Bali

Magandang hapon sa inyong lahat!

   Before I forget, can someone please accept the friend requests from Andrea Pulanco, Lily Corilly, and maybe someone with the last name Salanga? They are people here in this area and will hopefully be posting pictures that might be fun for you all to see!
    How was everyone's weeks? Was that correct grammar? Who knows. Anyway, to be honest, I hope that some people had a better week than Sister Galera and I had this week. It was a pretty discouraging one and it just went by way too fast. I really feel my time ticking here in San Juan and there just isn't enough time in the day to get everything done! And today is no exception, so lets get into what happened this week!

    Our magandang moment for the week is with Sister Kathleen :) Oh man, although Sister Kathleen is sobrang magaling (so great) and is now a recent convert, she has actually been one of our focuses for this week and has pretty much been to constant focus in my mind. But what has been so great with her this week was she has become way active in the relief society and is actually choreographing their carribean sayaw (dance) for the RS activity this weekend! She is really becoming a part of the ward and we are so grateful for that.

    We had a fair share of sayang moments this week but I will just share a couple. Neither Jeff or Hesa came to church this week which is totally a bummer. And the other is that we had an incident at the church where there was a miscommunication about the time of a meeting and it's a way long story but I think in the process, two of our recent converts including Kathleen got offended. For a missionary there is not much more scary than for a recent convert to be offended especially by ward members. But of course every cloud has a silver lining, and I guess in the end this is just a continuation of the magandang moment because after the incident on Saturday, Kathleen said she probably wouldn't be at church the next day. But she came, and during Sister Paduga's great talk about agency and making choices to not give up in life, Sister Kathleen just broke down crying. It was exactly what she needed to hear. The Lord is so aware of His children and their needs.

In other news, We have a new missionary! Sister Gaddy has been transferred to La Trinidad :( we all miss her a ton but Sister Paduga is now here and we are really excited. I am out of time so you won't get to know about Sister Paduga until next week. Although this was a pretty rough week, there is always something we can learn. The whole purpose of our lives is to go through hard times and to learn from them. Learn what to do better next time and learn what to be grateful for amongst the negative. I love you all. I hope you all take care.

Until next week,

Sister Sawada