Week 8 - First Area

First off I want to start this off by saying I am safe and excited to finally be here and I also wanna say that I had people tell me what the Philippines was going to be like for the past two months and no matter what they told me it would never prepare me enough to know exactly what it would be like. There is also just way too much to write about and my writing will never do it complete justice.

It's kind of crazy to finally be here walking through the city, riding in jeepney's, teaching lessons in a different language, but only understanding when they talk slow enough, lol. I really love the people here because they are all just so happy and everyone stares at me because I'm white and I'll hear a kid in the distance yell AMERICANO!! The people are also great because everyone wants to hear from the missionaries because we talk about Jesus and then we hit them with the doctrine of families being together forever and the great apostasy and how through Joseph Smith it returned. I've only taught in my actual area for two days and we extended like 7 baptism invitations and they all accepted. Also the kids here crack me up so much...they are just constantly outside running, playing, and laughing with the missionaries.

My companion is Elder Amone who is a huge Tongan professional rugby player from Australia. He is awesome and has helped me not die like 10 times already..joke (kind of). My mission President is a super short awesome Filipino. President and sister Deyro are so nice, but they're only here for a year so I'll appreciate them while I can. The food is either rice or way too sweet or will give you food poisoning so I just eat rice and too sweet spaghetti. But the fruit here is fantastic... a perfect amount of sweet, sour, and refreshing. The heat is way intense and I thought when the sun would go down it would cool down, but you end up just sweating more....I can literally feel the pores in my face slowly open up. when it rains here it comes down hard, but don't worry it's still super hot. There are animals literally everywhere you go. Cows and water buffalo on every field, cats and rats in every alley, dogs in every street, and chickens in every lawn. Every bug here is huge and twice as scary except the mosquito's so you never notice them till it's too late. P.S. we take bucket showers, there is no toilet paper, and I ate Balut.

You can ask anyone here if I like it here or not because every time i'm just walking through a giant rice field and looking around seeing a lighting storm in the distance I just yell I love the Philippines. Also I realized when I focus on the work of bringing others closer to Christ time just flies by and I love every minute of it. I'm so happy to be out on the field.

Some on the member kids

 At the Manila temple

On splits while teaching this awesome family

 Elder Amone and I in our apartment

 Jollibee is like the best place to eat here

I'm just buying everything here because everything is dirt cheap. This first week had been crazy overwhelming, but i'm good with just going with the flow. I need to take more pictures because there's literally so much going on I forget to take anything. Its hot. There's way more to talk about, but that's pretty much it for now because we have to pay for the computers mins.

Love,

Elder Terry