To the Temple in a Postal Truck

Togooch, a Latter-day Saint sister in her 70s from Choibalsan, had carefully saved money for the train ticket for the November 2007 trip to the Hong Kong China Temple. After a three-day rail journey east to Beijing and then south to Hong Kong, she arrived in the Kowloon Tong neighborhood and hauled her heavy luggage to the temple patron housing facility across the street from temple. She stayed there for a week, receiving her own temple ordinances and performing proxy ordinances for the dead. Like many who could not afford to make the journey more than once, this week would have to hold enough temple service for a lifetime. Then Togooch would board a train again and make the three-day return journey.

Before boarding the train to Hong Kong, Togooch needed to get from Choibalsan to Ulaanbaatar, which required either a long plane ride or an even longer 14-hour drive, mostly on dirt roads. The resourceful Togooch made the trip in a postal truck. On the evening before the train departed, she arrived at the mission home in Ulaanbaatar. She found a hubbub of last-minute preparations. Forty-three people were going to the temple, including 16 missionaries. All day, people had been packing and repacking bars of soap, shampoo, toilet paper, clothes, and lightweight and nonperishable food. The mission president conducted temple recommend interviews all day. Togooch explained that she had brought 20,000 Tugriks (less than $20 USD) and needed to exchange this in order to pay for food during the two-week journey. Unfortunately, by this hour, currency exchange offices had closed, and the departure was early the next morning. The mission president and his wife, who had previously lived in Hong Kong, gave her two envelopes containing enough Chinese and Hong Kong money to cover her expenses for the journey.

At 7:30 on a bitterly cold morning, the members and missionaries boarded the train and pulled away from the station. There were so many of them that they had the entire train car to themselves. Many members and missionaries carried large bags full of food and shared it with each other on the journey. Once in Hong Kong, Togooch accompanied the body of the Saints on all their activities, keeping pace with them, despite walking with a limp caused by one leg being shorter than the other. She refused to be left behind.

Hong Kong China Temple

Togooch returned to Choibalsan, endowed with power from on high. The long winter continued. At the end of March 2009, when the Choibalsan branch conference was held, the mission president and his wife appeared at church to attend the conference. After church, Togooch hurried back to her house. She returned, breathless and sweating, and presented them with an envelope containing reimbursement for her travel expenses to Hong Kong two years earlier, a bag of cookies, and a bottle of her own canned apples that she had lovingly preserved.