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

February 16, 2015

hey mom and dad! Things are really great over here!! It's hot and humid so we're constantly sweaty but it's really fun. The language is totally different from the mtc, and it's pretty hard to understand people sometimes. I had balut and chicken intestine and the boiled blood stuff, there's a lot of crazy food here!! haha.

I'm in an internet café since there are no computers in our apartments. and don't worry,there's some good food here. I'm definitely not gonna starve at all and we're always getting fed.

We're busy every single day like crazy, even on pday so I won't have a ton of time to email you guys. A week before I got into the mission, the mission president decided to cut email time in half, from 2 hours to one hour so there are a ton of people to email and not any time to do it, haha!

I do have time to cook but very little. My trainer is Elder De Dios from Canada. His parents are both Filipinos but he didn't speak any Tagalog before his mission.  We sleep with a fan and yeah I'm sleeping really well because we get so tired from the day that we can't help but fall right asleep. From 1-8pm we're out teaching and finding people to teach and getting sweaty haha. There are four of us in the apartment so two companionships and our ward is really good. My first area is the Quezon City 1st ward.
I love you guys a ton!! I miss you and think about you guys a lot!! Ill "talk" to you all next week!!
  

 Elder Van Slooten trying on "balut" for the first time. (Balut is duck embryo, yum)

                            Henry and Elder Nawaia at the Manila MTC

                           before going to their respective first areas.


Elder Van Slooten's new mailing address:

Elder Henry Van Slooten
Philippines Quezon City Mission
Aurora Blvd. cor. JP Rizal St.
Project 4, Cubao
Quezon City 1109, Metro Manila, Philippines

January 24, 2015

hey mom and dad! this week has been pretty good! i have quite a few pictures to send. elder nawaia got to go to temple square and walk around because hes an "international missionary". they let all the international missionaries go to salt lake and see temple square because they may never get a chance to do it again. anyways he took my camera with him.

 also exciting news, we got flight plans!!! were leaving february fifth after all and were leaving at 3;30 am hahaha were flying to portland to tokyo to manila!! im so excited to get out of here! we skyped with a member in the philippines and taught them a lesson and the member was in quezon city! she spoke pretty fast but i picked up most of what she was saying hahaha she said "pogi kayo elder" hahaha not sure if i spelled that right though.    these are my travel plans!!!!

January 17, 2015

this mornings sunrise was cool. that last one is of elder peck during our temple trip last Saturday

January 10, 2015

 elder nawaia is really great and hes starting to get a lot better at tagalog, its probably really hard for him to learn tagalog while hes trying to learn english at the same time. im excited to get into the field though the mtc is getting very repetitive and its hard to spend your whole entire day in the same class room. we eat breakfast and then go to class. then were in class until lunch time. then we go to lunch then come right back to class. and then were in class again until dinner time. then after dinner we go back to class again until 9:30 at night. its a lot of learning and a lot of work but we are learning very fast. some of the guys on my district are scared to get to the field in terms of speaking and understanding capabilities. sometimes i feel that way too but i actually feel very comfortable with tagalog and think i could almost go right now. i know if i went into the field right now with as much tagalog as i know, i would probably get fried. the hardest thing about learning tagalog is getting used to sentence structures. its very different from english. im really trying to let go of all my english tendencies and only think in terms of tagalog sentence structure but i think ill be ready in a couple more weeks. were supposed to leave february the fifth but one of my teachers got an email saying we would leave january 28th. i hope we leave then. ill send a few pictures. i didnt take that many this week because everything is starting to look the same.

this was taken last sunday during the temple walk. they let all the missionaries walk to the temple and tour the grounds for an hour or so every sunday afternoon. we usually dont go because its been so cold but we decided we needed to get off mtc campus and walk around.

January 5, 2015