Hayden's Missionary Blog: First Week in the Land of the Thais

Elder Ridd (left), with his trainer, Elder Holland. They're serving in Thonburi, Thailand.

Hey everybody!

I'm finally in Thailand now!!! My area is called Thonburi, and it is in western-ish Bangkok. My trainer is Elder Holland and he's a super cool guy. He is from Portland, and he played a year of basketball for Southern Virginia University. We're the only elders in the area, but there is also a pair of sisters here, along with a senior couple.

Thailand is crazy! I can understand a lot of what people say, but I also don't understand a lot - haha. Everyone here speaks super fast and sounds kinda slurred, but that's probably because I wasn't taught to speak by native Thai people.

The plane ride here was suuuuuuper long and pretty boring, haha. I only got about three hours of sleep on the whole thing because my throat was killing me, and by the time I got off I had an eye infection which was a pretty fun time. The eye is all good now because you can get like any medicine over the counter here, and my throat is better which is good. It was super weird to say goodbye to all my MTC friends, because we'd all been together for two months.

We have taught a few lessons already. We taught a kid who wanted some tutoring in English, so we helped and then slipped some gospel in there as well.

We also taught a super cool investigator who has been investigating for awhile and has a baptism date for the 1st of October.

The other day, we got a call from a family who had met with the missionaries about three years ago and randomly had the thought to call us pop into their heads, so they did and we went over to teach them. They live about an hour away from us - with traffic (because traffic is wild here). They live in a very small house with no walls, kind of tucked away in some trees. We taught a guy who was about 50ish, along with his wife, his 40-something-year old brother, and a grandma - about prayer. They seemed pretty down with it, so we'll go back again to teach some more.

We also found a Pakistani family that we got as a referral from Salt Lake. They had a maaaassive family and apparently were referred by a friend of theirs who was learning about the church in Germany. They are super into the Bible, and said they might be interested in learning more. They lived in a random, super crowded Muslim community, but they were Christian already.

The members here are super cool (from what I can understand from them, lol). Church was wild, because I didn't catch a lot of what was going on, but I got up and bore my testimony and introduced myself. Most of them understood, I think. My head hurt afterwards from all the attempting to translate in my head - hahahaha.

Today we're probably gonna check out a Wat (a Thai temple; click here for more info). We also are going to visit a guy who is the son of an ambassador, who was friends with President Hinckley. President Hinckley promised that we would keep on visiting him, so that's pretty cool.

Well, that was this week!

I love and miss you all! Keep being awesome!

Elder Ridd <3