Jud!!

Hellooo

Hope everyone had a great week watching General Conference! We will be watching it this Saturday and Sunday and we’re super excited. President pulled the all-nighter Saturday night here watching some of the sessions. Apparently he kept freaking out and went to wake up Sister Fermanis a few times throughout the night to tell her something cool that had happened in the conference. Haha classic President. I’ve been able to hear of some of the big changes coming and am excited to watch it to get the full explanation. Also heard another temple is on it’s way to the Philippines! There are now 2 temples here and 3 that are either under construction or announced. Pretty exciting to be here at this point of time!

This week was Holy Week here in the Philippines. Most people here in the city take the week to head back to their province and visit family. They celebrate Christ throughout the week (usually by chuggin beer haha.) There was no traffic which was super nice and in the mornings Makati was like a ghost town.

Found two new amazing people to teach this week! The first one is Lynn. She was referred to us by Tina Lobo- the less active fam we’ve been working with (they came to church again 😊 ) She lives pretty close to them and she told us she’d go to church before we even taught her a lesson! She got sick and slept in too late on Sunday so she missed church but Friday night we had a family home evening at the Lobo’s house and she came with her 12 year old son Carl. They cooked up rice before we got there and we bought two full chickens from a spot not too far away. I feel they will be at church this week and we’ll hopefully be able to teach them a few times.

Jud is the second guy. He is 24 and is a total stud! We found him sitting in the room of Sister Dole (recent convert that we sometimes do laundry for on pday) and he has just moved here from his province not too long ago. We taught him right there and he explained that where he’s from he’d pass by walking missionaries all the time on his motor. He always thought it was crazy how far the Elders would walk. We gave him a Book of Mormon and returned to him the next day. He read our assignment then went back to the intro and read through that as well as the testimonies. And WHOAAA next time we went back I wish I could explain how good his explanation of what happened to Joseph smith was. Honestly dead serious I couldn’t have explained it as well and in as much detail as he did to us. He had the dates down, names, everything. We were so shocked haha! On Sunday he was the first investigator we got to church in quite some time. He is set for April 28 to be baptized!

I mentioned Miller a few weeks ago- the one from Phoenix. He was actually baptized over in the province while we were in Palawan!! I think I forgot to mention that last week. We taught him again this week and introduced him to bishop one morning. He’s such a cool guy it’s so fun being around him. He is working on learning tagalog and he’s going to work with us a few times each week now. Awesome seeing someone completely change their life in a few months. It’s amazing to see how much they’re willing to give up. It just reminds me that all of God’s children have the light of Christ. They know deep down right from wrong and have the same potential any of us members have.

Thursday we had MLC and that night we had our first Thursday night basketball activity here in this area. Elder Petersen and I did it a few times over in Las Pinas and saw some success so we decided we may as well get it started here. We had lots of priests there and a few investigators but hope next week we’ll get even more at the court. Lots of guys just came from the nearby houses but I’m not sure if any of them were very interested in church haha. On Sunday we coordinated better with the ward so this Thursday we think it will be more successful.

We had some great appointments with members this week- one of them being Bishop Satorre. I always love going to his family’s house because their two little kids speak English. It’s super weird talking to a 7 year old girl about Elsa in English because it’s pretty rare to meet English kids here. It’s super funny though I convinced Carly that Elder Mitchell was a unicorn. She nearly checked his head for the horn haha. P day we got to eat with President’s family and a missionary who was a visa waiter. He’s going to serve in Africa and will be missed here.

One night we knocked on a door and there were four kids about our age inside. We asked them if they knew a steph nearby and they said “no.. what’s his last name?” We then answered saying “steph curry” and all of them started laughing super hard. We then pointed at one of the kids in the back and acted like we thought he was steph curry. We didn’t think it was that clever but hey they laughed even more. So we took that moment to ask if we could come in and introduce ourselves and all at once they all went quiet and the at front simply said “no.” Hahah it was such a change of emotions we were laughing about it the rest of the night!

Love you all! Have a great week.

Elder Reber