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When Life Goes Sideways

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  We are meeting a lot of amazing people and learning from them! A few weeks ago we heard about a woman who might need some help so we went to see if there was anything we could do. She is 80 years old. Her husband has passed away. Her older son was killed in a car accident. Two other sons live with her because they have disabilities. Her first language is an aboriginal language and she is also fluent in Taiwanese. Mandarin is a third language for her and the one she is least fluent in. She can’t read in any language. She found some unused land and grows a garden to help ends meet and keep herself active and productive. She had two different garden plots, but recently decided to focus on one. We took her some food as a gift. She received it reluctantly saying she gets by ok and people don’t need to bring her things. We asked when we could help with her garden but she said we were doing God’s work and she could handle the garden. She doesn’t have a car but she has a scooter and drives h
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To Every Kindred, Nation, and Tongue

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新年快樂 Happy Chinese New Year! Today is Chinese (Lunar) New Year! Last week all the missionaries got together for a traditional Chinese New Year dinner. As part of the festivities Sister Croft and I  dressed up in a lion costume and did a lion dance . During our 60 seconds, we bumped into the wall once and I hit Sister Croft with the lion head once, but we had fun and there are no lasting injuries! Since we were married we have always celebrated Chinese New Year in our home, but there are many homes in American that don't have any traditions around this Asian holiday. That includes my childhood home where we celebrated English boxing day. (Yes, my kids got to celebrate boxing day too.) Family to family and country to country there are many cultural differences including: language, food, architecture, clothing, cash, appliances, holidays, traditions and so on. Despite those sometimes large differences, I have had two distinct experiences in the last two months that have impressed on m
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Following The Spirit

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One of my goals is to become better at following the spirit. What I mean by that is paying attention to little feelings or promptings to do something good. I believe those types of feelings are from God, through the Holy Spirit, to accomplish his purposes. The first week we arrived in Taiwan we were rushing to our first staff meeting. As we crossed the church property I saw someone by himself looking at a fountain. I had a quiet little thought that I should go talk with him. I started to push it away because it would make us late and because I can't speak Chinese and didn't know what I could do besides say, "Hello." But, I decided following the feeling was more important than my excuses, so I changed direction to meet him. When I came up to him I realized he was American and soon found out that he was meeting with missionaries. We kind of connected. but didn't talk long and I didn't see him again while we were in Taipei. A week later when we were in Taidong, h
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Dealing with Emotional Temptations

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Two weeks ago was pretty tough for me (Darren). I was experiencing a variety of small frustrations, and three frustrations that felt very big to me: I couldn't communicate with anyone. We couldn't find contact information to visit members of the church or people who had shown interest in learning about the church. My leg around my ankle started hurting badly after a run, enough that I was limping when I walked. From the symptoms, the internet was saying to plan on a 12 week recovery with no running! At times I was feeling useless and hopeless. Sometimes staying in bed even sounded appealing. I feel these types of thoughts and feelings are emotional temptation . Churches often talk about sins, both of omission and commission and temptations to commit sin. I think it is less often that we talk about emotional temptation, but I think they all go hand in hand. I believe that our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ are actual beings who know us individually and love us, and want us to
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Cleanliness Matters -- Find a Way!

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  When we first walked into the Elders' Taitung apartment, we were a little dismayed that all the windows looked like this. We figured someone did it to prepare for a typhoon, but it made the apartment feel dingy and really unpleasant. We asked multiple people whether the tape needed to stay that way and they all just looked at us puzzled, so we decided to take it off. Pulling off the yellow part was easy, but most of the tape got left behind as gunk on the window. (I think the tape must have been there for a year or more). We tried to find a razor blade scraper at department stores, but with no luck. One store suggested a nearby building supply company, and they had a relatively expensive scraper, but I had to have it. To clean all the windows took many hours, but it was worth it. The apartment is now very pleasant and has wonderful views and is bright and cheery! There was an even more challenging cleaning problem in the apartment though. Unfortunately, this before picture doesn&
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Chinese Food

