April 24, 2016

Helllllllllloooooooooooo Viiiieeetttnammmmmm,

Well I am here chilleennnn.  Its Pday! Finally! We deserve it. This was a long week. So transfers went smoothly. It took me all wednesdaymorning to get down to my area though. That was the only bad part but I got there safely and everything was all good. So I arrived and met my new companion Elder Christensen, well actually not that new because I already lived in the same appartment with him in my first area for almost 5 months so I know him really well. Its actually kinda funny cuz he saw me come into the mission and I will see him leave it. He goes home in july so I will (as the missionaries say) kill him. He is way awesome though. He is so focused on his purpose that he barely even thinks about home so its nice. We work really hard. 

So right now I am in an area called Batasan Hills in the Fair View zone. I am a zone leader here and the area is really awesome. Its one of the highest in baptisms for the mission. The ward is so supportive, the bishop is very involved in missionary work, so is the ward mission leader. Everything is just pretty great right now. The only thing bad about this area is mannn there are a lot of steep hills. I get SO tired by the end of the day. I will probably lose some weight in this area. But last thursday we had something called MTC exchanges. Thats where missionaries from the MTC come and do splits with us in the field. I did it when I was in the MTC. But I got to go with an Elder from Austrailia and it was pretty cool. He could not speak Tagalog at ALL but it just reminds me of me when I first started and its cool to look back and see how much I have grown. It was a cool experience.

I had one of the coolest experiences so far on my mission happen already in this area. One day Elder Chirs and I were walking to an appointment and this lady stops us and says "Elder, where is your area?" I replied "Uhh its right here" And she says oh okay then walks away. So I shouted back "hey wait! Are you a member?" She said yes but she was baptized in Athens Greece in my dads mission. She was baptized by one of my dads former companions! I thought that was so cool that I somehow all the way across the world connected with my dads mission somehow. Really awesome.

So now that I am zone leader I cant just care about my area only I have to care about everyones in the zone. For a couple hours on friday we spent a couple hours looking at numbers and setting goals for our zone.  I think we made some good ones. It was pretty fun and it seemed like I was contributing more to the mission. 

Another really cool experience that happened was on saturday night. A little back story first. Here in the Philippines people get clean water in these big blue jugs. So we have 3 big blue jugs in our house and when we run out we have to order more. So earlier on saturday we were completley out of water and we had to order more so we did but sometimes the people suck at delivering it. So we came home around 8ish to do our personal study because we didint do it in the morning because we had to do something for President but we came home and we took a look in the door and there were NO blue just so we had NO water.. Which is not good. and tomorrow was sunday sooo we couldnt buy water on sunday. So we went down the street to see what was up with the place for not delivering our water. So we went down and the guy there called his people and they said they never got an order from us so were thought hmmm weird. But the guy was nice enough to lend us a jug of water and he even gave us a ride back up to the appartment. In the car we took the opportunity to share the gospel and he was asking questions about the BoM and stuff so when we got to the house we gave him a copy and a lesson 1 pamphlet and he was interested and accepted a lesson from us but sadly he doesnt live in our area so we gave the refferal to the other elders. The funniest part about the story is that once we walked in the house and turned the corner we saw our water jugs.. So we already had water. So that was a way cool experience.

Well that is kinda all for this short week. I am sure I will have a lot more to say next. I love you all!! Have a great week.

By the way thats the view from our appartment.