Aaron

Recently the Elders have been teaching the Gospel lessons to a man named Aaron; he is actually from China though and that is his English name. Liji and I have been able to sit in a few lessons with him and we have really been touched by him. He is just so humble and sincere. About 2 Sundays ago we were able to listen to Aaron's first prayer, and it was such a spiritual experience. I've never been able to be a part of something so humbling and I am so grateful for this mans strength and wonderful example to me, it has been so good to get to know him, and feel of the love that our Heavenly Father has for all of his children, especially those who are just finally coming to him for the first time. The pictures below are from a lesson we had with him at the Gunsan University where he is studying. He is married, but his wife has to stay back in China; that would just be so hard.

Daedunsan

Driving up to the mountain we're going to hike.
As I was picking up a map of the hike we would be on this lady was standing next to me so I tried to ask her which route on the map was the shortest one to go on and she showed me on the map where to go. She said we needed to take a Gondola up most of the way and then instead of just sending us on our way she said let's go and she took us all the way up to the top, taking pictures of us the whole way. We never figured out why she was taking us; if she was on her way up herself, or if she was a tour guide or just a really nice person. Either way she was a big help to us and we had a great day.

After the hike we were super tired so we stopped at this nearby crick we found to put our feet in. Of course Liji found some frogs to catch and they ended up being really cool colors on the bottom.

We drove around some more and found a better place that was deeper and we could actually get in and swim around.

We ended the day at VIPS; a really nice buffet restaurant. They had a lot of Western style food and we stuffed ourselves.

2 pieces of cheesecake for me and a little ice cream!

Gia Tigers vs. Lotte World Giants

Last Wednesday we had a professional game come into town for a 3-day series. Since we finish work early on Friday our boss helped us buy some tickets and we had a great time. Sadly our team lost it in the 9th, but it made for some excitement there at the end I guess.

I Love You!

This video is a little bit staged but I still wanted to share. This is Nina; our youngest student and she is always at the academy the earliest. Everyday we have about an hour to plan lessons before our classes start at 3. Well Nina always shows up about 2:30 and completely demands our attention the rest of our prep time, so we now have to make sure we are ready for the day before she shows up. Well a couple of days ago she came in our office and was hanging out as she usually does, but then she acted kind of funny for a minute and she left the office. She does this a lot so it wasn't really that unusual but when she came back in she suddenly burst out with "I Love You, Mrs. Waite. I Love your, Mr. Waite!" We haven't taught her that and so I'm pretty sure she had gone out and asked our boss how to say that. Anyways it was super cute, so then I got the camera out to have her do it again and thats why it's not quite as natural on this video; but it melted our hearts.

Our Last Big Meal

2 Sundays ago was our last time to cook the big meal on base. We've had a lot of fun doing them and this last one Liji planned all on his own and it was super good. He did taco salad with grilled chicken and beef. How he marinated them is what made the meal. The flavor was so perfectly great and everyone raved and raved. Sorry I tried to upload a video of everything all finished and set out, but I guess it's too big because it won't load.

Where's the Camera when you need one?

For the last 3 weeks Liji and I have been doing some walking/hiking everyday somewhere around town. In two weeks we are going to Hawaii on our way home and Liji has all these hikes planned out so he wants us to be in shape. Well it has been a lot of fun and we have been able to see some beautiful things. We have usually been taking our camera along with us, but today I didn't take it because we were going somewhere we'd already been hiking at. But that was a mistake because I could have gotten the cutest video.
Because it has warmed up so much a lot of the schools are taking picnics with their school kids. We have run into them a lot over the last few weeks as we have been out on our walks, and it is probably the closest feeling you could have of being a movie star. They all act like it is the most exciting thing in the world to be seeing us as they yell out hello and their names. We have to be completely out of sight before we stop hearing shouts of Hi, or Hello to us. Well today during our walk around Wolmeoung Lake we stopped at the big excercise area they have there and we happened to get there just as all these students are gathering there for their picnics. They were running all over the place playing on the excercise equipment and just having a lot of fun. Well I went over to do work my abs on this twisty machine and Liji went to a machine we call the Strider. I was a bit a ways and had a great view to just watch these kids notice Liji and then with in a minute of him starting his excercise having a swarm of about 15 kids just goggling at him. And they stayed there the whole time he did. I wish that I could have gotten a video of it so bad. You would have thought he was Tom Cruise or something!

And I guess I should add some pictures from some of our beautiful hikes. So here ya go.

And Liji and I have come to the realization that we will never be true hikers in the eyes of the Korean people until we get some cool outfits like these.

Beautiful Korea

When we got to Korea last summer everything was green and beautiful. It took me a while to realize that because there were so many people. For me beautiful = no people. After I got used to the fact that there is NO WHERE in Korea that you can escape the people, I really began to appreciate the fauna. Unfortunately for me, by the time that happened it was winter.
I almost did not make it through the winter, everythins was soooo dreary, it was smoogy, cloudy and bleak. It seemed as if color had been removed from our world. To make things worse, people told us that Spring would be here at the end of February. Well, that didn't actually happen until the end of April. But now that Spring is here, I am astonished everyday we go outside and find green trees and vibrant flowers. To us it seemed like the transition from bleak and dreary to green and vibrant took only one or two days. One day it was bleak, the next it was beautiful. I am so grateful for the beautiful world that God has created for us (even though I have to share it with other people!)
This is our last picture of the temple.

As we walked around this resavoir, I kept telling Christina that I wanted to go swimming, she wouldn't let me.

We keep thinking that we have seen every kind of flower or blossom that Korea has to offer and then a new shows up. These tree all looked dead until they suddenly put on these purple flowers.

