Hello!
Glad to hear from you all again! It was also to get a couple emails from different people! So, thank you for writing! I love hearing from you all. I have had another crazy and fun week, but not as crazy as last week. Last week was way crazy. But, I did get to experience my first typhoon this week. It wasn't really that big of a deal, but anyways. I think it was Thursday night around 7 o clock, we were walking to one of our appointments when we get a text from the zone leaders telling us that we should all immediately return to our apartments because of the typhoon coming. Of course, we were just like, what typhoon? We walked to the beach and the waves were pretty big, so Elder Boligao just said, oh yeah, looks like there is a storm coming. But, apparently there are code numbers for how bad the storm is going to be. We were under the lowest number, which is one, but I guess if it is a 3 or a 4, "you're screwed", to quote Elder Boligao. Yolanda, the really bad storm a couple years ago was a 5 just to kind of let you know how bad that storm was. Us four Elders were sitting in our apartment, and the storm we were having struck up a conversation about Yolanda. It hit Panay island, and Culasi and caused quite a bit of damage, but not nearly as much as in Taclobin, or however you spell it. They said that over 10,000 people died over there though. That's just crazy. But, our storm wasn't really that big of a deal, it was just pretty windy and rained really hard for 3 days. We only had a little bit of flooding in our bathroom, but it wasn't a big deal. The rivers in our area though got ridiculously bigger though. I was kind of shocked when I saw it. The next day we got a text that it was up to us whether or not we could work, so of course we went out to work and got ridiculously wet. I have an umbrella, but it's pretty pointless when it is raining that hard. We took advantage of the rain though to do some tracting. Apparently, people will let you in when it's raining because they feel bad haha. But, it was actually way funny. This week was this first time we have actually taken some time to go tracting. So, whenever you are at someone's house, you don't knock, because hardly anyone has a door, so you just say tagbalay, which is basically saying, we're at your house. Some people are just so dumb. Like, we had people who look out the door, see it's the missionaries, and then run and hide and then yell, "Nobody is home!" .... How dumb do you think we are? hahaha, I couldn't believe it, we had that happen more than once too. We just say, have a good day, and then keep walking. People's excuses for not listening to us are way funny because they are all to nice to say no. We had one person who just said, oh, I think my neighbors said we wanted to listen to you guys, and then walks us over to his neighbors, and then goes and hides in his house. We actually taught his neighbors a really good lesson, and they invited us back to listen to us again, so that was good.
We eventually made it back to that sisters house who we were walking to when Elder Boligao got hit by the trike. Oh, by the way, Elder Orr, who is from our batch actually got hit by a trike this last week too. Except he got hit more square on. He just had some nasty bruises and scrapes, but apparently the trike was in much worse condition haha. Elder Orr is huge, but apparently the trike totally wiped out after it hit him. But, anyways, we went to that sisters house in Buhi twice this week. Her name is Rose Mary Valde. They both went really well. We actually ended up teaching 5 other people who were in her house at the time, and they are all progressing and doing our assignments, so we were super excited to end up getting 5 new investigators out of the process.
General Conference this week was awesome! On Satuday, we watched priesthood right away in the morning. We had 4 Elders, and two other men from the unit at that one. We actually also had 3 of Elder Kimball's and Kellerstrass's investigators at it too, the only thing is that they are all sisters. haha. I guess they just wanted to be 3 hours early for the general session. They had came kind of a far ways to get there, so we couldn't really do anything. I'm just glad they were excited to be there. We then watched Saturday's early and afternoon sessions. We had a lot more people at those including quite a few investigators. I thought all those talks were so good. I think I'm going to print all of them out to study, because it's obviously hard to remember all of that information. I tried to take notes on all of it, but it's just hard. One of my favorite talks was Elder Christofferson's talk about the atonement and the relationship between justice and mercy. It addressed something that I had been thinking a lot about these last couple weeks. But, really, I was impressed by the spirit we all felt in our little meeting house as we listened to our Prophets and General Authorities. It was kind of fun to see a bunch of people in the program that gave devotionals at the MTC. Tad R. Callister, I think his name is, gave a talk in conference about how the home should be the primary gospel learning place, and he gave us a devotional on the Plan of Salvation in the MTC. Bonnie Oscarson gave one of the invocations and she gave us a devotional at the MTC on stories of missionaries in her family. There was a couple other people too including Elder Scott. I thought it was really cool how they let people give talks in their native language. I wasn't expecting it at all when President Eyring said that that one guy would be giving his talk in Cantonese haha. On Sunday though, we took a bus down to San Jose with our group to watch conference in the only chapel in our zone haha. The bus itself was very very sketchy. It was falling apart. Like it had a bunch of holes in its metal floor that had rusted through so you could see the road. And then the seats were just tearing all over the place. And the shocks were shot. It was so bumpy. One the windows fell off while we were driving because it was so bumpy. I was sitting on a metal bench was a little bit of cushion in the back of the bus. My butt still hurts. I caught some pretty major air at some points in the trip. But, we had about 60 members take the bus down with us. It was great. I was pretty jealous of the MTC getting to sing in priesthood though. They sounded really good though I thought. I only recognized one Elder that I met though, and then of course the director.
Oh, I've actually saw some pretty crazy animals this week. I saw a wild parakeet, which was way cool. I also saw the largest toad, I have ever seen. It was kind of funny, because before that toad, I saw one that I thought was huge, but Elder Boligao is like, no, that thing is tiny. There are ones that are way bigger... I was just like, no way... And then, about 5 minutes later, I see this toad that was way bigger. "Te?!" he said, which is basically just like I told you! I also saw this unreal rat in San Jose. I am not lying when I think it probably weighed between 10-15 lbs. I thought the one in our apartment the other day was big, but no.. I was wrong. It didn't even look like real life. It was so big haha.
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