Happy Father's Day!

Well these have been a really busy last couple of weeks!

A little bit unexpectedly, we had a lot of stuff come up in terms of planning and meetings and exchanges and everything else. It was great to be busy, but time just kind of flew by for all of us here. One of the great parts of last week was that we had a visiting Area Authority come and do a mission tour with us. His name is Elder Pajaro from Quezon City in Manila. We had a meeting with the MLC and then two zone conferences for all of the missionaries. Some of the topics included how the Pajaros were converted to the church and the importance of missionaries and becoming Christlike. Then after the mission tour we were able to go on exchanges in our area with some of the Zone Leaders.

One of the interesting parts of the week was when we went to go visit another zone to check up on some missionaries. Because of the time, we decided to just have lunch in that city before we took an hour drive back to Naga. We just kind of picked a place at random, and when we walked in saw a white guy sitting at one of the tables. After we ordered he motioned for us to come over, and so as we talked with him, we found out he was here with his wife (a Filipina from my first area). He's a member, served his mission in Argentina, I think he said Cordoba. We start talking with him and his wife and find out that his wife isn't a member yet, but is an investigator of my companion's sister up towards Manila. And then it turns out that the guy is from Granite Bay and knew Sutter where Dad worked and everything and knew the areas where we lived. Just a lot of random coincidences.

But the cool part of the conversation was when he kind of stopped for a moment and said, "Your Dad must be a great man. Full tithe payer, honest, kind, good guy. I can see it in you and in your demeanor. I can just tell that he is a good man from the way you are." So I just thought that was really interesting. And I just wanted to say thank you and Happy Father's Day to you Dad, and thanks for everything you do for me. I love you so much and I'm excited to see you and the rest of the family in just a week and a half. Then we can go biking and skiing and riding. If you can still keep up with me old man haha.

Love you all and I hope you have a great week! This will be the last full week of my mission and I'm going to try and give it everything I have!

Also we went to a waterfall this morning (which is why this email is coming a little late) so I will try to send some pictures once I have sorted through them all.

Hey everyone! Sorry, a bit of a busy day, so this is a little late.

Honestly, not a whole lot happened last week. It was great with our MLC and giving a workshop on the Atonement. We also got to talk about some things that will hopefully help the mission focus on Christ more. We kinda noticed that a lot of our discussions tended to drift towards ways of putting up barriers to disobedience or encouraging them to find, or whatever, but then we realized if we were just able to help the missionaries focus more on Christ more, all the other problems would just start to sort themselves out. So we had some good discussion about all of that.

We then went up to one of the far zones for exchanges and had a pretty good time up there. Got to go to the beach for probably the last time before I come home, so that was pretty great. I also got to teach a Seventh Day Adventist for the first time. Kind of an interesting experience. He claimed that anything not coming from the Bible is not a foundation for truth. Then when we asked him how he knew the Bible was true, he said it's because the Bible says it's true in and of itself. And then he kept trying to challenge us by asking if we think the Bible is enough for our faith. We ended up bearing testimony of the Book of Mormon and it ended pretty well.

The rest of our week was spent in meetings, or planning, or visiting our area a bit. My companion has been sick for a little bit, so that put a damper on our work, but we are hoping to get out a lot more this week and find some new people. It's just been a struggle lately getting out to all of the people we want to visit. We are hoping Carlito can be baptized this month, but we'll see what happens.

Well, that was a short version of just a busy week. I'll see you all in 3 weeks anyway! haha. Love you all and have another great week!

Hey everybody!

Well we had another very busy week with transfers, taking departures home, and picking up the new missionaries. It all went pretty smoothly for the most part, except for some missionaries forgetting to bring a phone with them when they came to Naga, so we couldn't just send off their replacements to the area because they didn't know how to get there. That's why I got all of those pictures from that far area, because we just ended up taking them out there. And I was surprised to see it was one of the prettiest places I have visited so far. Really awesome. The new missionaries seemed pretty great two, and the only problem we had there was there was a group of 6 missionaries taking a bus back to their areas about 4 hours away. Well about 45 minutes out of Naga, their bus broke down and they couldn't get any others to pick them up. So we made a surprise trip up to the Northern end of the mission to drop them all off. It was exhausting and we didn't get back until it was pretty late. Glad to help them out though.

