Monday, August 13, 2012
Molo, Iloilo City, Philippines
I have been suffering from a very upset stomach. I would not be surprised to learn that I have something, but the jury is still out. It's been killing me for a few days now. If it lasts another day, I'll tell Sister Pagagduan, but I don't want to be diagnosed with liver failure, so I'm not going to tell Sister about it yet. I think she'd do this:
1. Tell me to drink water
2. Tell me to take Pepto Bismol
3. Get me a doctor’s appointment
4. Tell me not to work for x amount of days
Then the #3 of that would say
1. Drink water
2. Take these 50 drugs for 5,000 pesos
3. Come back in three days
Then, three days later the doctor would say
1. You've got liver failure
2. Buy these drugs for 6,000 pesos
So instead of all that, I'll just drink water and take Pepto Bismol.
We had a good Family Home Evening last Monday. We were super stoked about it. It was with a really strong member family, and we had invited a ton of investigators and less-actives from their area. When it came time to do it, we went to round up everyone, but no one was to be found. Only one investigator attended, and she felt out of place. That was a bummer. We tried to make it as fun as possible so the lady would forget that she felt out of place. We succeeded, I think. We had a lot of fun. Afterwards, when we ate the snacks and were just talking, the parents of the family were talking to only us and not to our investigator. They were asking us about how we like Filipino girls and stuff like that. It wasn't too fun.
That investigator avoided us the last two times we went to their house. We don't know what is up.
Zone meeting is now three hours long. As a DL, I stand and give a report on how my district is doing. I stood up front and said a few things, and then said "And now to show you the love I have for the district, I will now song a song . . ." I was about to go sing "district I love you . . . district I do . . . father in heaven has sent me to you . . ." but Elder Light grabbed the mike from me and said “O.K., we'll stop you there.” Afterwards he said he didn't want me to sing because President Pagaduan was there. It was funny either way though.
We went over the Sermon on the Mount with one of our investigators, Maria. She has gotten through all the missionary lessons, so now we are teaching additional lessons. We’ve expanded on things like forgiveness and charity. Most people here know Jesus died on the cross, but that's about it. They have no idea what Jesus' teachings really are. They know he's "our savior" the same way I know George Washington is a founding father, but don't really know much about him. I am really happy to do stuff like read Jesus' teaching with investigators. I don't feel like we get to do that enough as missionaries.
We gave out two more baptismal dates this week, one of which was to a gay kid. He's not quite making some promised changes, but he is at least reading the scriptures and stuff. He didn't show up for church yesterday.
We also gave one to our investigator Noel. He's doing really well. He's reading and understands why he needs to get baptized and stuff. In the last lesson we had with him, he gave a great closing prayer. He asked for help to make his goal of October 6. We set a ways off cause he'll have some Word of Wisdom stuff to take care of.
I fasted yesterday. I don't know if that's a great thing to do when you're dealing with diarrhea, but I got through it okay. Between fasting and diarrhea, I was pretty dead during church. After church and lunch in Arevalo, I got super sick. We only did one lesson yesterday because I was feeling so sick. I'm doing better now, but this morning was pretty bad.
In fact, during that one lesson we did yesterday, I felt super bad. We decided to go out and get that lesson because it's not far from our house. It's good that's all we tried because after the lesson we had to run back to the house.
I totally understand how people died from this stuff back in the day. Dysentery. We are being real upbeat about it though.
We actually had a great week for work. We have been doing great working with the ward and have their trust. This is the most any ward has been involved in the work. We are asking a wide range of people to help us out. We are surprised a lot of older people are willing to join us for an appointment or two.
In Bugasong, we used to have a few people work with us and they'd usually work for 5 or 6 hours. Here we have two or three people work with us for an hour and a half each. It takes a lot of planning, and it is really using up the load on our cell phone, but it seems to be more effective. We are also taking our investigators to members’ houses that live close by and teaching them there. That way we're playing a home game opposed to an away game.
Well that's about it. Go ahead and laugh about the dysentery. We are. The whole mission office has it too. They just got theirs yesterday. It's not from me because I didn't see anybody from the office until yesterday midday.
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