Ocean Font

It's so beautiful here.  The branch is great and we will be building a real church.  So we can just focus on people by church now saying it's just next door and build their faith until they are will to travel for church and then we can just do the same thing at the new location.  We are going to be calling more members coming up, for the Presidnecy.  President Trebuscia is the branch president.  He is a recent convert obviously and he once was a sea man but we quit that so he could attend church and when Pres. Koster found that out he immediately called him as branch president.  My companion is awesome.  This is his first time training and he goes home in march?  I think President Koster is expecting me and E. Ivins to learn fast because E. Ropati are very good missionary is leaving after 12 weeks of training and I think Pres. wants to move E. Cayton soon enough.  But my companions great, his first language is not Tagalog and he learned English too on his mission.  He's good at English but like most filipinos he's much to shy to use it really and make mistakes.  He's very hard working and rarely super serious.  My first companion that after joking around during role play who said that joking was good.  The foods good.  I actually had balut this week and you can see the head and eyes and all but it was honestly really good.  I plan on eating it more.  But we have this little place next to our house thats super cheap where you get a couple scoops of rice and a very small portion of some kind of meat.  Everywhere are these little stores where we stop by often and get a coke, some weird good candy and noodles if we cook them at home.  Or bakeries, every pastry cost about 5 p, and the bread is natually just sweet.  But the other elders in our area are very strong, both big football guys.  But E. Ropati is very good (pretty sure secretly he held a certain calling)  but they always put up bigger numbers than us.  We had a breaking record, apparently, last week of 45 new while they had a typical 67ish.  Although our mission is going up in the ranks of Philippines missions we are lower than expected so president wants us to break the norm.  Our record for baptisms in a month is 3 and the other companionship is 11.  But I'm not jealous or anything, it just motivates me, I know we are about to get more new investigators in a week than them.  And it's really a huge blessing, I didn't think about it but the batch that I came in with (27) is by far the biggest ever in the mission so president was stressed out with trainers.  And I should have guessed that I won't have gotten a trainer that has done it before but E. Cayton is defientley for me and ever night I talk to E. Ropati or if we ever have a Tagalog word that E. Cayton can't describe in english I just write it down and ask E. R later.  So we live together and sleep in the same room.  Sleeping never feels hot, you have the fan and you are much to tired to not just fall right asleep but I never feel hot falling asleep.   Wash clothes:  a month or 2 before I came in everyone was given washing machines so I don't have to wash it by hand.  You just have to wash the soap out between changes and you hang up your clothes on hangers even thou nothing ever gets completely dry.  Things just get wet. 

We are having a easy time working hard as a companionship but it's not as easy to work smart.  But we identified this and we are improving it.  It's easy to find but very hard to get investigators to progress.  Nanay Miriam was supposed to get baptized this last saturday but she is too scared.  Because she doesnt want the responsiblitly/commintment to go to church everyweek.  Even tho when we asked if she likes going to church and she said yes and she said she wants to keep going and she keeps drinking just a "little" coffee.

The baptism I was just going to be a witness only but I got suddenly pushed the last one and I struggled to pronounce the name but the water felt great and the water was perfect