We also had a few investigators at church, which is great. We are hoping to see them baptized this June. It was our ward conference and the stake president gave a good talk about saving the lost sheep that don't even realize they are lost. Sometimes they just slowly drift off and don't really know what is happening, so we have to be the ones to reach out to them. After the talk, our investigator came up to us and said "Thank you for rescuing me, Elders." So that was pretty cool. And then some couple I haven't met came up to us and the guy(who is a member) said "This is my girlfriend. She wants to be taught and to be baptized. When can you come over and begin the lessons?" So that was great getting a new investigator just like that. But we'll see how it goes.

Probably the most interesting part of the week was taking the departing missionaries home and seeing all of their reactions to their missions coming to an end. It's kind of an interesting chance to see what a mission meant to them as I talked with them and sometimes just observed. And that's what I've noticed with all of the missionaries we take to go home. Some are somewhat indifferent. Others are completely ecstatic and can't stop talking about how excited they are and inadvertently (or sometimes on purpose) try to make you jealous of them. And then there are always a few that seem to take it and see it differently. You can tell they are excited to go home and everything. But they are also sad to be leaving a place where they had so much growth and experience. These are the ones that I think have been deeply impacted by the mission. I just like talking with all of them and seeing their testimonies and what their thoughts are on going home.

Well hope you all have a great week. Love you all.

Hello again everyone! 

Hope you all had another great week! Ours was mostly packed with meetings and planning for the transfer that will be taking place tomorrow. We have 23 missionaries going home, and a bunch of the remaining missionaries will be transferring, which means we just had a ton of planning to get done! It took a lot of time and was pretty exhausting trying to get it all to work out, but we finally got it done. We also have half of our Zone Leaders and Sister Training Leaders going home, so we hoped to find some good leaders because the other half will be going home in July. It's going to be sad to see this group go, but I'm excited for them, and think they'll all do great. I have a lot of really good friends among them that I've been with for the whole mission.

We do have one new investigator that we are hoping will be baptized in June. Her name is Ian, and she is the daughter of one of the recent convert families in our area. She's 17 and just got back from working in Manila. She has a lot of great questions about God and the gospel, so our lessons so far have been pretty great. And she came to church already, so that was a bonus. As for Carlito, he's still making slow progress. He's remembering certain things better, but struggles with others. He's still coming to church, but we're still worried about the depth of testimony that would help him to not be offended and cease attending church. We ran out of time this past week to get to everyone, but I'm hoping once we are completely done with transfers by Wednesday, we will be able to put in some really good, full days of work in our area. We need it, and we have to do it to help prepare for a couple baptisms in June (hopefully).

Love you all, and have a great week!

So that was another week down. And luckily we didn't really get caught up too much with office stuff, so we just got to go out and work!

The week went pretty well for the most part with some of our investigators. Carlito is still slowly movin along, picking things here and there as we try to prepare him for a baptismal interview within the next month hopefully. We ran into a little bit of trouble with his family though. His uncle is a recent convert of about 8 months now, along with the rest of that family. And for the most part, they are really strong and faithful. The problem was that there was a fiesta in their place the other night, and we caught the dad drinking some, and then he didn't come to church the next day. Partly because he wanted to stay home and watch the Pacquiao fight (which by the way, is too bad. I was hopin Pacquiao would take it.) So now we have to reteach him the Word of Wisdom and hopefully get him back on track.

That was the weird thing yesterday. Everything was shut down for those couple hours of the Pacquiao fight. Nobody outside. Really quiet. Nothing was happening just because of the fight.

We have hopefully found some potential investigators to progress over the next couple months. we are still trying to fix some things up with the ward first, but we've seen some other great things happening with different recent converts of ours. They are always pretty up for sharing the Gospel, and giving out referrals, and we've been seeing some good things come out of that. This week should be pretty good too with our MLC and exchanges again. We have some good things we will be discussing. And then we will just move right into transfer planning next week. 

