Hello!
I've had another great week here. I can 't believe that I am half-way done with my mission. It blows my mind. I still feel like I should be a young missionary, but I am actually one of the oldest missionaries in our mission. I think there is only 30 or 40 missionaries in our mission that are older than me in the mission right now. The time is going by so fast.
So Wednesday was a holiday here and maybe one of the coolest ones I've seen yet. It is called San Juan, but basically it is a celebration of the start of the rainy season. They celebrate by getting everybody wet. So, we will just be walking by on the road and then an ambush of people come out and soak us with buckets of water. It's so funny. They don't care who you are or where you're going. You're going to get wet. Elder Beticon and Elder Palzario warned us though thankfully so our scriptures and stuff could be saved. It was a lot of fun though. We had a ward activity and had a MASSIVE water fight. So much fun. I'm going to adopt the holiday when I come back.
This month, us 4 Elders in New Washington, have had a couple of unfortunate things happen this month financially, and now, we have like no money left. We pretty much have had none for the last couple days after we got back from Iloilo. Anyways, it's kind of a funny situation right now. We are pretty much trying to survive of members and off nature until the first of July. haha. Oh, and our stove ran out of gas so we have been trying to cook everything in our rice cooker hahah. We have been climbing trees for fruit and all kinds of ridiculous stuff. It's bad.
We went to Iloilo this week for MLC again. I really liked this one though. President had told us though in announcements though that it would be "full-scale accounting." So we were panicking a little bit because we didn't really know what he meant by full-scale accounting, but it sure sounded serious, and he was serious. In the mission, our monthly baptisms are going down right now, so President wasn't really happy. He absolutely fried some of the zone leaders during their presentations though. If they didn't know some things, they got chastised pretty good haha. It was brutal. haha. But, the training's that were given were really good. I feel inspired right now from it. I actually gave a training at MLC too on goal setting, but President talked to us about Buruanga, which is an area in my zone that opened up when I first got here, but right now, they are baptizing people like crazy. They have gotten close to 50 baptisms I think in the last 3-4 months. We don't see them very much because they are so far away, but I've heard some of the stories and miracles that are going on over there and everybody has kind of been asking, "What are they doing that we aren't doing?" So President talked a lot about that. Basically he just said that you have to expect to be successful. And if you are not getting results, you need to reflect on yourself because if you are perfectly obedient, the baptisms will just come to you. So, I've been doing a lot of personal reflection lately. And I've made some goals for myself, but I feel like I'm coming up on my prime haha. We have a lot of good stuff going on in our area right now and then after about 2 months, I'll probably transfer and then its another chapter. I'm really excited though for the time that I have left!
I am really loving the work right now. We have the best people to teach. We have been teaching this one family for about 6 weeks now. And their whole family is very Catholic, but we taught them last night and we felt prompted to talk about persecution and how often God makes righteous people suffer a lot of persecution because of the truth. And then afterwards, we found out from a nearby house of members that this family has been getting a LOT of persecution lately from family and their church because they are letting us teach them, but we had no idea. They didn't say anything about it. Then we taught about temples. We know that the father of their family has past away last year. We taught about baptisms for the dead and missionary work in the spirit world. And it was just one of those lessons where the Spirit completely took over and prompted us to say things that these people really needed to hear.
We are teaching another young family where the father is the only member and they are knew to this area, but they are so great. They are of course very poor, but the father quit his job last week because his boss wouldn't let him off on Sundays, and the wife has been running into a lot of trials lately too, but they are so faithful already. I have seen a lot on my mission how the adversary really tries to make it hard for people to reach the waters of baptism. People experience a lot of trials right before their baptism and after. Anyways, my heart really goes out to these people.
Brevin; do the pit toilets ever overflow?- I haven't heard anything about that. I'm pretty sure that if they need to, they just bury it and did a new one.
Chloe: Do Filipinos people wear deodorant?-Very rarely. They sell this stuff that really isn't antiperspirant, but, it makes it smell better. I was in Iloilo this week and saw old-spice American stuff. It is so expensive, especially here. It's like 7 dollars per stick.
Kayden: how much do miss exercising or do get regular exercising? I just miss running. One of the downsides to having a companion haha :(
Owen: how much do you weigh? Right now I'm about 140 lbs.
Dad: do people ever wear socks and if so, what color do the men wear? People almost never wear shoes. Construction workers...flip flops. Sometimes though, people will wear socks if they wear basketball shoes. or if they are a business person. Probably black is the color.
Seth: do the chickens have large talons over there? haha Yes. Chicken fighting is really big here.
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