More Glorious and Bright: Dream a little bigger

You know that scene in Inception where the girl is the intruder in the man's dream, and everyone starts looking at her and staring at her sideways? Korea is like a dream. Like someone else's dream.

I am definitely an outsider here; besides the other missionaries I've seen one other white person. People stare at me on the street and talk about my hair and eyes and skin. It's so weird. Surprisingly, there are a lot of Koreans here and Americans are pretty unusual. But they really LOVE Americans. They love America! So at least everyone is nice to me even if I don't know what they're saying.

I don't know what language I learned in the MTC but I don't think it was Korean. I have no clue what anyone is saying, and I have a hard time talking to them because of my accent. But I am trying really, really hard. My companion said I was speaking Korean in my sleep! Sometimes in lessons I'll catch some stray words and be really happy.

There's this line from Pitch Perfect that goes something like 'If at first you don't succeed, get the heck out of Kuwait!' In one respect I'm doing just that...trying to bring a little slice of heaven into Korea :) But even though the first few days were so hard and I had such extreme culture shock, I want to stay here and learn. When I get frustrated about the language, I remind myself that that isn't my purpose here. I'm not here to learn Korean. I'm here to serve God! When I remind myself of that it's so much easier! At first street proselyting was really scary, but now I genuinely enjoy trying to talk to people and understand them. We've met so many people here.

We have a few investigators! They are all very diverse. One of them is a nine year old girl. Another is a girl from Seoul Nam who comes here to school. We taught her Thursday (I think). We really want her to recognize God's love, because she really needs to feel like someone cares about her.

My companion is awesome! Her name is Gil Suryeo, which means 'glorious luck.' She's really short and tiny and is really vivacious. She literally chases people down the street sometimes. We've given out a lot of cards and copies of the Book of Mormon! It's so awesome to see seeds planted. In some instances we get to reap what we sow. We met a girl on the train today from China - she asked for our number! Usually it's the other way around.

One interesting Korea fact: the sisters can only talk to women and the elders to men. It's a cultural thing. Still a little hard to get used to.

The food is delicious! It's a good thing I like kimchi and rice. We had this steak thing the other night covered in cheese. It was amazing. I ate what I thought were noodles, but I looked more closely and the noodles had eyes, so that was fun. My companion fed me squid without telling me.

I gave my talk in church and got to meet our cute ward. There are lots of kids. Relief Society was pretty small; because school and work are so exacting (my companion got 3 hours of sleep every night when she was a student, so she had no pity for my jet lag haha), Sunday is sleep day for some people. Many come for sacrament meeting though.

It was wonderful to meet everyone. We say hello to everyone! They are all pretty respectful even if they aren't interested. I love recognizing people who are prepared to hear the gospel. Their faces just shine. We met a girl like that last night -- she was so excited to hear the gospel and just talk to us. Fingers crossed.

Anyways, I'm a little scattered right now, so I hope some of this made sense :)

Love,

Sister Bell