Week 43

July 20, 2011

Dear Family and Friends,

Wow, another week has gone by. The time is racing past us. On July 23 we will have one year remaining in the Philippines. The daily rain showers are increasing in duration and frequency. We have had a few tropical storms blow through and a typhoon but so far it hasn’t been too bad. The amount of rain that falls is incredible. The Philippines has an average of 20 typhoons during the rainy season so we are looking forward to some wild and crazy times. We are still amazed with the beauty of this land. We have never been in a tropical climate before so the lush green vegetation is very beautiful.

 The little children are also a delight for us. We were able to help with a Family History Training workshop for our branch this week and the kids love to gather around us. They love to ask me things in Tagalog to see if I understand. They are patient with me and sometimes very helpful. I was setting up the computer with a flash-drive device that would enable us to have mobile internet access and they saw the Tagalog Tutor icon on the desktop. They were fascinated with this program and asked me to play it for them over and over again.  We all had fun with it and laughed at the pronunciation by the computer.

This week has not been anything out of the ordinary routine. We are teaching more and visiting more and more. We’re so glad that we don’t have to walk everywhere (my shoes won’t last much longer). And we have become very grateful for the air conditioning in the car.  We did have a nice visit with a young family. They are both members (she a recent convert of slightly over 1 year) and they have three children. The oldest girl is now eight and we are trying to get him to become active and baptize his daughter. As we met in their home and began teaching, we heard this loud scratching noise in the ceiling. It sounded like a dog trying to run on a tile floor and he was not able to get traction. The noise was loud enough that it made mom jump – it startled her. Everyone laughed and then the dad looked up at the ceiling and told us not to worry because it was just a rat. Eeeewwww! We had a good discussion and then he said that he would like for us to teach their daughter so she could be baptized. I told him that we could teach her but he should baptize her. “Well, Elder, he said, I have a problem. You have caught me smoking several times so I can’t baptize her.”   I told him that if he would come to church and begin reading from the Book of Mormon every day the time would come that he would no longer want to smoke. We are praying for them. They will be such a strength to this branch. We love the Philippine people. They are so humble and teachable. They just don’t know how good they really are and I am convinced that the Lord has a great work for them to do in this part of His vineyard.

We are continuing with the tutoring sessions. We really hope this will help us speak better. J We still believe in and pray for miracles. This sister was given a Mina Bird that talks. It is really fun to hear this bird. As we are sitting in a tutoring session the bird will begin to say ‘Tao po’ which is what a person says when they come to your house. In English it means ‘is anyone home’ As we sat in the first few sessions this sister would get up and go to the door to see who was here and then realize it was the bird. We all had some good laughs. As people walk by the bird will also say, “gwapo’ (handsome in English). That makes people look. The bird also has some more colorful words but we won’t mention them here. The next week we came to tutoring and the bird was in the back. They said it was too hot for the bird out front but I think they were just tired of answering the door.

We have transfers coming up next week. It is hard to believe that another six weeks has come and gone. Hopefully the Zone won’t be affected too much. We do know that we will be losing some missionaries because they are going home. We had the missionaries assigned to our branch come to dinner this week. We wanted to make sure they had a good dinner and we wanted to thank them for their work. They have done a very good job in this area. We enjoy them very much. We still have not heard if we are moving. We have not bought a lot of food and are trying to eat what we already have in case we have to leave it here. We are going to purchase a large quantity of rice and bottle it for storage. We need to be somewhat prepared in case a big storm hits and we will need to provide food for the branch. The Area office has plastic bottles and the ‘drying packs’ to put in the bottles for storage. We also have water stored just in case. If we don’t have to use it we will give it to the members when we leave. Better to be prepared.

We are grateful to be here. We do miss all of you. We hope that you are all well. Hope you all have a happy and enjoyable 24^th holiday. We love you all. BE good, DO good and BE men and women of Christ. And as always, always remember to say your prayers.

Love,

Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, Janene and Grant