Mother's Day

Making faces at Elder Williams

That was fun! Will you still tell us about your week?  You look really good!

I’m glad you think I look good, because I’m just a big fat missionary. I am doing reporting right now but it should only take a few minutes then I will write a big-ish letter. 

It probably is fine to be "fat" as a missionary, If you can call 140lbs fat.   It will be good to have you writes a little so I can post to your blog.

I’m just worried because Blas used to periodically pinch our stomachs at practice and would get mad if we had any body fat because it has zero effect on our capacity as runners.

I noticed grandpa just fell asleep when he wasn’t talking. Did you record our video chat this time?

Monday we had a huge FHE with over 50 people, most of them little kids who were starving for attention, it was way fun. We also went running but I think you saw the video

Tuesday night we were walking home and a kid about 20 and another girl were standing on the side of the road and the girl shouted "where are you going?" because she assumed I don’t speak a word of tagalog. So we used it as an opportunity to talk to them. as soon as i started speaking tagalog she got all shy and left, so we just talked to the guy. They were from Baguio city so it didn’t really go anywhere but at least we talked to them

Wednesday we had DDM, and Elder Montierth (from California) has a companion who is awful at English. He had to give a workshop and tried it in English, it was hard to follow. But it was still a pretty good day.

Thursday our work got destroyed. A huge storm came in and we had to run back to our house because our laundry was hanging up outside and it was getting all soaked. So then we waited out the storm in our house. It was so bad the Zone Leaders texted us and asked if we were doing okay.

Friday I worked with Elder Montierth and we did tons of work. it was easy to approach people because they basically invited us over. It’s one thing to see a missionary, they stick out so bad. But an American missionary in the Philippines is rare. (Some people here have never met a white person before. It would be like if a person black as night moved to star valley or Colorado). So when you put two American missionaries together, it’s like a beacon you can see from space. It was definitely a good day

Saturday was a pretty boring day, and it was hard. We didn’t teach much and just walked around looking for people

Sunday Elder Lozano skyped his family, but he is from Bacolod, they speak Ilongo, Cebuano, and Tagalog there, so his conversation was just a big mix of languages, I have no idea what they talked about. I also met some teenagers who thought they were funny and said "Hey Joe!" (Super common for Americans here, missionary or not), so I walked over and started talking about what we do as missionaries as fast as I could in English. They got overwhelmed and had this really worried look on their face and one of them walked away. But then I started speaking tagalog and they were actually really interested in what we have to say, we're going back next Sunday.