos:

 

Yet another Timp pic

 

 

Mahjong and more Mahjong

 

 

the district doing their thing (classic Elder Baer face included)

 

 

 

the MTC scoring 0-3 on the food

 

 

temple trip with the comp