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!