New area: Baua - poor electricity, rats, and pretty views

August 19-25, 2019

So, I've finally transferred to my new area Baua. It took about 9 hours to cross the entire mission to get here but it's all good. The area itself is pretty rural. There's not much of a market to buy things from and there's not many people. We do have an actual church building though rather than just a meeting house. The area is also kind of close to the mountains and the ocean so there's some pretty views. Anyways, here are just a few notes about our area. For one, because it's so rural we have to use a different cell phone service than all the other missionaries in our mission which means that I can't call all the members in my district to do follow-ups even though I'm the district leader. We also have rats in our house. We can hear them running in the ceiling occasionally and at night they come down to ground level. Because of this we need to have all our food put into the fridge or hung up on hangers. This was especially annoying since I just recently got two of my new packages from home that have lots of goodies. Another interesting thing about our apartment is that we have a 'crazy lady' that's our neighbor. She doesn't seem to be all mentally there and can't talk very much. She seems to be nice though. Occasionally she'll open our window and touch my companion while he's laying on his bed. We also don't have a key to our front door because I previous missionary accidentally took it. The final thing about our area is that since it's super rural we don't have much of a market or place to buy food. We buy fried chicken from a street stand very frequently because of this. Another side note, we basically have our own puppy. We always feed it the bones from our chicken and he loves us. He actually even likes to run into our apartment and play with us.

Tuesday - 

 

So I'll probably keep the individual days a little summarized because much of what I wanted to say is in the intro. Anyways, we woke up at 4:00 am to take the bus to my new area. I sat on the bus for 9 hours or so and traveled all the way to my new area. I sat on the bus longer than any of the other missionaries there. I then met my new companion Elder Denton. He's from Tasmania, Australia but had been living in Melbourne before he left. My dad is actually familiar with where he's from since he served there on his mission. Bascially the first day was more of getting organized in the new apartment and a short introduction.

Wednesday - 

Some more area introduction. We also taught a couple lessons to our investigators. I also met the branch president. He's President Suarez and actually served in my last area San Lorenzo on his mission so he knew a lot of the people that I just came from. He also is 5'11" which is really tall here in the Philippines and he can crack coconut shells with his bare hands which is interesting.

Thursday - 

We did some work in our area called Amunitan. We basically got punted the whole day and none of the people we were going to were home. That's okay though because after we started heading home, a wealthy member named Christian Cabading and his wife gave us a ride on their tricey to a resort called Kangaroo Beach and bought us some pizza there. It was pretty and by the beach.

Friday - 

We did some weekly planning in the morning and then some work later. We also did some finding near the beach. We also ran into a big group of teenage girls that had met previous missionaries. They were really wanting to talk to us but didn't seem to interested in learning. On our way home it started raining really hard and was super windy. We talked to someone and they said that it was a typhoon. Of course we didn't learn that until the day of since we're missionaries and separated from the world of information.

Saturday -

More work. We also got a referral from a member and taught her.

Sunday - 

We went to church. I helped bless the sacrament because of lack of priesthood holders. We also did some work in a barangay called San Jose. I also couldn't call the members of my district because we don't have cell service here. 

Pictures - 

package, dog, pretty views, etc.