T-shirts and green leaves, what could be better?

These great pink blossoms were late bloomers, most of the other trees had bloomed (except the purple ones above) and then we found these. The blossoms are monstorous, about the size of my fist.

This last picture is just to show the contrast. We took it a few months ago when everything seemed like it was dead.

What the!?!?!?!?

Christina and I have been planning a trip to a mountain hike that is about an hour and a half away by scooter. One of our friends went there and told us about is so we have been excited to do it ourselves. Last Saturday we got up and packed a lunch and went downstairs to get on the scooter and head out. We got to where we parked our scooter, but it was gone! We thought someone might have moved it so we looked around, but it was gone. We found the basket that was on the front of the scooter on the floor right where we parked it.
We were astonished, we have had the scooter for almost a year and we have never had any problems aside from people ocassionaly throwing trash in our basket. I called our boss, but she said she was too busy, she could help us file a report with the police on Monday. We thought that was too much time so we asked the missionaries to help us. We spent the rest of the morning filing a report with the police. We did not have much hope of ever seeing the scooter again, but we thought we should at least report it stolen.
We feel like the thief targeted us, where we park our scooter, there are two other scooters just like ours, only newer and nicer. Why would someone steal an old beat up scooter like ours when there are two nicer ones only a few feet away? We were disappointed because now the weather has finally warmed up enough to go out exploring again and we had so many plans of places that we wanted to see, and now we were stuck with only our bikes (which after a year of no maintnence are barely running) to get around on.
We made plans to ride the bus to church and got everything ready for that, but to our surprise at 6:30 Sunday morning we got a phone call. The caller was speaking Korean, and I don't speak much Korean, but I did recognize the word for scooter, in my broken Korean I tried to ask him where it was but he couldn't understand me and hung up. Luckily for us, when we were filing the report at the police station Christina had the foresight to give them the Elder's number. So the officer called them, and they told us to go to the police station to pick up the scooter.
It was completely out of gas, and missing a few accesories, but other than that, it was in the same condition as before. I pushed it to the gas station and gassed it up and then rode it home. We thought that was the end of it, but on Tuesday we got a call from a detective asking if he could give our number to the theives so they could 'forgive' us. I assume he meant that they wanted to ask us to forgive them. I was a little apprehensive, but I said that would be OK.
We were very surprised later that day when four high school age boys and their mothers showed up at our work to say they were sorry. After they asked us for forgiveness, we had to sign a paper stating that we did indeed forgive them. I felt bad for the mothers, they were so embarrased. We found out later that if we wouldn't have signed the paper the boys could have been sent to jail.
We still don't know how they found our scooter, but we are very glad to get it back. Getting the scooter was the best thing we have done. We know more about the surrounding area than our students who have lived here their whole lives. We have seen all kinds of interesting things, and hope to see a lot more in the remaining weeks before we leave.

Now Is The Time

Liji and I wanted to have children right away; pretty much since the day we were married. It is now almost 3 1/2 years later and that still hasn't come to pass. I'm not going to lie and say that it's been easy but I also don't want to whine and complain. Life is as it should be and we know that the Lord has his plan. Before coming to Korea we were putting Liji through school and didn't really have the means to go into intense doctor visits. We did do what we felt we could afford at the time and according to the doctors, they didn't find any problems. I was also on a fertility drug called chlomid for a couple of months and that didn't help.
We will soon be coming home from Korea and then living in Logan.
At this point in our lives we are researching the many different options that may be available to us. This isn't a topic that we have really talked about a lot with other people(mostly because it's a very emotional one for me), but since we have started some more intense research of this over the last couple of weeks I realized that the more people who know about us and are sharing our situations with others, the more windows there may be that open for us. So please feel free to share. When we get back to the States we would like to meet with a specialist, but we would like to go to someone that's highly recommended. We would greatly appreciate any and all suggestions about anything related to this; possible contacts that would be good for us to talk to, doctors, nurses, couples with similar experiences, great clinics, tests, treatment options, financial assistant opportunities, insurrances that may cover fertility testing, ect. I guess if you would just please keep your ears and mouths open for us, we would so grately appreciate it. Call, e-mail, or comment at anytime. Thank you so much for all of your love and support.

Children's Day

May 5th is Children's Day Holiday and we got the day off. It was such a long day outside and I am still super exhausted from it. We all met at 9:30am at Gunsan Lake. Here we are setting off on our hike around the Lake. The hike was about 5 miles and then we had a picnic. I don't think the hike had been planned out very well and I'm not sure if anyone had actually ever hiked all the way around the lake before because most of the people ended up going about a quarter of the way and then turning back because they were too tired. Just before getting to our quarter mark resting point there was a pretty steep incline and a couple of the sisters were exhausted and seemed really put out that his hike was so hard. It was pretty funny. As we were going up this last hill I went up to Sister Che who was breathing really hard and asked her how she was doing. She does not speak hardly any English, but in her broken English she said, "I hate Sports; I never doing this." She especially seemed mad at her husband; he must have talked her into coming. Liji and I, and a few others wanted to go the whole way so we kept going to make it all the way around. It was so much fun to spend the morning with such wonderful people.

After eating lunch Liji and I headed out to the Saemangum because they just opened up the seawall road going out to the Islands nearby and they were having a Flag Festival out there. We hiked up another small mountain there and had a great few of all the Islands.

This is the Longest Sea Dike in the World.

At the Flag Festival

They had this big flag performance/dance show to bring good luck to the future of the Saemangum.

Your supposed to write down your hopes for the future on these big pieces of Paper.