Monday, February 12, 2018

Busanga and a bucket list check

Helloooooo!   
Heres a special birthday shout out to the newest member of young womens at home. Happy #12 Paisley!! I can't believe you are so old. Paisley and I both have blonde hair, blue eyes and love the best plant, cactus.  I have decided Paisley has changed the most out of all of my siblings since I left.  Love you Pais- hope you had a great day! 
I guess you could say this week was upper dec. Started the week off with some exchanges in our area. I worked with Elder Davis from Oregon who’s been out a transfer more than me. It was kinda interesting because most of the day appointments were falling through and we were finding but not getting much success. I realized at the end of the day that it was the first day in awhile where not much “success” seemed to come. Elder Davis and I were talking about it though and realized it was still such a great day even though we didn’t teach as many lessons and find as many investigators as we goaled for. We just did our best and enjoyed every moment and as President says “Let He who is in charge stress about His work.” We don’t need to worry if we know we’re doing our part. The bright side of not having many lessons is the fact that we were able to give many more people the opportunity to accept the gospel than if we were in lessons with those we’ve already met. We also have had the Priests in the ward work with us a lot. It’s really been awesome to get to know them better. They’re so funny haha and they remind me of what I was like back before I left on my mission.
We got an apartment finally!! It’s literally the closest building to the mission office (the pics we took last the other week were on top of the senior couple’s apartment.) It’s gonna save us lots of time with travel now so we’re pretty excited. Although I guess there is an opposition in all things because another set of Elders in the mission had their house burn down (sound familiar big nick?) Getting a phone call at 1am is usually not good news haha. Their fire alarm was randomly going off 2 days before the fire so they decided to drown it in a bowl of water but hadn’t gotten a new one in yet. If they would’ve woken up 5 minutes later they would’ve been toast. 2 of their neighbors died but other than that nobody was injured or anything like that. I’ve slept in that house quite a bit so it was weird to see it all burned!
From Friday to Monday Elder Mitchell and I went with the Pasay zone leaders to help out down in Busuanga! I’d search it on google it’s an awesome place! :0 It is one of the islands in our mission and the area has only been open for 5 months. There are four elders assigned there right now and two of them have been my companions (my last companion elder fiesta and my trainer elder cibuco.) It was so sweet! At the airport we were talking to some of the workers while weighing our luggage and they pointed to one of their workmates and asked if they were pretty (it’s not weird to ask here if someone is good looking, ugly, fat, etc. haha) We looked over and they were pointing at a transgender guy and out of nowhere Elder Tuiatua just yells “Whatta maaaaan!” then gave the guy a hi-five haha! I think he would’ve been punched in the States but it’s pretty normal to joke like that here. We flew in a tiny plane with those big propellers and got to see some super pretty little islands as we were about to land. The funny thing about the airport there is it’s literally in the middle of nowhere! There were animals flockin around near the runway it was hilarious. The runway is tiny so right as we landed the plane nailed on the brakes. The airport building itself kinda looks like a big shed haha.
Once we drove across the island to a place called Salvacion we got right to work! Friday Elder Mitchell and I were told to just go find new people. Literally I can count the number of people who rejected us on my two hands for that whole day haha! Basically every house we “tao po’d” told us to come in before we could even say hello. The people there are so ready. The crazy part was the surprising part wasn’t how open they were to let us in- it was seeing how prepared they were as we taught them the lessons. They all have such great faith and many great questions that all missionaries hope to hear. The very first lesson we taught was to someone named Mae Daco. When we asked her what she felt and thought about the first vision she just started crying and said she’s been feeling so heavy for the past few years because she’s been wondering which church was true. She told us she knew God would give her an answer because she doesn’t believe God wants His children to be confused. We scheduled to return to her Sunday at 3 but since church went a little long we were late. Apparently she had her whole extended family of 40 who lives in their compound ready to listen to us! Ahh we were so sad to be late but our second lesson with her and her aunt was even better than the first! She will be baptized next month and we’ll see what happens with the rest of her family. There hasn’t been a new religion introduced in this little place in years so everyone seems to know that the “Mormon church” is the new church here. Everyone seemed to want to know more about who we were and why foreigners are walking around their place teaching about Christ.
Saturday morning the Sister missionaries from Coron (other side of the island) came to Busuanga to help us out with an activity. Total there were 12 missionaries and we held a huge activity playing volleyball and basketball with kids. There were about 40 kids there and we were all playing games. It kinda reminded me of playing with kids when I went to Fiji on that HEFY trip with ode. It was about the same atmosphere but this time I could understand the kids haha. After a bit I was wondering if we were just wasting the Lord’s time playing games with kids but lots of parents ended up dropping by and I realized that service is a great thing these people could see missionaries doing. As we were proselyting later that night we would knock on a door and the people would ask “hey weren’t you playing with all of those kids earlier?” or we would see a kid in the family who was at the activity.
Sunday we had church! For Sundays the Elders actually rent a trike and go around picking people up for church. I got to drive for a minute it was cool. Ha it was literally a minute though because I didn’t really know how to work the thing. Either way I guess I can check that one off the bucket list haha. The church is actually a little tarp that hangs off the end of Elder Cibuco/Elder Dial’s house. We had about 30 people there.. 24 investigators and 6 members. Lots of the investigators we had just met during the weekend while we were finding! In the middle of the sacrament the wind blew and water came hurling down from the tarp all over me haha.
This week I was able to work with my trainer Elder Cibuco for the first time since he trained me! It was a big flash back in lessons sitting next to him and looking over at him as he taught. He is such a great missionary mainly because of how hard-working and diligent he is. It was fun to talk about our great experiences over in Tondo. He actually speaks a different language called Cebuano so when he trained me he was also still adjusting to Tagalog. I honestly didn’t realize he was also struggling with the language when I was new because I couldn’t understand hardly anything but he never once mentioned it or complained. Love that guy!
Overall it was a great week to be a missionary. Our district leader Elder Asay said something really cool this week. He said, “We should want to be the guy that when we wake up in the morning Satan is thinking ‘oh no, not this guy again! Nothing seems to be stopping him.’” Wouldn’t it be amazing if he thought that of all of us. I know this is Christ’s church restored to the earth. I know that Christ is at the head and hopefully we can continue to do our best to gain His trust to do whatever it is he needs of us. Have a solid week!

Love elder reber 



















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