2 January 2012

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           Diyos ta Fugag!‏

  
  

  Kamusta po kayo?

  This is probably the slowest internet I've had here and my keyboard is very annoying, so this may be a little short. I have a few pictures to send too but for some reason it won't work. Not sure if my card got a virus from being plugged into these virus filled computers or if it is just the computer. I'll try again next week. 

  It sounds like a good week of having a test run of being empty nesters! Thats going to be fun for you. Pretty soon, it will be the first time nobody else lives in the house! That will be really weird. I guess I don't need to tell  you that though. :) I'm guessing the biggest adjustment is going to be cooking for 2 people. I remember mom had a hard time with just 3 people-too much food and too little people! 

  Coming up this Saturday we should be baptizing JR. He is just 12 years old but his love for the gospel is very clear, and he's always asking us when our next appointment is. I started teaching him back when I was with E. Tangi. We also had the baptism of Peter for this saturday, but we had to move it til next saturday, which is too bad because that is 2 days after I will be getting transferred (most likely). President told me he has "plans concerning me" on transfer day so I guess we'll see what that means on January 12th! 

  Today was fun because it was "mission wide clean up day", meaning everyone was to deep clean their apartment. Who knew our sink was supposed to be stainless steel rather than brown? Haha. Our place was actually already one of the cleanest I've seen. Some of the other apartments I've done splits in have been absolutely disgusting. I've been very lucky to be in Cabagan so long because everyone says its the nicest and biggest apartment in the mission. 

  It has been a little weird in church the last 2 sundays because there hasn't been any sunday school or priesthood. It feels pretty weird just going to sacrament then going home. I can understand why they just had sacrament on Christmas, but I was kind of surprised that it was just Sacrament on New Years too. Probably because everybody was too tired from staying up all night! Haha. 

  New years here is definitely different than back home. I think its a requirement that everybody buys a bunch of fireworks to launch off during new years and new years eve. Everybody has the little annoying ones like firecrackers but louder, and some rich people launched off a bunch of big ones like it was 4th of july. It was pretty much impossible to sleep, so I climbed up on our roof  and watched them for almost an hour. Right around midnight the whole sky was glowing and flashing. Everybody has a party and a bunch of food, and all of the men get super drunk. One drunk guy came and tried to talk to me in English, but he was so drunk and his sentence structure was so terrible I couldn't understand him. At midnight, the tradition here is that everybody eats a big meal. It is a nice tradition because everywhere we went for about 2 days, people fed us. And dad-yes there are those floating candle balloon things here too. It reminded me of the movie Tangled! Haha. I only saw a few of them though. It was a great week for food because earlier in the week, it was a fiesta in one of the barangay's. The city government is kind of weird here in that within the city of Cabagan (or any city in the Philippines), there are several barangay's, which is basically a neighborhood. Then each barangay is run by a seperate mayor with councilors. It would be the equivalent of our ward boundary being run by separate people under the direction of the City mayor. Kind of weird and confusing. Anyways, once a year each barangay throws a fiesta, which basically means everyone that lives in the barangay has a bunch of food. Pretty much all week, we were fed everywhere we went. 

  Since Christmas is come and gone, I decided to regift a lot of the stuff I obtained from Christmas and put them in the stockings to give away. I gave away one stocking to a family with the CTR rings you sent and bunch of other random stuff like jacks and bouncy balls and the old 2011 calendar I had with the nice pictures in it, and it was great to see how excited they were over something so simple and useless to me, and to see that they are actually using the stuff and wearing the CTR rings. I plan on giving away everything else I can before I get transferred to make my load a little lighter. 

  Well, thats it for this week. Keep on doing what you're doing and have fun being empty nesters! Haha

  Mahal Kita, 

  Elder Nay