davisintaiwan: Missionary lives in Taiwan

It's summer time in Gaoxiong already. We are running AC now since it's in the upper 80's with high humidity. Shirley went out for a quick walk/run mid-morning and came back with a red like a monkey because her thick hair covered part of her red face. It's going to be a long summer. In fact, we don't remember that we had spring at all. Or for that matter, we didn't have any winter either. Hope our children will be able to take our winter clothes home. We don't need any here. Elwin says that the only thing he needs long sleeved shirts for is when he wears his suit coat.

New Assignment: Family History Support (Call-center missionaries)

Since we accepted an additional assignment in January, life has been different. We've been asked to be "familysearch support missionaries", meaning that we'd answer phone calls from the FamilySearch website when patrons call in for various problems. We are taking online courses from a group of Asian/Pacific Family Search Missionary Experts (Australians and New Zealanders with strange accents) over Skype and Meeting Place, 4 days a week for 2 months. We are utilizing Meeting Place, Skype...in so many different ways. We are also learning new software, such as inContact, Amdocs, inSite, etc. We figure the next one we attend may be the "inSanity" clinic. There are plenty of homework assignments to keep us busy all day, and all night if we allow them. Yes, we are learning a lot about family search, but we are very tired everyday too. I think getting a PhD was easier. I don't think we can learn all about this humongous project in our life time. All 3 family history missionary couples in Taiwan are going through the training together in hopes of sharing the workload. The rolling out of the Church's "familytree" has made a great impact on this work. Anyone interested in family history, and can handle technical stuff, needs to apply. The Church has great need of "service missionaries" for this job. You don't need to leave home. You just need to be interested in family history, are somewhat familiar with the FamilySearch program and are willing to learn new things on the computer. I won't be able to do too much blogging because I'm working on Case #2999..., 2998..... We started working officially now that we have graduated. I sat in front of the computer working none stop for a solid 4 hours yesterday morning. It's going to be interesting.

Visiting Wards and Branches each Sunday

We continue to visit wards and branches each Sunday and derive much satisfaction to preach the gospel of family history. We have finished visiting East and West Gaoxiong Stakes (about 16 units). Some of them are as far south as you can get in Taiwan. We also visited Dong Gang, which is a sea port. It's very satisfying to see the Church spread out all over the island. We meet wonderful people every Sunday. We enjoy listening to their testimonies, their conversion stories, and their "Mighty change" after they joined the Church. Most of them are 1st generation LDS members. We see in them the future of the church here in Taiwan... and it looks great. A lot of them are sending their kids on missions now. We see many local young missionaries in the missions in Taiwan. We have met parents who brought their sons and daughters to the Taizhong Mission to serve their 2-year, or 18 months missions. We have also met some older couples looking into serving a couple mission. We have been asked to speak about how to prepare for missions for older couples now.

Amidst all the craziness, we are glad to have Sundays to visit the various wards and branches. We are treated very well there. We love visiting the members and feel of their beautiful spirit. We give sacrament talks, and have received positive feedbacks from both leaders and members. We do workshops on the new "Family Tree" either during Sunday School time or after the 3-hour block. People are thrilled that they are learning new technical stuff. By the way, if you are interested, you can now upload photos, stories, albums onto the Family Tree now. Go to familysearch.org/photos and you are there. It's been fun to see how far the Church has gone to make all these things possible for us.

Relief Society sisters in DouLiu.

Get on familytree

We are grateful to be here at this time. Elwin continues to work on his own genealogy when he finds time. We both have learned a lot about how to fix problems in the family history. Elwin has been able to connect with relatives to combine records, to correct problems, and to share information. He talks about the differences between genealogy and family history at sacrament meetings, which has made quite an impact on the members here. The Gaoxiong Family History Center sees more and more members each week. We had 22 visitors last Wednesday night. Hooray! Malachi's prophecy is being fulfilled: Malachi 4:5 ¶Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful of the Lord: 6 And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

If you have been doing your family history, you probably know that new.familysearch.org is being replaced by familysearch.org which is the familytree. The change is pretty transparant. You log on just like you would for the old system. Click on the "familytree" link on the front page and you are in the familytree. It's very userfriendly. If you are new at this and are interested in doing family search, be assured that the Church has opened the system to the public. Considering that genealogy has become the top hobby in the world. Wow...that's really cool. If we could get the people in Taiwan excited about their genealogy, it's going to be amazing. We plan on continuing our efforts to bring members and non-members alike to get involved with their genealogy and family history.

If you haven't been to "family tree", let's get started. Go to : http:www.familysearch.org. For beginners, it's fun to watch an introduction video in English or Chinese, whichever one chooses. There are 9 videos/powerpoint files of training.
https://familysearch.org/tree-training. Enjoy! Problems, call the help line. Who knows you may hear some familiar voices. Call at 2 AM and we may be on. :-)

Other work...church related

It's atypical that we go to universities to speak. But since we came to Taiwan, Elwin was invited to speak to a graduate students' group at the Pingtung Science and Technology University a couple of months ago as posted in a previous blog.

Shirley was invited to be the keynote speaker for an Educational Conference at the Pingtung Science and Technology University on March 28. A big poster adorned the auditorium. There were around 150 students participating. The professors all sat in the front as Shirley has asked for assistance to translate some professional terminology into Chinese. Most students can read English well, but listening and speaking skills are not sufficient to understand a professional lecture. A PowerPoint presentation was prepared to help the students. Dr. Ma had it uploaded to the department website requesting students to study first. Then, we were told by some professors, there would be some tests about the lecture in their next class. It was a very fun experience for us. Shirley's topic was on: Optimizing the learning environment for the young ones.

國立屏東科技大學幼兒保育系 National Pingtung University of Science & Technology

Shirley lecturing

Group sharing their finding

We were served a delicious lunch at the conference room in the Education Department. As we talked about our mission, one of the professors asked us to talk about family history. Elwin immediately went to the computer and pulled out his familytree and showed everyone how to access the LDS familysearch website. He generated many questions from the staff. We are invited to go back to teach them more next month.

Fellowshipping with members and missionaries at the Lin's