No Cop, No Stop

Malo soifua!!!

This week was absolutely wild, and I loved it a ton. I left home on Monday morning, Oct 12th, and I flew to NYC for basically the entire day. I was with Elders Lee and Wood on the plane (both going from AZ to NYC), so that was a lot of fun. Our flight landed in JFK Airport a little early, and we just kinda waited around until some other elders came and found us and took us to the meet up spot. All in all, 20 missionaries arrived in New York Monday night. We met with Pres and Sis Teuscher, talked a little bit, and then left in our companionships for the night.

I'm currently in Staten Island, which has one bridge connecting to the rest of the city that we can use. The bridge has a $20 toll fee per crossing (luckily the church covers that), so we usually don't leave the island haha. 

The next day was transfers, however, so I drove with Elders Checketts and Hwang into the city to drop off Elder Hwang and pick up Elder Siu. Here's the rundown of our current trio:

Elder Hill

Languages: 2 (English/Samoan) 

Experience: less than a week

Elder Checketts

Languages: 2 (English/Italian) 

Experience : three months

Elder Siu

Languages: 3.5 (English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and a little of another Chinese dialect as well as some Japanese) 

Experience: 13 months 

The best part of our arrangement? We're the English elders for Staten Island, yet we speak more languages than the sisters and the Spanish elders COMBINED. Good times. 

Also, a quick appreciation plug for Elder Siu. He was called to Hong Kong, but was reassigned to NYC for a transfer because of civil unrest. Finally he got to go to Hong Kong for a few transfers before being sent back to NYC again, this time because of Covid. Despite some rough circumstances, he's been a great trainer, and we have a lot of fun on top of working really hard. 

With two new elders in Staten, we've been doing a lot of getting to know members, resetting expectations and schedules with those we're teaching, and just all around re-vamping the Staten Island area. We've also been working the Facebook find grind, just making tons of new friends and trying to find people to talk to. It's been hard work, but it's yielded some good results so far, so I'm hopeful for the future. 

Now, to explain the subject line. Traffic here in Staten is actually the worst. The roads are all narrow and wind randomly, street lights are designed all weird and annoying, and there's a whole new set of "driving rules" to follow. For example: no cop, no stop. If there's a red light, or a stop sign, but you have places to be, and there's no cop nearby, just run straight through. I've already seen this happen a half dozen times, and it's a little freaky. We missionaries follow all legit traffic laws, but others don't, so we have to be careful.

Another great "traffic law" is the concept of the "park anywhere" lights. Normally, they're called your emergency lights or some other nonsense, but here in Staten we know the true use of the red triangle button. You can literally park ANYWHERE you want, flip those bad boys on, and then just walk away. It's insane. I've seen cars parked two rows deep on the side of a street, and they just have their park anywhere's on, so nobody cares. It's so grippy, and it makes some really stressful situations.

Finally are the bus lanes. Basically, almost every main street has bus lanes, which would be great except for two things: 1) busses don't really even use the bus lanes a whole ton, which makes traffic worse; 2) other cars will just use it because the busses don't. 

Mafaufauga faaleagaga:

We were teaching (in person) a guy named Ben Dugbe, who moved here from Liberia (and has some very interesting views of blacks in the US that he loved talking about, but I digress), and he was talking about prayer, and he compared it to a phone call, which wasn't new to me, but his next insight was something I'd never really considered much. He talked about how when you call someone, they can respond directly and communicate quickly, but you have to know their private number. It's the same with God. He's always ready and willing to respond and communicate with you, but you need to know the private number. With the God, the private number is prayer. When you pray, you can talk to God, and you can hear Him talking to you. Like a phone call, you need to make sure you have a good, strong connection, otherwise the call won't go through. But if you put in that effort, and talk to God regularly, you will receive blessings beyond comprehension.

Alofa lava atu outou uma lava,

Elder Hill

Photos:

• Elder Lee (far right), me, Wood (2nd from left), another elder I met for about  5 seconds, and Bro Mālolo, who used his airline job as an excuse to come and visit us in the airport and get us some food for the flight.
• Me, Elder Siu (middle) , and Elder Checketts (right) with our quality Chinese food
• Clouds
• Street near our house (Staten Island is very green and foresty)
• This is Bambi. He lives by the church building, and he's been hit by a few cars so his antler is janky and he has a limp (he literally just runs in the middle of the road)
• "Yeah, we don't get ice cream here" - Elder Checketts