Tuesday -
This day was pretty typical I'd say. We woke up, prepared, and then had our district council meeting from 9:00-11:00 like every Tuesday. After that, we did our studies and then went out and worked. We taught our investigator named Jun Casuay Cortez. We just kinda did a review of prior lessons to prepare him for his baptism on Saturday. It went well. After that, we did some finding in our area called Fugu. We found this once house of the Bauno family. We kind of asked if we could meet them and stuff and they said yes. The husband was a little drunk (which is SUPER common here) and his wife was in a wheelchair because she had her leg amputated from her diabetes, that we came to find out was actually donated by our church. We talked to them for a while about their family and stuff, and I'm excited to visit them again. We also taught the brother/son of a member family who had previously been taught but wasn't too receptive, but this time it was really pretty good. I think it helps that Elder Areola speaks fluent Ilocano (since that's what they speak where he's from) so he can kind of get a little more personal with some people who don't understand Tagalog great.
Wednesday -
On Wednesday we went out as usual, but ended up doing more service than usual. We went to the house of an investigator/part member family and helped them clean pieces of aluminum that they were going to use for roofing. After that, we walked by some members who were working with someone else to dig holes for posts as the frame of their house. We ended up digging three of the four holes for them. It was nice to do service and we ended up finding a new investigator while doing so. And we ended up teaching like four lessons as well. At the end of the day Elder Areola wanted to make dinner (which is always an interesting Filipino dish) and we needed some ingredient called marunggay (which is just a type of leaf) and we ended up just tearing branches off this tree we found by an elementary school. Which on some level seems like we shouldn't have done that, but he insisted it was alright.
Thursday -
So we actually had scheduled service on Thursday, rather than on-spot-service, so luckily we could wear some more comfortable clothes that I didn't have to worry about staining. This work just ended up being shoveling a bunch of gravel that seemed to be under their hammock for no reason. We later went out after our studies and taught a lesson to a member. It was actually pretty cool and we were able to help resolve some minor concerns with scripture and things. It kind of shows that everyone needs help from the gospel no matter what point in their life or conversion process. We then did some more on-the-spot service. We were walking to try and re-contact some people we had previously met, and then we saw some old ladies gathering some sticks. We asked to help them and they said no like 76 times, but Elder Areola started helping them and so did I. Sometimes it's difficult for me to do on-the-spot service because the tasks are ones that I'm not usually familiar with, but after Elder Areola started it was easy to help. After that, we were able to help bring the big bundle of sticks to their home and then they said they wanted us to come back later to teach them.
After that, we headed over to the house of a less active priest-aged member named MarJun Juan. We taught him and his non-member sister and friend. We also extended the baptismal invitation to both of them. After that we also visited a less active family, and then taught some people in the park that were referrals from a member.
Friday -
On Friday all the Ballesteros elders went to the neighboring city of Allacapan in order to withdraw money for the month. That took a while and then we had district exchanges which meant that Elder Butler and I would be companions for the day in his area. We started by going with the zone leaders in order to interview one of their investigators for baptism. That went smooth and the rest of the day was alright as well.
Saturday -
It was the day of the baptism. I'll describe our convert. So his name, like I said earlier, is Jun Casuay Cortez. Basically, he lives in Fugu (which is kind of far) with our other recent convert Roldan Gaoat. He was a referral, and the whole teaching process went really smooth and he actually seems to have a pretty strong testimony which is what we like. The baptism itself was fairly unorganized which is kind of what we expect here (unfortunately). It was kind of funny because for one, they had two members that were going to do the baptizing instead of the elders. We like to give members here the opportunity to exercise their priesthood power and things, but it turns out that one of the individuals that was supposed to do the baptizing actually didn't hold the priesthood, so the one member baptized the both of them.
Later in the day we headed to the house of our Branch Mission Leader and all six of us elders had family home evening with their family. There was also food there, so that was nice. During the family home evening we played charades. When elder Mamauag was explaining the rules he was saying something to the extent of "So if I hold up one finger it means one word, and then after that I hold up the amount of syllables. For example, spoon (we were playing with English words) has two syllables, 'ih-spoon'.." Elder Vaea and I just burst out laughing. It was funny because everyone here says an 'ih' noise before words that start with an 's'. Another example that I hear all the time is Joseph (ih)Smith, but this incident was funny because it came to my realization that it wasn't just the inability to pronounce the word spoon, but rather the thought that, that was correct pronunciation of spoon.
After that, we also taught our new investigator Juliet Juan lesson one. It was pretty cool because she cried during the teaching of the first vision. That surprised me a little because initially she didn't seem to interested, but the spirit touched here which is cool
Sunday -
Of course, this was the Sabbath day. After church, we had our MCM meeting with the Branch Mission Leader. Later we went out and worked. We went and contacted referrals and taught a lesson to a less active member as well. One of our referrals is named Bryan Tabyous and he knew lots about the Bible and had lots of questions. It was really cool though and you could tell he was sincerely looking for truth.
Pictures -
my companion and I on a weird small motorcycle we saw, a big tree in Abulug when I went on exchanges with elder Butler, me in a waiting shed, and pictures from the baptism.
No comments:
Post a Comment