Yuie Comes to America.

My long time friend, Carmen Yu, works for the Church, and came to Salt Lake for some training.

Carmen Yu and I were companions on my mission in Independence, Missouri 10 years ago. We really got along great, and had a lot of fun. She was uncompromising in her focus, and her desire to boil octopus at early morning hours. She is just an exceptional person. We have a bond that transcends time and distance. Even the distance between Lehi, Utah and Hong Kong. She is also hysterically funny. Not as funny as I am, but still.

Here is Yuie arriving, she is disoriented by all of the "Caucasians".






Our Visitor Center Directors were there to greet her too. Here are Brother and Sister Barlow, surrogate parents to the sisters at the Visitor Center:



Yuie with her favorite Caucasion:





Yuie was traveling with a co-worker, Flora, who also came for training. True to the history of sister missionaries, the first thing we did was go out to eat:




The next day Me, Seini (another one of my companions), and Yuie got together for dessert at my house, and to reminisce:

A couple funny stories about Yuie. When she arrived in Missouri she barely knew English. One of the ways she learned was by reading the scriptures. She started using terms in her everyday language that one would only hear in the scriptures.

One time when we were together something great happened, and I said,
"Yuie, aren't you excited!!" She said,
"Steenie, I am so excited, my lips are without utterance."

Another time we found ourselves right in the middle of a very unfortunate domestic situation. We were awakened in the wee hours by the sound of police right outside our apartment window. They were yelling back and forth with our upstairs neighbor who was totally drunk and making all kind of threats. We were still in a haze when we heard this guy yell,
" I have a hostage!" (followed by screams from a woman)

At that point we quickly woke up, jumped out of bed, and started running around in our room in hysterics. We were grabbing stuff, when we crashed into each other in our shear panic. At that point, Sister Yu said:

"Steen, what is a hostage!?"

"I'll tell you later! " I said, a little dumbfounded.

We army crawled out to the living room, and called our Mission President. I asked if we could come over, but he cautioned us that it may be more dangerous to try to leave our apartment. We slept on the floor.

Fortunately, the HOSTAGE situation ended well, or I wouldn't really be able to call this a funny story, would I?

To be continued....