Friday, November 26, 2004

Today was a really effective day. This morning we went to try to help Bro Romell start building his house. We got to his lot at about 8:15 and just waited. He apparently doesn’t know how to lay out the house and so we were waiting for the people who knew how to do it. They never showed up and so Bro Romell just took us to his house and fed us a porridge of rice and egg. It was a very good marienda. Because we didn’t have anything to do we went back to the house and changed. I had to get another shower from the bucket in smelly bukid water. We went out to Bro Pacheco’s house in Panay OYMing as we went. We talked to a lot of good people. At Pacheco we were just planning to read with him and follow-up but he ended up asking a question about baptism and also about the word of wisdom. Our discussion wasn’t exactly what we had planned but it was good anyways. At lunch we worked on our “Increasing Spiritually” quiz. We hope that by letting the branch members rate themselves on different areas we’ll be able to strengthen the branch. We also at lunch had a good discussion about the temple and about marriage etc. for our companion study we’re studying the church handbook of instructions. It’s very interesting. After lunch we went out to Nanay Cabanig’s house because she had a referral for us. We got to teach her neighbors, the Gregorios, a first lesson and it went well. The family was first taught by Elder Manning and was dropped because they were really busy. Hopefully they’ll start to progress now. We then waited for a long time for S. A.to get home from the mountain. When he finally got there he was really drunk and so we just told him that we’d come back tomorrow. We then went to Dagupan and had a really good reading/discussion with the Viloria family. We also got to have a good discussion about not working on Sunday with Bro E. C. It was really strange because we didn’t even have an opening prayer and Elder Cox just started in talking about the Sabbath day. I wasn’t sure what he was doing and so I didn’t really give him the help that I should have.