Tuesday -
This whole day really consisted of Elder Morely saying his goodbyes to the people in San Lorenzo. He's seems a little overly devastated to leave the area, but little does he know that all areas have something different to offer. I also spent a while moving my stuff to our new apartment on the second floor since we're moving apartments.
Wednesday -
In the morning Elder Morely just said more goodbyes to some people. By 2:00 we headed over to the Laoag Stake Center in order to exchange. I dropped him off at the bus station because he's transferring out to Cagayan to a place called Camalaniugan. He'll now be able to experience more than just life in the posh Ilocos Norte area. It's a little more rough living circumstances wise in the Cagayan province, but the work is good. While I was waiting for my new companion to arrive I talked to Elder Clark for a little bit. He's the new AP just recently. For some reason he kept telling me to come with him to check up on missionaries and make sure they were getting to their right areas as they transferred. I'm not sure why he kept asking me but I went with him. It was strange because there were like a hundred random people standing there and he just told me to come with him. I don't even know him that well or anything, but that was fine I guess. He's a funny guy, he's 6'7" and sang rap songs that he made at zone conference. So that's just a little about him. Anyways, once my new companion arrived at the stake center we headed back to our area. He seemed a little interesting from first impressions but Elder Fuller is actually a pretty cool guy and I'm glad he's my new companion. Also Elder Etcheverry got a new companion named Elder Francisco. We live in the apartment above them and it's awesome because we're already becoming a pretty close district.
Later at night we got a call from AP Elder Ballan and he told us that we'd be having two other missionaries staying in our apartment for one night because they needed a place to stay for a night before they met their new trainees on Thursday. Those missionaries were Elder Witt (my MTC companion) and Elder Childers (one of the first other missionaries I met in my first area). It was fun to see them again and all six of us missionaries played a couple games of Uno and Scum.
Thursday -
Much of the day I just introduced Elder Fuller to the area, we went over the area book together, and I also took him out to meet our main investigators. That was the entire day.
Friday -
In the morning we did weekly planning, and then later we went out and I continued to show Elder Fuller around. We walked around a lot of our area and I just introduced him to members, and people we go to frequently. We also taught a couple lessons.
Saturday -
Elder Fuller and I are trying to decide an area to focus on this cycle, so I continued to show him around, and we even did a little exploring in places I'm not as familiar with. We're trying to scope out our entire area and try and determine where we think we'd have the most success. Our travels took us over our entire area of St. Agustin and Payas. As we were trying to get back to the highway after exploring Payas, we started looking to see if we could find an alternate route back. We ended up just walking super far into a corn/rice field and found that it was flooded so we couldn't get all the way across. On our way back we popped out of the corn and then two old men were super surprised to see us. To them it looked like these two white guys were very lost. They asked us where we were going and just directed us back to a place we already knew. It was pretty funny to hear the surprise and concern in their voices.
Also during lunch we talked to Elder Francisco about the Tagalog here in the Northern Philppines. He's from a place called Palawan (which is under the Manila mission) and he says the Tagalog here is very different than back home. Something simple as "chair" is different. Here in Laoag they say "upuan" which means "place you sit", but closer to Manila they say "salumpwet" which means "place for your butt."
Sunday -
Elder Etcheverry and I had to give talks. It's kind of funny that we have to give talks as missionaries. I kind of would understand if we're in a branch but we're in a ward and it still seems like missionaries are assigned to do all sorts of random tasks even though they should have enough member support to get things done. Anyways, we both were assigned to talk about Christ. I chose to talk about the atonement and how through the atonement it was made possible for us to overcome both physical and spiritual death. Elder Etcheverry talked about the Great Intercessory Prayer.
All four of us missionaries got assigned to go ministering with members of the ward. "Ministering" consisted of us just going to less active members homes and sitting there quietly while everyone talked in Ilocano and we didn't understand anything. It was funny because people kept looking at us like they expected us to talk but we didn't know anything that was being said.
Pictures -
a package I received, goodbyes with Elder Morely and Bishop Sugui, mga pusa, weird idols and statues for "holy week", my delectable canned meats, Elder Fuller and I, a very safe and structurally sound bamboo bridge, walkin' in the bukid
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