Tuesday, November 2, 2004

Well I’m sitting here at 8:30, the only one awake in our apartment. When we got back to Calintaan today we went out to try to visit Bro Pudan again. Elder Cox’s leg really started to hurt him and he was having trouble walking. We have to walk through the bukid, rice field, in order to get to Pudan’s house and it really was hard on Elder Cox. We also tried to visit Bro Andales but he wasn’t home, and by that time Elder cox was in so much pain that he could hardly walk. We decided to just come back in so that he didn’t hurt himself. He really is in a lot of pain and I feel bad for him. I just gave him a blessing and how he’s in bed resting.

Riding on top of the jeepeny with Elder Cox

This morning at district meeting we found out that the balanced effort hours are changing again. We used to do 40 hours of conversion, 10 of retention, and 10 of activation in a week. Now it has changed so that we do 50 hours of conversion and 10 hours of combined activation, branch work, and retention. It’ll be really hard to get those hours in but I have to obey before I complain.

On the way back from district meeting we went up to Magsikap, the mountains, to visit our investigators, the Manzos, up there. We’ve been hearing that the whole family up there has been drinking even the members. We were talking with people and we figured out that the people don’t think that drinking is wrong unless the Elders catch them at it. I’m not exactly sure how many, or who exactly, was involved, but we have to fix it. I guess you could classify this day overall as kind of discouraging but also motivating. I really need to step up in all aspects—teaching skills, language, everything.