KUMUSTA!!!!
I'm here!! I still can't even believe it; it doesn't feel like it's quite real yet. But I have SO much to write about so I'm just going to start and bust it out. So sorry, no pictures this time but I'll work on it for next week. First of all, that place is crazy, talaga, but I LOVE it! The traffic is out of control. People play frogger like nobody's business and I'm so shocked I have yet to see an accident. Coming from the airport we rode in a shuttle and there were multiple times where we almost crashed. It's pretty hilarious. Main types of transportation are Jeepneys, which are just old army jeeps that they decorate and have routes around the city, Tricies, which, just picture a beat up old motorcycle with a side car attached and then image usually 2-3 philippinos on the seat and then 3 to sometimes 5 shoved into the side care. Haha, it's like seeing how many people you can fit in a telephone booth. Too funny. The area I'm in is Tandang Sora; it's basically a ton of houses and some markets and stuff. But it's definitely pure city. It's super dirty, and most the time smells like an outhouse, I have to be quite honest. But I don't really care because I'm just glad to actually be here! The houses are tiny and connected with all these little tiny alley ways. A lot of the people really have nothing in their houses. The whole thing is about the size of my room downstairs, sometime with an upstairs, sometimes not. Sometimes they don't even have a complete roof or complete walls, but then again, here you don't really need it to be perfectly enclosed because it's so hot all the time.
My apartment isn't too shabby at all. We actually have one shower with a shower head, so that's nice. The toilets don't flush though so you have to fill up a bucket and pour water into the toilet to get it to go down. Whitney might have some problems in this place :) haha. And there is toilet paper! Honestly though, if I had to go the other way, I'm totally up for anything. I pretty much get eaten alive every night, whether I wear bug spray or not. You should see my legs. They're covered in bites and of course I don't have enough self control to not scratch them.
My companions name is Sister Schardt. She's from California and she was actually in the Manila mission and got transferred to the Quezon mission when they split a couple months ago. This is her last transfer here so she'll go home in 5 weeks. That means I'll have 2 trainers. It's been good with her though. She's very organized, which of course I like :) and she's a hard worker. She's pretty uptight though and likes to correct me a lot, which is ok because I'm new. It's super hard though because she is horrible at Tagalog. It's frustrating for me because I can't understand what they're saying back to me because they talk so fast, and about half of the time she can't tell what they're saying either. Needless to say, kind of hard to teach effectively when neither one of us knows what's going one. It's hard too because I don't want to copy her because I know she's doing it wrong. That's how bad she is. Even I can pick up on her grammatical mistakes and that's saying something because I'm absolutely horrible though. I feel bad for her though because that would be hard to have been here the whole time and still not completely understand the language. I am not going to let that happen with me. I will learn this language, if it takes all the brain power I possess. And I'll learn the correct way to speak it, not just enough to get by. That's my goal. Anyway, it's been good though. I'm still trying to learn how to teach some of the lessons and I'm really halting when I speak. haha, sometimes they just tell me, "speak english!" and I tell them no, I'm trying to learn. It's so funny. It's hard though because I want to street contact or talk to people in jeepneys but I can't because I don't understand their responses and sometimes my companion doesn't either. We're dealing with a major language barrier here.
They people here are so nice; seriously though. You can pretty much say hi to anyone and they'll at least acknowledge you. The first things they say to me are "maganda ka" which means, you're pretty and then they mention my rosy cheeks, my eye color (they ask if I wear colored contacts) and my hair. They think my hair is beautiful which I just sit and go, you've got to be kidding right! I look like a Q-tip! Oh my goodness, you should just see my hair. I have NEVER seen it this curly ever and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. So I don't do anything. Haha. The weather is hot. You pretty much sweat just sitting there, but I thinks it's because of the humidity more than anything. I drink so much water, I swear, but I never have to go to the bathroom. It just sweats straight through me. It pretty much rains everyday. Sometimes hard, sometimes not. The food is good. Everything that I've tried so far anyway. My body is kind of having a freak out though because all they have here is breads, cereals, rice, meats and a little bit of vegetables. Fruits are pretty expensive in the cities so we don't get them as much. I'm just craving a juicy apple or to knaw on a cucumber, no joke. But I'm scared to eat veggies uncooked here because it's one of the ways you get parasites the most. Maybe I'll splurge and get an apple though. Yep, that's what I'm going to do.
Ok, now for the fun stuff. Our investigators are awesome. We have about 12 people we're teaching right now. Honestly, there are not enough hours in the day to do everything that we need to. There's just so much work to be done. Even with the mission split there's still about 6 million people in our mission boundaries. yep. My favorite investigator right now is Jeyar. He's golden, honestly though. They taught him one lesson before I got here and gave him a Book of Mormon, so that would have been last week, and already he's almost through 1st Nephi, has read all the pamphlets we've give him AND done the additional study at the back of each of them, came to church with us yesterday and committed to baptism. This is going to sound crazy, but when I first met him, you could tell there was something different about him. He had a glow, a good feel. I don't know how to describe it. But he's ready, I just feel it. I hope everything goes through because he's about 21 so that means future priesthood holder and future missionary. Yes. It's the most rewarding thing in the world to see how happy and excited he is about it. That was one thing president said when he was interviewing me. He said, There's so much work to be done here and so many people are prepared and I've thought about it a long time. Why don't we have pass along cards or other resources for the Philippines. And he says, I think it's because the structure of the church just isn't ready for it yet. It needs to be stronger. So that's what we need to do…make strong converts that make strong wards so that it really can boom. I love it because when I walk down the streets I can just see how much these people need the gospel. Just for hope or to know that there's something more, you know. I've loved it.
My mission president is amazing. He's pretty soft spoken, but he knows what he's talking about. According the Sister Schardt, he's way strict, but I say go for it. If we're going to do the Lord's work, let's do it his way. So I'm ok with that. Just a few other weird culture things. We have one long term investigator that hasn't been baptized yet because her and her husband aren't married. They have 9 kids and have been together for about 30 years. That's pretty common here. Oh yeah, and the little kids are the greatest! They are honestly the cutest things in the entire world! Tell Whitney, if she wants to make brown babies, marry a Philippino because they have the cutest kids ever. They'll flock around us when we walk down the street and ask us all these questions. My favorite is "wash you name?”. Haha, too funny. Anyway, I'm out of time. I'll save the rest for next week. I love you all and I hope everything is going fantastic!
Mahal na mahal ko kayo!!
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