Well that was our week. Nothing too exciting, just got out and worked a lot! Love you and hope you all have a great week!

8

 Random Paintings that a member here did on their wall outside

10 na lang

First full week of work with my new companion and it went great! Best work we've had in our area for a while now. We had a couple of exchanges and went out and just found a ton. Talked to a bunch of people and tried to see who might be interested. We also had our area expanded by a bit, so we went to go check it out and see what it looks like out there. I think it will just be a nice refreshing break to get a change. Our previous boundaries for our area were so small and we'd been through it a bunch. We also found some less actives and spent time visiting a couple members to see if they had any ideas of people we could teach that were past investigators or currently less active. It was a really tiring week, but we had some good lessons out of it and saw some of our investigators progress pretty well. We are still working on getting them to come to church, but I think we just need a little more patience with them maybe. Some of them are in really tough circumstances right now.

Right now, we are just trying to work out some ways to find some new investigators. We are planning on visiting some of the government people here to plan service projects that we could do to help the communities. We've also been kind of busy with planning for the upcoming transfers. 23 missionaries will be going home this transfer and 36 in July. By comparison, the biggest group to leave so far has been 17. So we've already had to start beginning planning for that and how to move everyone around. This has been made a little harder with a couple of emergency transfers in the past week, but we still have plenty of time. My group going home has to be split into 2 days because it's too big to handle all at once. Half get to leave a day earlier, but I'll still be coming home at the same time as originally planned, because I have to stay to be able to drive everyone around and make sure transfers run smoothly.

Hopefully we have another good week ahead for us! We found some nice people that I hope are ready to hear the Gospel and make a commitment to follow it. Love you all and wish you all a great week!

Well I have myself a brand new companion.... Elder Abasanta! From Cebu. He's super humble, and way up for doin work. He just finished training a new missionary, but besides that, hasn't had any leadership positions so far and he was super surprised to get called as the new assistant, maybe even a little overwhelmed the first week with driving everyone to the airport, and picking up new missionaries and training and everything. But he's still doin awesome. He's the 12th of 17 kids in his family and currently has 2 sisters serving in other missions here in the Philippines. I'm the first American he's had his whole mission, and he goes home in December.

It ended up being a crazy week with the transfers and everything. We took the departing missionaries home and only once did we almost die on the way to the airport. But to be fair, we were racing the other elders and they kept swerving so I couldn't pass them. Good end to their mission I think. Then it we waited for the arrivals to come out. 11 of them altogether, some of them just temporarily here while they wait for visas. All of them seemed great and pretty pumped, but exhausted from the trip. There was also an elder from East that's 6' 5" and 350 lbs. I think everyone here will want to talk to him and ask him to dunk haha.

After all of that, it just kind of flowed into watching conference, which was great. All of the speakers did awesome and there was a ton of stuff I liked. So much of it was focused on the family and the Atonement. I loved it, and I'll probably spend the next couple weeks just going over the talks. We actually missed a lot of Sunday Morning session because of the way they do conference here. We wanted them to have all of the members watch at their home units, where they fit, and where they won't have to travel as much. Instead, they wanted everyone to come to the stake center...and watch it in English. Why? I don't really know. Not everyone fits, it ends up being too noisy, and a lot of people can't see or understand it. We were really hoping they would just do Tagalog, but I've yet to attend a conference with Tagalog. Really too bad for the people who try to make it, but don't speak any English.

But besides all of that it was still a great week. Love you all and hope you had a great one!

Walang work....

Another week of getting ready for the transfer tomorrow, and it was a veeeeeeery busy one. Our week basically came down to planning, planning, and more planning, with just a little bit of work in when we could find the time. It started with our MLC on Tuesday for which all of the Zone Leaders and Sister Training Leaders came to Naga. It was an awesome time and we just discussed some of the challenges facing the mission and what we could potentially do to help the missionaries overcome them. I think my favorite part was just everyone talking about raising sacrament meeting attendance, and what we've all been doing to help less actives come back to church. Everyone had a lot of great ideas. One Friday, we also had a zone training and talked about teaching skills and what we can do to become more effective teachers.

