Tuesday -
We started the day with our district council meeting. I assigned Sister Calipayan to teach and it went well. She had lots of activities in her training. After our meeting ended and we ate lunch, we headed back to our apartment in San Lorenzo.
We ended up doing some apartment cleaning in preparation of our coming apartment checks.
Later in the day, after doing a few cleaning things around the apartment and a little work we headed over to centro San Nicolas in the sister missionaries' area. I interviewed one of their baptismal candidates because I'm the district leader. Of course I won't go into much detail for this person's privacy but this was the first time that I had to deny someone in a baptismal interview and it was a little awkward and I ended up having to call President Peterson to try and sort some issues out. I will have to re-interview this person at a later date and they will need approval for baptism coming from our mission president.
The day ended with dinner with the Tumamao family again.
Wednesday -
In the morning the senior sister missionaries came to our apartment to check on our living circumstances. They weren't too disappointed since we made sure to clean it up real nicely the day before. Of course they still had some complaints since our apartment, like every apartment in the Philippines, has some issues. They were concerned about a couple leaky sinks, a window that didn't have a screen, and a drain that drains very slowly. We also have a rain gutter that's broken. They asked us to talk to our landlord about all these problems. We're also supposed to give our landlord a deadline. I also re-stringed my guitar again after work because the strings that I bought just last month already rusted and broke. This time I made sure to buy the better strings though.
Thursday -
We did some work in our area called Baay. Since I've been in San Lorenzo for a little while now it's been getting increasingly harder to find new parts of our area to visit. Though we were planning to go to this area called San Pablo, on our way there, we stumbled onto this small road. It turns out that this road has a lot more houses than we expected so we went house to house try and find new people. We ended up teaching three new people who seemed very happy to have us there and it didn't feel like we were bugging them at all. We also talked to some other people there as well that we didn't teach. One of them was this 50+ year old guy. We talked to him for a while and he told us about his life and how he used to be a soldier, a teacher, then an orthopedic technician in Saudi Arabia, and finally he returned home to work in the bukid. We're excited to return to this area and to find and teach some more people.
Friday -
In the morning we did our weekly planning before we went out to work. Once we got out to proselyting we went to this place called San Pablo. We tried some more finding. The finding went okay and we found a couple people but didn't end up doing very much in depth sharing. We also met this woman named Daisy Vivit and talked to her for a while. As we got to know her she talked about how her husband is a pastor at the Assemblies of God church. She also told us how she previously talked to other missionaries. Though this normally would seem like a circumstance where people would want to argue with us (usually for no reason) that didn't happen. She was really nice and we just talked to her for a while about religious beliefs and the similarities in our religions. She didn't really want to argue, but she also didn't really seem like she wanted to learn too much more than what she already believes, so after a little bit we left.
Saturday -
We returned to San Pablo again to do more finding. As we were walking I saw this one road that looked like it led to nothing. I felt like we should head down it anyways, and we did. It turns out that there was pretty much nothing down the road except for one home. When we got there, there was an old lady that was very excited to invite us in and we ended up teaching her the first lesson. She too was previously taught by missionaries, but she used to live in a different home and since she's moved she hadn't seen them since. We ended up teaching her the first lesson and she received it pretty well even though it didn't seem like she remembered it very much from the last missionaries. \
After that, we continued along the main road and tried to make our way back to some of the homes of people we met previously. Unfortunately, no one was there. We decided to do some more door to door finding. It wasn't super fruitful and we got a sufficient amount of dirty looks. As we were making our way to our dinner appointment and passing by many houses I saw one more house. I also thought that we should go to it. We did and we also found another family that willing to let us teach them. It was a pretty cool day of work.. And even though the decisions to go to those specific places and homes seemed like nothing but a thought in my head at the time, I do know that it was guidance from the spirit in reality. This experience also reminded me of a talk I listened to in the MTC by Elder Bednar about recognizing the spirit. He taught that we often overthink and over-analyze the spirit but, in reality, as long as we remain worthy and are doing the right things, we will have guidance. He also talked about how most of the time that guidance is not recognized immediately but is usually recognized long after. Often it comes as a simple thought, but it can lead to very powerful things and I know that's true myself.
Once we arrived at our dinner appointment we were surprised to find that it was actually a big birthday party with lots of people and karaoke. Though I couldn't really successfully chew through the mixed meats we were fed it was still a good time. I also talked to a recently returned missionary from the Salt Lake Temple Square mission. She was nice and it was interesting to compare and contrast the differences in her mission versus my own.
Sunday -
As we should, we attended church in the morning and then later went out and did some work with our fellowshippers Ezra Valdez and Rusthel Barruga. They are both preparing for missions. Though I don't think fellowshippers really like to, we did some door to door finding with them and successfully found some new people to teach. Later we headed over to the home of the Gadu family in order to teach our investigator Menchie Segui, who hopefully will be baptized this coming week. Once we taught her, Nena Gadu (the mother) and her Rudy Gadu (her 28 year old son) came along with us to show us to the homes of previous interested people. No body was really there and we just ended up walking to this really far place called Paoay Lake. We're not even sure if it's part of our area or not, but the Gadu's insisted that it was. The lake was actually super cool and big and I'm glad I was able to see it. It's actually a Philippines National Park even though you wouldn't know that by the small amount of people there. Also everyone with us also kept insisting that there's mermaids in the lake. They also said a bunch of other stuff that seemed VERY not true. They talked about how there's five different towns submerged in the water and how there's a golden bell on a Catholic church down there. They also said that anyone who tries to recover it is killed by the mermaids. It was kind of funny too because they 100% believe this. Elder Doyle and I just kind of chuckled about it.
Pictures -
pictures from work, a goat that has hair and a beard, and Paoay Lake
No comments:
Post a Comment