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  This is probably not what you think of when someone says Chinese food, but it is a popular treat here. The base is shaved ice, but it is shaved very fine and is more like ice cream than a snow cone. There is fruit and syrup and all kind of very sweet things that can go on top including beans (yes sweet beans) and boba (chewy balls) and sorbet. I decided to start with something obviously different to make a point. Most of the food Americans think of when we think of Chinese food is really Americanized Chinese food. The Americanized version is often breaded meat and often sweet. I don't think I've ever eaten anything like Orange Chicken or Kung Pao chicken in Taiwan. There is a huge variety of food here. There are a lot of noodle dishes -- beef noodles seem especially popular. The Taidong area has a lot of chicken done in a particular way. Squid, octopus, clams, mussels, and shrimp are also popular.  It is normal to cook almost all parts of an animal. People eat chicken and pi
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Open Your Mouth...and Sweat

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My (Elder Croft's) biggest worry about this mission has consistently been the language. Part of my desire to be called to Taiwan was for me to be able to learn to speak Mandarin, but unfortunately desire does not equal ability.  When Sister Croft and I were first dating, I eagerly started learning a few words. But, I quickly became discouraged when the Mandarin for, "I want to go to sleep" and "I want to eat dumplings" sounded exactly the same to me. This video has fun with those exact phrases , so apparently I'm not unique. In the 33 years since then, I've done some sporadic studying. Most of the time I can hear the tones now, but my vocabulary is so limited that anything anyone says to me just goes right on by. In Chinese this is, "I hear but don't understand." In October I got a Mandarin tutor from the MTC who helps me for an hour or two a week over zoom. The last session we had before I ended up leaving for Taiwan he challenged me to wr
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We're in Taitung! (Taidong)

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  President Yang asked us to serve in Taitung (that is using the old romanization. The new romanization is Taidong)! This is an area in the South of Taiwan on the East side of the island. As you can see, it is beautiful! The office helped us rent a car and we drove down the coast early Saturday morning. It was my first time driving in Taiwan. We heard the traffic would be really bad, so we left at 6:00am. That worked out really well and we made it safely. Probably my biggest surprise driving was the speed limits. I'm used to driving 70mph to 80mph in Utah, but most of the time, even on large, well maintained roads, the speed limit here was only 60kph to 70 kph which is only 37mph to 43mph. The fastest speed limit we saw was 80kph (50mph) for a few short stretches. There were times on smaller roads where the posted speed was only 40kph (25mph). Residential area speed are only 30kph (18mph) but that makes a lot of sense because there is poor visibility from parked cars and scooters e
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Thanksgiving Times Three

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Thanksgiving was special for us in Taiwan. We attended three celebrations. Thanksgiving #1 There is an English speaking ward in Taipei and one of the families in the ward has made it a tradition to have the youth prepare a traditional American Thanksgiving meal for the missionaries. They met on a Saturday and made sweet potato casserole, pies, potatoes, etc. On Sunday evening the youth and the missionaries got together to eat and to share experiences. That was only our second day in Taiwan and we felt very appreciated and welcomed. The youth were great. We don't think they realize how different their lives are. They have lived and traveled in many countries and our associating with a lot of diverse people. Learning languages, and having a lot of amazing experiences. Thanksgiving #2 The next few days we helped the mission president's wife and the other office missionaries prepare a traditional thanksgiving meal for the entire mission. We needed to feed 100 people! I felt like we
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Decorating for Christmas

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  Our first week in Taiwan we helped prepare for an all mission conference.  The missionaries met for a morning of training, and a big Thanksgiving dinner (more about that in the next post). And the mission wanted the stake center decorated for Christmas before they came. We spent a good portion of the day decorating this tree. First we were supporting and helping the young missionaries, but it took a lot longer than expected due to two major problems. 1. The limbs kept falling off because of broken parts, and 2. we didn't have as many lights as needed to string them the way we wanted to. In the end it was adults doing the work while the missionaries went to other appointments, but despite the problems, we think it turned out really nice! We also have a Christmas tree for our apartment.
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