10/11/2009

Dear Mama/family and friends!

Hello everyone! This week has been great! This letter is going to be really random because I'm going through your emails and answering all the questions. Well the typhoon came back and brought so much more rain, but less wind, we sat inside all day and didn’t do much. The pants I bought aren’t ugly but well... they aren’t American. I'll just put it that way but they are nice, my companion is from Murray Utah. We went to the golf course today but didn’t play because they didn’t have any left handed clubs, but, next Sunday when we teach this investigator who is in the army, we are going to ask him if he wants to go because he can get us in for free and it would be worth the rent of right handed clubs. The course is just a short walk from our house, its really weird to see this nice cut grass and a putting green over all the ugly grass and the trash that’s everywhere. We did some service last week at the church we cleaned up all the leaves that were EVERYWHERE! You would die at the sight of all the leaves that come off all the trees its crazy! Yes we do get up at 5:30 to go play basketball (paglaro tayo ng Basketball) but its really not that early for us, it gets light really, really early and get dark at like 6:00 its very annoying, everyone is up and running by 6 so its usually really loud so I just lay there wishing I could go to sleep. My companion usually does the cooking and we both wash the dishes ( I know its shocking)! He was complaining about not having a dish washer and I just started laughing it was so funny. We hired someone to come do our laundry. She is a member and we pay her with our own personal money and not the “sacred funds”. It's really nice because its kind of hard to wash clothes with a scrubbing bar and a bucket of water but I don’t really mind it, its just time consuming. So those pics that Kens sent are so sweet! That’s so cool that Jeremy got to do that! I have been taking some pictures too but I don’t have enough to make it worth it to send home a CD yet, but I will in a little while. Transfer day is on November 5th so if your going to send me something get it out about 3 weeks prior to that date and I'll be able to get it then. I'm trying to think on what you could send, candy and beef jerky and some Mac and cheese! They have American candy here but its so expensive! Oh yeah maybe a fun card game too (not phase ten though lol) the teaching is going well our investigators seem really receptive and the two people we are baptizing on Saturday (17th) have really strong testimonies. The older one of the two is a mom of 3 two girls that live in Manila and her boy is 7 his name is Justin and he gets so excited when we come over to teach! He grabs our hands and pulls us in as fast a he can! It's so funny. The other one is a younger girl (15) and she is an awesome investigator! I'm so excited for them! Saturday and Sunday are going to be such great days. Now the language…. Well I learn words here and there, the sentence structure is just to weird to me, I'm not really going anywhere with it but I just have to keep trying. Its really about half and half in the English to Tagalog in the city tons of people talk English but its so terrible I would rather just have them speak Tagalog and not understand what they are saying and nod my head then not understand their English haha and yes we really don’t tract for a couple of reasons, the people find it offensive if we are going door to door. And during the day its really hard to get to someone just randomly walking up so we set up appointments to return and they are usually there. We got a ton of referrals from the members last night because we went on splits with a couple of the ward members because we had so many appointments to fill so we got a ton of referrals. It's hard to work here a little because the last missionaries were really disobedient and stopped teaching some of the progressing investigators so some of them are mad at us but we are fixing it. Usually we decide beforehand who teaches what and stuff so I have a little time to figure out what I'm going to say. So yesterday was conference it was in English and it was great! It went by so fast! A couple of our investigators came and said they liked it so that’s good. I had a hard time going to priesthood session without dad, it made me really sad! I miss the little big things like that. The meetings are split up into two days like they are there...Saturday and Sunday. So I think I answered all your questions you had a lot haha. So when I was reading about Thomas, it made me really sad the he had died, its really weird when someone passes away that you were friends with but thanks for sending me that! Well I hope your guys week goes by great! I hope it doesn’t get to cold their I wish you could send me some of that cold here, that would be nice! :) I miss you all and I love you all!!!! Go hit up the slopes for me at least once this year!:) Tell all my friends I say hi! Have them drop me an email or something sometime.

Love,

Elder Mulliner