Sunday, 3 May 2015

105 degrees in the shade...wait, what shade? 5/3/2015



Sunset through the smoke


Okay, okay...I think you get the point that we are melting here, so I will spare the complaining again.  I have told Mike that I will never complain about the cold again, but he doesn't believe me and I probably don't either.

These are 2 of our great missionaries Elder Villamer and Elder Hunt.
We got to go with them to teach Irma.  The woman on the left
is Irma's mom.  They live in such a beautiful spot!
Another great week as missionaries!  We are meeting so many sweet people.  We are so thankful for this opportunity!  We love going out with members of the church and finding people that haven't been to church for months.  They always appreciate our visit and we love meeting them.  Here are a couple of pictures we took on one of our visiting days:
 This is the home of Erlinda.  She is in the pink shirt and is the grandma to all these teens!  They either have deceased parents, parents that work abroad or a combination of both.  My favorite was Jericho who is 13.  He is hiding behind Clariza, the girl in the greed striped shirt.   Our visiting partner is Sister Malig, the woman I am leaning on, with the red shirt.  I don't know where everyone fits in this house, but it seems to be filled with love!  When we left this house we met another woman who saw our name tags and told us she was a member of the church who had moved to the area 5 years previous and had just never bothered finding the church.  We hope she comes back as well!
Brother Malig picking the perfect apple mango for us!  It's like
the Garden of Eden there!
The land near Malig's house.  
Sister Malig and Sister Abelya came visiting with us and they would squeal with delight after each visit.  They would just say, "This is so much FUN!  I love this!"  We would never be able to do the visits without them as there are absolutely NO addresses here.  Have I already said that?  You have to find out the barangy (neighborhood), and then just stop and ask people where the family lives.  There is no rhyme or reason to where people build houses.  Of course they also help us with the Tagalog.  We go visiting for hours and love every minute.
This is Sister Malig and her husband as well as
Sister Abelya. Brother and Sister Malig have lived here
for years and have SO many fruit trees.  They gave us
some apple mangoes- who knew there were so many types of mangoes!
They also picked some of the mangoes we are familiar with.  YUM!




Cocoa Tree
Beautiful rooster.  Yes, it is on a
sort of leash.  How else will it stay in the yard?



This is Ronnie and Michelle on their wedding day.

We were asked to speak at a wedding this week.  Ronnie is a returned missionary and Michelle is getting baptized in a couple of weeks.  They asked us to give them advice.  We spoke in English, but they said they understood.  Who knows!
We always have some meetings to attend.  This was MLC-
Missiionary Leadership Council, held in Olongapo.
It was very uplifting!

Just a funny story of the week:  Our English classes will begin in one of our branches, this coming Saturday.  We designed some flyers that took a lot of time for us to do, but we thought they looked very professional.  We took them to the printer and he told us they would be ready the next day.  When we picked them up we thought they were great, then later we looked at them again and realized the printer must have lost a couple of the words when he was moving it around on his computer or something, so he just put his own word in there instead of asking us.  Now the flyer says:  "Learn conversation, proper grammar and conversation."  The second "conversation" was supposed to say "pronunciation!"  Now we sound like we don't know English!

That's it for another week!  We love you and miss you!  Ingat!

3 comments:

  1. Dear Elder and Sister Wood,
    I am SO excited that you are enjoying your mission, I have no doubt that you will attract people to church, like moths to a flame. You are such a wonderful couple, great example to me, when I was a new member.
    It is so funny that your daughter is serving in a very warm climate, as are you.
    I am still saving to serve a mission, myself, someday.

    Love,
    Sister Diana Robbins

    ReplyDelete
  2. Diana,

    You will make the most WONDERFUL missionary! WE are always inspired by YOUR testimony and great example! We love you!

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  3. So I gather there is no reason to have a GPS there if they don't have addresses ; ) I had no idea there were different magoes.

    You two are wonderful.

    ReplyDelete