Week 47: Operation Happy Monday

Hello all of you faithful readers, I hope I wasn't jumping the shark in my use of the plural just then, but I'm pretty sure Mom and Dad read this every week.

It's been such a week. On Wednesday, Elder Pino and I had exchanges with the Zone Leaders in their area, and I'm not gonna lie, I covet their area pretty hard. It's right in the middle of the city, has got 3 malls and a metric butt-ton of people all over the place. I kinda figured they had it pretty easy, but when we went out to work on Wednesday, Elder Herrera and I got one of the worst whoopins I've got on my whole mission. nobody was home. Nobody kept their appointments. but because we're good boys, we just started talking. To each other, yeah, but mostly to literally everyone else we saw. And you know what, it really taught me something about missionary work. You have a choice. If you want to just submit and let the day kick you in the but you can, but then you just wasted a day, and you don't have many of those, I don't care how old you are. That day turned out awesome because we decided that it was going to be awesome and we worked to make it that way.

Also this week we saw a sad monkey, so we gave him a mango

He really doesn't like it on that chain, and I really wish I could just let him free, but I think his owners would get mad at me. I think he liked the mango though.

The box is his little monkey house.

In less sad news, I went to a waterfall a few weeks ago, but never sent any pictures, but this is that:

Love,

Elder Menzie

Tagalog like it's hot:

Aray! -- Ouch!

Week 46: kayod kalabaw

This has been a pretty fun week, especially if you consider running around like a chicken with its head cut off to be a really fun time.

This week on Thursday and Friday Elder Pino  and I, along with the other missionaries in our house were told we had to go into the city to get an official interpretation for the Echo cardiogram of one of our roomates.

Not gonna lie it was more than a little tedious, mostly because on Thursday we were trying to get an interpretation for an EKG that nobody seemed to have a copy of. I don't know if it's just the western civilization in me, but I feel like it shouldn't be too much to ask for places to have at least a digital copy of an important medical procedure they've given to somebody, but as the saying goes:  "It's more fun in the Philippines," and we just print off the hard copy of an EKG and after that it's like it never happened. It's okay though, because we did eventually get our hands on a copy of the EKG and got it interpreted and I felt like such a pro.

We also had a service project this week, where we sifted all the big stones out of this gravel, and put the fine dirt into bags, and mixed some of it into cement. I made a smiley face in the cement:

Other than that, we've really just been working this week. The past few weeks, it's been kinda hard for us to get new people who we are teaching  to come to church, which is a pretty important part of their progression. We always invite a lot of people, but mostly they're just no shows. It was so fulfilling this week to see several people who we had just started teaching this week seated in church before we even got there. I love this verse in Luke 2:

37 For with God nothing shall be impossible.

It's so simple, and so powerful. we need God's help every day, and I'm so extremely grateful for his help in this work, especially when I feel like I just can't do it on my own.

Love,
Elder Menzie

Tagalog with a kick:
kayod kalabaw -- a figure of sppech that means hard work

Pictures:

Me eating at McDo

Elder Pino and I at the service project

a nice sunset