March 9, 2015

    Elder Henry Van Slooten and companion Elder De Dios

  with President Carlos G Revillo Jr. (mission president) and wife

 

hey family! that's so cool Mario Bambo is back. I always remember him as being so nice. Don't worry about me. I'm eating healthy and exercising and sleeping well every night. but yes the little kids here are so funny! they always come up to us and ask for hi fives. they say "hey what's your name!" they're pretty funny but they can be a little overwhelming sometimes just because there are so many of them! the bugs here are massive.. the cockroaches are massive and they can fly, which is terrifying haha! the spiders are the size of the palm of your hand.. the other day in church I heard a girl yell and she said there was a big spider in the chapel.. my companion and I laughed because we thought she was overreacting. we went up to see how big it actually was and it was about the size of a cheeseburger.. so gnarly haha! one of the young men just got a broom and swept it out.. you see some pretty funny things here often. its not uncommon to see someone fully clothed on the sidewalk but dripping wet.. a lot of people don't have showers in their homes so they put on clothes and do a bucket shower on the sidewalk.. took me a while to figure that one out.  Its not uncommon to see 5 kids on one bicycle at a time or to see a man holding three live pigeons in one hand and a dead chicken in the other. People here are so kind though and I think I'm finally starting to understand them more. A lot of the time people will speak in church in English and I'll think "how did I understand that so well?.. oh it was in English" haha!  but this past week when people speak in pure Tagalog I'll think "was that in English?.. oh no it wasn't, I can just understand them". That always gets me so excited  and yes mercury drugstore is the best!  I always walk down the street thinking about how you used to walk down these streets as a little girl. I love you guys so much!! I'll talk to you next week, I hope everything is going well for you guys! tell Jolie I miss her too.

March 2, 2015

HEY family!! this week has been great! a lot of our investigators are in pinyahan which is the neighborhood that we live in so its nice being close to all of them. one of our investigators - jonathan o'dell is super funny. he's definitely our favorite investigator. whenever we give him an invitation he says no.. but we tell him every time we're not leaving until he says yes. he talks about why he can't/doesn't want to and we tell him about how he can and should. anyway every time he ends up saying yes and every time he says yes we know he's going to follow through. he's awesome, super honest and so nice. we can tell he really likes us and respects us. he's about 30-35 years old and his family lives in iloilo. he's just here working. we really think if he gets baptized he can become a leader in the church. he's really great. he makes us laugh every time we teach him.

 

the other day we were teaching this one lesson and my companion, elder de dios, was trying to get contact information from  three people that we were teaching when this little girl tapped me on the shoulder. she was probably six and she just started talking to me. she asked me where i was from and i said "america, siguro iyan ang dahilan kung bakit ang pangit ko" just as a joke and she said "hindi..pogi ka" ;') hahahahaah it was sooo cute! she reminded me of bo.. anyway i gave her a restoration packet and told her to take it to her parents and have them read it.. we haven't heard anything from them yet.

 

everything is great over here, i love being a missionary! i feel like im learning tagalog and how to teach effectively really fast..

this is one of the people that we baptized this week! we had one other baptism. this lady's name is editha enolpe and the other baptism we had was sister evelyn cariaga. the other picture is just typical street view of where we walk around all day