The past couple of weeks have been wonderful, productive, and CRAZY busy! We are still waiting for our Visas to come through and like any other country, Philippines bureaucracy is as healthy and well as the US! The only problem with that is that we can drive with US licenses for 90 days after arriving in the country. After that, we lose our driving privileges until we get our VISAS and can apply for a Filipino drivers license. There are lots of ways to get around in a big city like ours…. BUT… those options do NOT include helping find apartments, helping missionaries move out of or into other apartments, and make shopping very, very difficult. We officially lose our driving privileges this Thursday and we are dreading that change. As adventurous and hard as driving can be here – we don’t want to miss our chance to laugh every day over something we see while driving! I’ll include pictures of just the past 2-3 days.
We are still healthy and well. We still love the people of the Philippines and in fact, learn to love them more and more as we stay here longer and interact more and more. I can already list 10 things that I am going to REALLY miss about this country when we come home. I won’t go into the whole list now but for Roy it will be the extra-spicy chicken at Jollibee’s (Southeast Asias version of McDonalds). For me…. I think aside from the gorgeous, happy children…. It’s the fruit! Southeast Asian fruits are TO DIE FOR!! I’ll do pictures and more info later on that topic.
OK… back to this past week or so; we have been solving lots of housing problems AGAIN! We have apartments that flood regularly. We have apartments with grouchy landlords that won’t fix things, we have apartments that are simply not suitable or healthy to live in! Each week we have an early Monday morning “Council” meeting to talk about the upcoming week, calendar, priorities etc. with the 8-10 Cebu area Mission Leaders, Young missionary leaders, and the senior missionaries. The meeting usually lasts about an hour and on busy weeks two! And we focus on what needs to be accomplished for the rest of the week. That work never really gets done! BUT…. Trying to get things done is different than we are accustomed to & definitely NOT in our comfort zone. It takes forever to drive anywhere and often several trips to the same location are required to take care of everything. Record keeping and legal requirements are somewhat archaic and there are LOTS of paper records! I think we are going to come home either so exhausted we never get out of bed again, or so patient everyone will be amazed! Our corporate, “git-r-dun” attitude just does not fly over here. Things take time to discuss and must “develop” …. It is very interesting… sometimes frustrating…sometimes inefficient…. But we are certainly learning that OUR WAY is not the only way. And sometimes we come out of a situation with a life-long friend! These are really good lessons for our impatient selves! Many days we are humbled at how things work out and how much we learn, despite how we thought it SHOULD go, and it still works out! The people we interact with often inspire us – young AND old! And as corny as this may sound to some of you – The Lord works in mysterious ways AND… we see miracles almost every day! I testify that miracles are still happening.
The other side of this work is that we probably haven’t taken enough days “off” lately so there are tired and crabby moments! We certainly don’t always have correct responses, but we usually work through them effectively. To be honest … it is hard after each of us has been together almost 48 years AND learned to be independent – and then go backwards in time to living in a VERY small space and not get on each other’s nerves sometimes. We are NOT perfect… but we are doing pretty good and most days we just laugh at each other and the things around us.
One last thing for this week’s message; we are AMAZED at the Leaders of this mission; Omer and Amy Fernandez are a young couple in their 40’s with four children. One married, one serving a mission, one in college and a 15-year-old still in high school at home! Both left AND on the faith that they will find an equivalent job when they return in three years. They are NOT rich and are NOT retired…. And frankly I think that is a LOT of faith! And… for any non-LDS people, nobody is paying them to do this! It is pretty amazing to watch them work so hard for over 200 missionaries in their assigned area and volunteer every waking hour and many hours when they SHOULD be sleeping… to be good disciples and help others come unto Christ. They truly are wonderful people and we have already learned to love them so much! I can say that they live a life of following one of the basic declarations of our theology stated in the 13th Article of Faith; “We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul – we believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.” This is EXACTLY how this couple lives and they are inspirational!
SORRY I BLAB SO MUCH!!
When it rains it pours! This little waterfall started just seconds after the rains started.
This little guy was NOT begging or asking for anything.... just walking along the sidewalk in his own little world, with his own little guitar, making music!
This was sooo fun and very typical of the happy Filipino people. These are a couple of shots of two teens that decided to take advantage of the 15 min. downpour to take a shower under a rain spout. Good, clean water.... running fast off the roofs.. notice how fast the water is running down the sidewalk... laughing and having a blast and taking advantage of a natural resource. We were stopped at a light and happened to catch this whole and it made our day!
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