Besides that, our week was mostly just putting together travel plans and everything else for the upcoming transfer. My companion will be heading home, so we had to try and get everything finished as soon as possible, so it wouldn't be too much of a rush today. It ended up killing a lot of our time for work,but we did try something new to find people interested in listening. We set up a projector and screen in the centro of Naga to play the Because He Lives video, the only problem was it started pouring once we did and so there weren't very many people out on the streets. But we still had decent church attendance despite the rain. One of our investigators even walked to church. I don't know exactly how far it was, but farther than I've seen most people willing to walk, so that was cool.

Highlight of the week may have been mixing it up foodwise. haha. Every week 6 of each transfer, we have a meeting with President and Sister Reeder and the other missionaries in the office to plan our week with transfers and then have an awesome lunch. And this time Sister Reeder made enchiladas, which is the first time I've had Mexican food in 21 months. And to top that off, we had banana cream pie. What?! When I thought the week couldn't be better, we were invited yesterday (Sunday) to have lunch with one of the senior couples here. And what did we have? Pork roast with mashed potatoes and gravy, and banana cream pie. Again. Those things don't exist here, and I don't know how she made it all, but it was great. We all had to lie down for a bit after that.

Well I hope you all had a great Easter. I was grateful for the chance to try to focus more on the Atonement. It's really different here, peoples' concepts of what it's all about. They parade around statues of saints and do penetensiya (punishing themselves as repentance) and all other sorts of stuff, and I'm just thankful for our knowledge of the truth of the Atonement of Christ and the freedom it gives us. We are so lucky that He would do that for us, even if at times we don't really deserve it. Actually, a lot of the time, we probably don't. But that's what makes His sacrifice all the more beautiful. Love you all and hope you have another great week!

Many Names

Sorry, there's not a whoooole lot to talk about this week! It was just
packed with a 3 zone conferences in a row (meaning Meet the Mormons
three more times. By the third, we just sat and talked with President
and Sister Reeder while the missionaries watched the movie), and some
follow up training for the new missionaries that arrived 4 weeks ago
and their trainers, and they all seem to be doin just great! Then of
course the best part of the week was Ariel's baptism on Friday.
President and Sister Reeder came, and seemed to enjoy themselves.
Ariel gave an awesome testimony at the end, recounting his ups and
downs in life with his family, drugs, work, and a bunch of other
stuff. He was ready and it all went great. We ended the night by
attending the wedding reception for one of the members in our ward.
And we got some free food so that was a bonus. Sunday we lucked out
because Ariel got his 18 year old daughter to come to church, and she
hasn't been too open to us up to this point, but this could be a great
beginning for her. And then Tupe came again! We didn't even have time
to visit Tupe over the week, but he still came and it was great. After
church we presented the Because He Lives video to the ward to try and
get them excited and involved. We'll see how that goes...
But that just about sums up the week. I also got my package, and it's
great so thanks again for that! Mom, Happy Birthday this week! I love
you so much and I'm excited to go hang in Newport when we get back!
And to get Torben off your back haha. I love you all and hope you have
a great Holy Week, because we will be shut in with all the craziness
happening this week! (We almost got trapped by a huge procession of
Catholics marching down the street with a float with Christ and a
cross on it. We barely made it to the car and got out of there in
time, or we would have been there for who knows how long...haha)
Oh, last thing. Because Anika included a list of the names she's
picked up, I thought I would add my own (Some of these are almost the
same, because Filipinos often get B and V mixed up...):
Elder Van, Ban, Von, Bon, Boerum, Van Bo Ehrum, Ban Bweroom, Van
Voroom, Van Buko, Spicy, Kwan, Elder Ano Iyan (What's that), Vanny
Pacquiao, Van Broom Broom, Elder Marlboro (I feel like this last one
needs an explanation. Our recent converts son has some sort of mental
disorder, like a psychosis or something, to small degree. He's also a
chain smoker. We talk to him a lot to try and help him out. Well, he's
never been able to remember my name, so the closest thing he could
think of to Van Boerum is Marlboro... don't know why.). There's others
too, but I can't remember them all.