Hello so I apologize again for last week's email. It was abominably long. I promise that this one will be significantly shorter and more manageable. 

Since last week's email was 100% about miracles, I realized that I haven't told you much yet about my area. My companion and I cover 2 stakes. Yes, you read that right. Not two wards, two stakes. Each stake has close to 2000 people in it. One of the stakes is a normal family stake, and the other is a YSA stake. We share this assignment with an adorable senior couple, so they mainly take the YSA stake, and we mainly take the family one. 

Our family stake, the Benson stake, covers 6 tiny towns: Benson, Amalga, Newton, Trenton, Cornish, and Clarkston. I think the largest one may reach a population of 800 on a really busy day if there are several family reunions going on. The population of dogs and cats, on the other hand, is probably double that. Every house we stop at has at least 2 dogs and 3 cats. The dogs help us out a lot by barking like crazy every time we knock on a door. I wish the people we contact would be as excited to see us as their dogs are. It would make our jobs a lot easier.

Since our area is so large, we get a car! It's a 2016 Chevy Malibu, and I'm pretty sure it's smarter than me and Sister Anderson combined. Our first day driving, we spent a good five minutes trying to figure out why the car refused to move forwards, because we couldn't locate the parking break. During another one of our proud moments, we spent 20 minutes sitting at a gas station because we couldn't get the gas valve open. Turns out you push on the little panel, and it springs open. Because that makes sense. While sitting at the gas station, we finally managed to locate the owners' manual, which had been buried under a massive stack of fliers for a Book of Mormon class that the Elders had left behind. Seriously, I think there were more fliers than there are people in our stake. Now that we have instructions, we have discovered that the car auto corrects when we go out of the lane a bit. It also has a fancy type of cruise control that allows you to set a following distance so that it automatically slows down if you come up behind another car. Basically, the car drives itself while we panic inside trying to figure out what the heck is going on. It's like all those sci-fi dystopia movies where someone hacks the self driving cars, except no one's hacking anything, we just don't know what we're doing.

I'm getting a lot better at recognizing the promptings of the Holy Ghost. The other night I woke up in the middle of the night with the sudden thought that I should check to see if the door was locked. I'm not a huge fan of the dark, so it took me a bit to build up the courage to leave the safety of the bedroom. When I got into the living room, I found that the door was very unlocked. I quickly locked it, then retreated to our bedroom and locked that too for good measure. I spent the rest of the night praying that if there was a specific reason the door needed to be locked that night, other than general safety, that I would never find out why. I think I'm honestly happier not knowing.

I got to use my Chinese the other day! One of Sister Anderson's investigators from the Mandarin Branch in Logan got baptized on Saturday, so we surprised her by singing 'How Great Thou Art' in Chinese. The baptism was wonderful. The woman, Michelle, was baptized by her husband, and we got to have the service in the Logan Tabernacle, which is incredibly beautiful. It was so exciting to see this woman make the first big step in changing her life while surrounded by family and friends who were there to support and love her.

The town of Newton is honestly one of my favorite places I've ever been. Everyone's kind, honest, and hardworking. People work together and help each other out. Everyone knows everyone, so the town gossip is alive and thriving, which helps us out a lot with finding people. Coming out, I was worried about meeting unfriendly people who would yell and slam doors in our faces. Instead, we have the opposite problem. Even when we meet people who have no interest in the church, they invite us in and sit and talk to us for an hour and a half about their lives and families and stuff while we try to sneak in gospel tidbits. We've met some really cool people this way, but it's seriously interfering with our productivity. Out here, kids just ride around on their bikes together, and if one of them strays too far from home, someone in the town will bring them back. 

Every day, I am constantly amazed by the beauty of my surroundings. There are a couple of rivers, lakes, and marshes in the area, so things are decently green. Since most of the land is fields, there's nothing obstructing the view of the whole valley and the mountains. I never realized how beautiful glossy green corn and golden wheat could be. My favorite time is when we go out tracting in the evenings. The sun goes down so it's not as hot, and the sunset turns everything golden, and there's a perfect cool breeze, and I could just be out there forever. Between the beautiful surroundings and the wonderful people, it's going to be really hard to leave this place.

I may have kinda broken my promise of a short email, but I think this one's at least shorter than the last one. I hope everyone has a wonderful week full of miracles!

Love you!

Hull Jiemei

Pics: 

1. A very kind woman took a picture of me and Sister Anderson after Sunday dinner and sent it to our parents. 

2. I try not to send random landscape pictures, but the sunset the other night was too amazing not to share. This is the valley I get to live in!

3. In our ongoing series of selfies with farm animals, we met a couple of donkeys the other day. One was shy and skittish, but the other came right up to say hi and pose for a photo.

4. This is the cottage we get to live in. It's the guest home of a couple who are serving in Brazil at the moment. It's the nicest missionary apartment in the mission, so the other missionaries have dubbed it the 'Taj Mahal'. We are very comfortable. Sometimes we're too comfortable-- I've fallen asleep on the couch during language study more times than I care to admit.