Sandali Lang Promise!

Hi Everyone!

    Happy Birthday Lyle! Hope it was a great day! Sorry this email is going to be sandali lang (just short) because my computer wasn't wanting to work and so now I only have a little bit of time left :( But it's alright because this week was great! But I've had time to think of what I want to focus on. Oh and the email title is sandali lang promise because that is what we have to say to some people sometimes to get them to let us teach them. We say sandali lang kami promise! (we will just be quick, promise!) haha

     Anyway so this week started out a little rocky. On Tuesday we went to the eatery of a new family in our ward. Eateries are super common here. They are pretty much just a stand with food and they often have tables and chairs that you can eat at. I am not sure how else to explain it, I will try to take a picture this week. Anyway so a family that moved here from Manila are opening an eatery and they wanted us missionaries to come and to have the Elders bless it. So Sister Nott, Elder Germaine, Elder Neilsen and I went and thought we would just pray and leave. But we should have known better. They told us to sit down and started dishing up some of their food. The food at eateries are the classic Philipino foods. So they ended up feeding us Dinuguan and Pinapaitan. Dinuguan comes from the word dugo which is blood. It is literally liver and pieces of pork fat mixed in pork blood. Blood. And then pinapaitan comes from the work mapait which means bitter. And it is just the insides of an animal, usually a goat, but the one we ate was cow. The bile of the animal is what makes the broth bitter and it's just not the tastiest thing. I feel like I am pretty good at eating...haha...and the dishes didn't taste too bad actually. But later on throughout the day Sister Nott and I were starting to feel pretty nauseous and we think our bodies just weren't used to eating those kinds of things. We went to the Limbauan family that night and they told us we shouldn't have eaten those things haha. It's funny because they eat it all the time but they really discourage foreigners from eating some of their foods.

     So that whole day was a little difficult, but then things started picking up! Something especially great happened with the Velasco family! I am sure I have mentioned them before. They have like 4 sons but we are focusing on one of them in particular because we really see potential in him to return and possibly even serve a mission! We visited them and we ended up reading/listening to the talk by President Uchtdorf from the Priesthood session this last conference. It's called Are You Sleeping Through the Restoration? I would recommend everyone read it! And then read it again and again because the message in there is so so good and so important. The whole message seemed to strike the son who we are focusing on and he especially liked the point that President Uchtdorf makes about how addictions can start from repeated actions and turn into bad habits. At the end of the lesson we invited them to the ward activity that week and they seemed to kind of just laugh at our invitation. But guess what? They came!!! It was so exciting. And the mother and one of the sons also came to church. We wanted to be a little discouraged when we saw that the particular son who we have been focusing on didn't show up to church, but Sister Nott reminded me that by small and simple things, the Lord is going to make great things come to pass. So we decided to focus on the positive :) I wish I could share more but I'm just gonna send some pictures from the activity and try to share more next week! I love you all! Have a great week!

Sister Sawada