11-27-11

Last week we had a crazy busy week last week so we did not post.  This will be a double post from last week. Check out the new pictures I posted on the picture page.
11-20-11
This has been such an incredible week. Maybe I mentioned this last week but Sundays are the reason I don't hate missionary work. Every day it's humid, hot, and we walk everywhere.
 But then it's Sunday morning and we get to see the results from our efforts the last week. Yesterday we had two part-member families show up to church. The parents in both families were baptized over 10 years ago and their kids were never baptized, but they want them to be baptized, so its been no problem visiting them. I wish I could express with words how happy I was when I saw both families show up to sacrament meeting. I've been pretty happy before, but that might have been the happiest moment of my life. The joy that was inside of me was of such high quality I cannot describe it.
Speaking of church, i think I told you before how nobody cares when its a sunday, right? yesterday I came to the conclusion that in our church building, between 9am and 12pm sunday mornings, there is, at any given time, at least three children in places they shouldn't be doing things they shouldn't do, and twice as many parents who couldn't care less.

 

11-27-11

Last week we played with someones pet monkey. And we trekked into the jungle to harvest bamboo for a member in someone else's area. My companion is probably getting transferred this Thursday, I'm not sure how I feel about it. I really like him and we had great success together, but he has such a thick accent I can't understand when he talks to me.

I also learned the angel on top of the salt lake temple is 12 and 1/2 feet tall, in case you were wondering.

I found out this week why there are a surprising number of Muslims in the Philippines. The smart ones do business in places like Saudi and move to the Philippines when one of two things happen: 

1. When their operation has been found out and he doesn't want to get caught, so he takes his family to an obscure location in a grass hut without an address. 

2. He gets too old to work and moves here because everything is so cheap he can live like a king the rest of his life. 

I got your letters about the dance and the carpet with the mustard. That's easily the best story I've ever heard.

Hope everything is well.

Love,

Elder Williams
 PS: I got the planking pictures today! I cannot tell you how happy they made me. And they were some of the most legit planking pictures I've ever seen in my life.

are you still there???? 

yes! are you?

YES!!! you are early!  I was just going to get on and write you our weekly email.  We were sad we missed you last week.  But the emails did not get to my phone until 4:30am but the time said 12:40.  weird.  How is your week?  This week is transfers?  so we wont hear from you until early next week.

actually they changed it so we will email every Monday. the reason I'm early this week is because we don't have meetings anymore on Mondays. the reason i was late last week is because of the thanksgiving dinner. so this is probably going to be about the time i will email you every week from now on.

Extra Bonus!

We received a package from Elder Williams in the mail today.  He sent some cookies, native money (peso), and 2 SD cards full of pictures and video.  The video is from his travels to Philippines and of the Typhoons that hit San Clemente.

 

sorry this email is so late, we went to a waterfall today as a Zone, I'll send a bunch of pictures. Also on the walk to the computer shop just now a random filipino waiting in line at a street vendor gave me a high five, more than likely because I'm white. It was pretty cool.

This has been an incredible week. It has been so wonderful to see the people who are prepared to hear  what we have to offer. I always feel on Friday mornings during weekly planning that we haven't done nearly enough work during the week  to be planning for the next week, but Sunday evenings we count up how much work we really have done and its amazing. This has easily been the best week we've ever had. I feel like Sunday mornings at church is the time when we see how effective our work has been for the last week, shown by how many less actives and investigators come to church. Yesterday three less active families we have been visiting for weeks now finally decided to come back to church. We also had 5 investigators come to church, which is the most we've ever had. Our attendance this week was roughly 120, and average is about 90. This week we have a baptism, and another one is planned for next week. Both of them are young men who have incredible faith. One of them has been taught by missionaries since April, because  he had problems before with the word of wisdom, especially when he was with his friends. But every time we visit him he tells us how  he wants to stop and be baptized so he can serve a mission. We also found an incredible amount of new investigators, and each of them are truly anxious to learn more, and not just being polite by letting us visit them. Establishing credibility and trust with our new investigators is actually relatively easy, most people, if not all, have some sort of belief or faith in Jesus Christ.

The waterfall was so cool, we met in Bamban, an area where two elders work (everyone calls it Outer Darkness because the work there is pangit talaga and the leadership is just as bad.) After all the missionaries arrived we loaded into the back of a big truck and climbed a mountain for about twenty minutes, then a twenty minute hike. I've seen a lot of cool places, but this waterfall rivals Upper Palisades. 

