Book of Mormon Moment #459. Vietnamese, Wed Nov 2, 2005.

11/02/2005. I love it when things just kind of line up. All of my previous contacts today were along the routes I was going to travel anyway. The sister missionaries were along the route to my client, I was going to eat lunch at a restaurant anyway, the dry cleaners and Wendy's were on my way back.

Tonight after Institute I stopped by our ward's elders' apartment. Okay, these guys were a few blocks out of my way. But I wanted to drop off some groceries to even things up because I gave identical groceries to the other two sets of missionaries last week.

When I stopped by, they asked if I had a Vietnamese and Punjabi Book of Mormon. Vietnamese yes, Punjabi no. There is no Punjabi Book of Mormon yet, just the Joseph Smith Testimony pamphlet, and Gospel Fundamentals. They already had those. So I gave them a Vietnamese Book of Mormon from my car, and offered an English Gospel Fundamentals to go along with their Punjabi, and explained the pairing concept for ESL (English as a Second Language.)

They had already given a Hindi Book of Mormon to a family that speaks Hindi and Punjabi. Punjabi was their first language, and they all could read it, but Hindi was their second language, and not all in the family could read it. So the family member that could read Hindi, was going to read it aloud for the others.

That scenario is typical. India is a country of many states, and each state has it's own native language, Gujerat has Gujerati, Punjab has Punjabi, Bengal has Bengali, etc. Hindi is the overall national language of India. In some states, only the regional native language is generally taught in school. Almost everyone speaks Hindi, but when it comes to reading and writing, some people only read and write their state's language, such as Punjabi.

I also gave the elders a Shona Book of Mormon, just because that seemed to be getting popular.