This week was pretty great, we had so much stuff this week that we had to do so we couldn't go out and work as much. But we still put in a decent week of work. Nothing really amazing happened this week, a batch just went home, prez let them go home a month early for Christmas which is pretty nice. I wonder what Christmas is like in America right now, it honestly doesn't feel like Christmas here, cause its hot, and there aren't any lights and no Christmas movies or anything like that. Prez said though that if we let it this Christmas has the potential to be one of the best, because even though we are not with our families and the whole gift exchange is as big, we have the opportunity to pay alot more attention to the true meaning of Christmas. Which is great, and its great for missionary work too, cause when I go up and talk to someone I ask there name and where they are from then sometimes say "Malapit ang Pasko, massiah ba ka" Which means Christmas is close, are you excited. They almost without fail say "Wala Christmas para sa akin, wala pera." Which means no Christmas for me, no money. That's when we can invite them to focus more on the true purpose of Christmas and testify of Christ. Its hard here though because there are so many poor people, and we aren't allowed to help them. When we eat at Macdo's kids outside will just come up and watch us eat. and that's hard for us cause you know that most of those kids are super hungry. Then when we are done and start to leave they come up to use and ask for money, but we aren't allowed to give any. Also something that is kinda of annoying is that kids will come by house to house in our neighborhood and start to carol, they only difference from doing that in America to here is that in America it is usually a service or doing it to be nice, but here they will sing until you come out and give them money. We either turn our lights off and they go away or we go out and give them pass along cards.
I am excited for Christmas though this week is gonna be so busy. Tuesday my comp and I are going on splits so I will be up in Ramon a little town 20mins outside of Santiago, then on Wednesday we have our Ward Christmas party, Thursday we have our Zone Christmas party up in Cauayan we have to do a performance for that, so our zone decided that we are going to do the Haka Dance, a famous Polynesian dance, we have a couple of big poly's in our zone and they are teaching us the haka. Anyway on Friday we have our Stake Christmas Devo, that our district is going to sing a Christmas song at. Then its Christmas eve and we will probably go to Cauayan. Then on Sunday it is Christmas obviously, and when we go out and try to work and stuff, we will probably just get feed. Sooo ya idk how much work is going to be happening this next week, however much we can fit around 4 hours of study and then all of the activities. We study alot, cause they put all the new missionaries on this new training program where we do the norm 1hr of personal study 1hr of language, then we do 2hours of comp study, and they gave us all this stuff we study, and it is supposed to get us trained faster, its supposed to get us to where we can train in after 12weeks, or two cycles, now is that we don't train for only 6weeks now we train for 12weeks.
Our investigators are still progressing pretty good, we gave Sarah a baptismal date, but their fam is going on a Christmas vacation for a couple weeks so we cant teach her so, we have to push back the date. Richard is doing pretty good, he is still super interested, but now we are just trying to get his fam interested and they are but we haven't officially invited all of them to pray to know it is true. Our next lesson with them I am hoping that we can do that. We had a great experience with Tatay Balagbaggan this week, on wednesday we went to visit him and he was heading out to the river to throw away a dirty diper (kinda gross way to throw it away) anyway when we got there he looked around and he has two caribou and one of them was missing, so we looked around for it and couldn't find it. So we went back to his house and we taught him about Joseph Smith again, then we asked them if they would pray to know if Joseph Smith was a true prophet and he didn't respond. He was super quite and so Elder Kelson was like what are you thinking and he was said about his lost carabou, he said he wasnt listening to us that whole time, haha cause he was worried bout his caribou. So we asked him to pray right there for Gods help in finding it, he said he would later, but we insisted now. Elder Kelson said to pray and he know God would help, he said to put God to the test and he would help. So Balagabaggan prayed for help, then we went back out and looked. Ha on our way there kelson was like "We gotta find this Caribou" anyway we went and looked around for a little while and couldnt find it, Tatay kept saying "wala" which means nothing. But we kept looking and finally found him in some random water hole, with some other caribou. Its weird though cause the last time we went looking we checked all over and didn't find it, but after we prayed we found it. So that was great, God does answer prayers haha! Tatay was really happy too, I hope that opened his eyes a little. But our next lesson with him we retaught Joseph Smith and asked him if he believed in him he said no, we asked him if he prayed about him and he said no, because he still doesn't believe God answers prayers cause he prays everyday for his knees to be healed but they are still really weak. We told him that if he prays about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon and our Church God will answer and then if he gains faith in that then he could pray again for help with his knees. I really think that if he can gain solid faith in Joseph Smith and our Church, then his legs can be healed, but not until he gains that faith. I told him that in the best tagalog I could...I hope that he could understand. Yesterday we went back to his house and watched the Joseph Smith story dvd I think that really helped him understand who Joseph was and just the basic history of him was.
Welp life is good here, I think that I am getting more used to the culture and stuff. Anyway
Mahal Kita
Elder James
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