The Next Two Years: Week 87

May 7, 2012

Dear Family and Friends,

net fishing

Hello everyone! How has your week been? We hope that you are doing well. Looks like school is just about finished. We are certain that everyone is excited for the summer vacation. Our internet service is acting up again so the SKYPE option is a real challenge. We are praying that it will get better.

This past week has been a busy week of travel and waiting. We spent a couple of days in the Family History Center again in helping the members with their work. We have a family of 4 and another sister that are going to the Temple this week for their endowments and sealings. That is exciting!

We had the opportunity to fly to Manila on Wednesday for Presidency meeting and Zone Leaders Council. We decided to rent a car so we wouldn’t have to worry about getting to the different places. It was rather expensive but also a very interesting experience. I asked them if we could have a new car and they said it would not be a problem. The car was a small mini-van with 60K miles and had a standard transmission. It has been a long time since I have driven a stick shift but it came back quickly. The van also had roll up windows – I never realized how much I rely on those little conveniences of a new car and believe me, power windows are a necessary item in a car. It did have air con so I guess that was the biggest blessing. Also, the van happened to have a license number that was ‘bawal’ or prohibited from driving on Thursday. In Manila they have a coding system that takes 1/5 of the cars out of the traffic every day to help control pollution and congestion. If your license plate number ends in 1 or 2 you are 'bawal' on Monday. If 3 or 4 then you can’t drive on Tuesday and so forth. It has some merit but I don’t know that it really works. Well, we paid for a car that we couldn’t drive on one of the 3 days we were here so I told them that this won’t happen. Later that evening, they came to the Mission Home with a replacement vehicle. I had hopes that it would be a more modern van – but it was the same color, make, model and year. On the bright side, we had our own set of wheels to drive through Manila.

The airport saga was frustrating. We were scheduled to leave Puerto Airport at 10:00 am which means we had to leave our home in Narra at 5:30 am to make sure that we could arrive on time in Puerto. There were some difficulties with the flight coming from Manila so that plane didn’t arrive in Puerto until 12:00. We spent 4 hours in that little un-air conditioned airport!

On Saturday we had a similar experience in the airport in Manila for our return flight. This time all flights were halted because some high-up authority in government was in Manila and no one could land or take off until his plane was in the sky. We spend another 4 hours in the airport in Manila. We look back now and laugh at the comedy of it all but at the time it was so frustrating.

While in Manila we were told that Deliah had passed away. She had been the cook, maid, friend and mother or nanay to many missionaries and mission presidents at the Philippine Manila Mission for over 20 years. She was a grand lady and was a delight to us in the Mission Home. She had been ill over the past year and had recently decided it was time to quit. We will all miss her. We visited her home and family to pay our respects on Friday evening. Our prayers are with her and her family.

Delia

Well, we had a great week. But we thought that this week we should lighten things up a bit. Here is the song we told you about. Hopefully you can smile a lot as we do when we think of the Philippines. The tune is “Oh What Do You Do In The Summertime?”