Monday -
I ended up buying a guitar on p-day. It was around 7000 pesos or so but it's pretty awesome. I'm pretty sure that it's just a rip of Fender guitar but it's very enjoyable to play nonetheless. One of the reasons I'm super suspicious is the fact that it says "Calilornia Series" rather than "California," but I guess that just gives it a little more Filipino character. It actually even can connect to an amp and has a built in tuner. It's been pretty fun to mess around on and hopefully I can actually become decent at guitar over time.
Tuesday -
So in the morning, as usual, we had our district council meeting. We ended up finishing watching the Safety Zone videos finally. We then had our lunch and studies and things as typical. We ended up also trying to do lots of finding but only ended up talking to some people that don't even live in our area. It was mostly a bunch of kids from an extended family that were visiting family that just had a wedding. We talked to them for a while and just kind of explained our purpose. My companion also asked a teenage aged guy if he likes basketball and then suddenly all the kids said "He doesn't like basketball. He of plays volleyball because he's gay." It was funny because they weren't just saying that as an insult, but they meant it literally. He was actually a bakla. To these Filipino kids, volleyball is literally a sport that girls alone play. Afterward they gave me a mango and me and my companion and I laughed about their statement. We talked about how random and offensive to some people that statement would be back home, but here it was just a simple truth to them.
After our finding we went to the missionary farewell of a member named Charles Tumamao. He's actually headed to the Philippines Naga mission right now. It was pretty cool to see him go and he's been a good fellow shipper of ours for the short time that I've been here in San Lorenzo. He's also the son of our recent convert. At the end of the meeting everyone was allowed to go up and share words of advice and thankfulness to Charles before he left and his mom went up and shared some words herself. She spoke completely in Ilocano so I couldn't really understand it all that well, but it was very powerful and I could really feel the spirit. Though I couldn't understand everything she said I do know she was expresssing how thankful she was for her son and how he helped bring her to the gospel.
Wednesday -
We had our interviews with President Peterson. Apparently in all our different interviews we all independently expressed to President about concern when it comes to finding new people to teach. He ended up gathering us all together and explaining something that he was planning to share at zone conference. He told us about our new approach to our OYM (open your mouth) tactics. He explained how we first want to focus on becoming friends with people and gaining they're trust before just trying to share our message with them out of nowhere. This also means that we don't even need to share a lesson with them the first time we go into their home if the spirit doesn't tell us to. The rest of the week we tried this tactic of just becoming peoples' friends and were able to find a lot of new people.
Thursday -
Not a ton happened on Thursday and I don't remember exactly why. I also didn't take very good notes about what happened on this day. All I know is that we found two new people to teach.
Friday -
We taught a couple lessons and they went pretty well. We also got punted by one of our appointments but that's alright because it happens super frequently here. We ended up eating dinner at the Barruga family's house. While we were there there were a ton of bugs flying around in their house. This is pretty common here especially when it gets rainy, but we ended up finding out that this bug is super fragile and if you hit it just once it will immediately die or get immobilized. At the end of dinner all four of us just ended up running around and karate swatting any bug in sight. It was enjoyable. I don't know if it's something that would be super entertaining back home but I do know it kept us intrigued.
Saturday -
We tried our new OYM technique the entire day. We ended up conversing with roughly 20 new people. It was pretty enjoyable and didn't feel super awkward like it occasionally does. We also met a group of around eight kids and talked to them for a bit. Elder Fuller lied to them and told them that I'm good at singing. They harassed me until I told them I'd sing. I decided to sing the greatest song of all time, All Star by Smash Mouth despite my inability to sing well. It was really funny and awkward. I hope they don't want me to sing to them again. We also got a message from the Philippines Area Security that said that for the next couple days we need to get to our apartments by 6:00pm because it gets dangerous around election time. Supposedly there's a lot of vote buying and stuff that goes on so we need to be careful.
Sunday -
We went to church and stuff which is always fantastic of course. Also during priesthood meeting there was a new old man that no one recognized and many times he just randomly chanted "hallelujah" and "amen" so some of the leaders kind of gave him special attention and quieted him down.
Later in the day, while we were working, we talked to an returned missionary previously known as 'Sister Owen' who was visiting the Philippines with her husband. It was nice to converse in English with some new people for a while. After that all four of us missionaries headed home by 6:00 which gave us a pretty decent amount of time to do nothing and then right cringey songs together while I strummed the guitar.
Pictures -
the guitar, our district council meeting, us with Charles and Jeffery before his farewell, a cat on our roof by the window
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