I miss snow so much. I wish more than anything I could go snowboarding right now. But I'm not within 1000 miles of a place where I could do that. Thanks for sending the redvines, I also miss those a lot. I absolutely love it here and actually wouldn't mind living here if I could find a job that paid dollar for dollar what it would pay in America, but its nice to see things that are native to america.

I've been trying to get pictures of my mafia neighbor, but its difficult. I'll send some as soon as I can.

11-6-11

We have hit the four month mark!  Does that mean time will keep going fast?

Elder Williams,

Happy 4 months!  It is day light savings weekend, do you use that in the Philippines?  We got an extra hour of sleep last night!
We have been watching bizarre foods from the Philippines, WOW!  I am sure you are not eating such crazy things. The one thing that is super gross is Balot, it is the duck egg that is 16 days fertilized so essentially a baby duck boiled like a hardboiled egg.   what do you typically eat daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner?

I don’t think they have daylight savings here, I haven’t heard anything about that.
usually I have a typical American breakfast, pancakes or toast with eggs and some juice or chocolate milk. Lunch is rice and whatever they make hot dogs out of or mincemeat from cans. Generally dinner is the same, unless we go to a members home, then we have whatever they killed that afternoon. But I've eaten some pretty gross stuff. Herring eggs, pig intestines, etc. Last week an Elder in our district bought an ulam for us and we had them over to our house for lunch. It was pork, I think. But nothing like you'd see in America. The lady who gave it to us had it sitting out in the open under a tarp and some bamboo poles. She cut off a piece for us from a huge piece that was probably pulled right off a dead pig that morning. As I was eating it, I noticed thats exactly what she did. It was cooked and everything, but I saw on the bottom the meat, then a layer of fat, then the skin.

The skin still had pig hair on it.

I have been trying for the last 8 weeks to love the food and the culture, but this was just too much for me. Easily the grossest thing I've ever seen.

That being said, they do things here that I wonder why we don't do them in America. For Example, they use a spoon instead of a knife for everything. Nobody eats steak here so no problem. And it's incredibly useful when I get to the bottom of a bottle of Coconut Jam. A spoon gets into those awful, almost cruel corners of a jar. PLus eating rice is way more effective, I would highly suggest that if you are going to continue eating rice. There's also this thing called Ice Candy, which is sort of new to me still. It's like Otter Pops, but they are homemade and they put weird things in it like beans.
My tagalog is getting better, and consequently so is my English, because I can talk to my companion in Tagalog now and not that awful English I used a few weeks ago. Two days ago we went to one of our areas, and we literally walked back in time. Most people here have electricity and homes made of concrete. Its (generally) more civilized that I thought. So we're walking down this road and all the houses have electricity and people live pretty comfortable. Then every other house has electricity, and soon every third and then every fourth house. After awhile, the houses turned from concrete to bamboo. As we continued on this path, we started seeing candles and more mga bukid and more mga carabou. Then the road turns to gravel, and its pretty much dark around us everywhere. It might have been the sketchiest thing I've ever done.

The pronunciation here of the people is so terrible. Our second counselor in the branch is named Howard Pascual, and for the first 7 weeks of my stay here, I thought his name was Whaord. Seriously.

Something else cool this week, my neighbor runs a rice mafia. Here's my theory:

1. His house is huge, even for a house in America. That almost never happens here.

2. People bring bags of rice to his warehouse on the other side of his home, and he weighs them and stores them in the shed

3. The owner is easily the mastermind behind all of it, sort of like a rice/drug lord. Being a rice farmer is hard work, and he has no muscle at all.

4. All the guys who work for him wear shirts over their heads like pirates, and one of the guys has a pirate moustache

5.He has two dogs who run around begging for food

6. One of his "Top Officers" checks the bags of rice that people bring in with a giant stick that looks like an apple corer. He thrusts it right into the bag to check the quality of the rice, as if to say "hopefully, this rice is good enough for us to buy, or else you've just lost 50 pounds of rice, and we don't really care."

Anyway, this is my theory. I don't mind if he's got a mafia or not, because I know if he does we're protected. our home is within the gate he has around his property.

Next time you send a package (for my birthday or anything) will you fill it full of redvines? a new senior couple showed up last week and shared some with me last night. It was wonderful and I wish they had it here.

When you eat, use a fork in the left hand (to scoop) and a spoon in the right hand. its so much more effective (except maybe spaghetti)

The new senior couple are absolutely wonderful. They are farmers from Emmett (I knew Elder Roberts was a farmer before he had even mentioned it. Is that bad?) And its great to talk to them, because they are still in the shock from leaving behind everything they know and getting used to this place.