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!