Elder Merrill's Current Address

Elder Merrill's Current Address

Elder Nathaniel Merrill
Philippines Baguio Mission
PO Box 7 (po box for letters only)
Brgy: San Vicente East
Urdaneta City, Pangasinan 2428
Philippines

Monday, May 21, 2012


It has been another great week here in the Philippines.  A lot has happened.  First of all on Wednesday I got my new companion.  My new companion is Elder De Jesus, straight from the Manila MTC. He of course is Filipino and he is from Manila.  Being from Manila means that he speaks Tagalog.  He speaks pure Tagalog, not other Philippines dialects, which is good because that means he knows Tagalog very well,and he can definitely still help me in Tagalog. We are doing well and are teaching well so far.  
         In the Philippines there are 3 seasons.  Hot, Even hotter,and rainy.  Right now it is almost into the rainy season.  It doesn't rain every day, but it rains more often now than it did before.  One day this week it very suddenly started raining very hard.   We walked in the rain for a few minutes until we passed a house with people playing outside in the rain.  They invited us to come sit on their porch, so we spent some time sitting on the porch and talking to them.  It turned out that none of them are members, but that they have a lot of family who are members. We were glad that they were nice enough to let us avoid the rain and they told us we could come back and share about the gospel.  It's funny that we only found this family because of the rain.  This week we happened upon one other great investigator. A few weeks ago I mentioned one of our investigators close to baptism left town, well he left his wife and two kids here while he went away for work for a month.  We decided to visit his wife (who is a member) and share with her about the importance of baptism hoping to help strengthen her faith in baptism as well.  It just so happens that because her husband is gone one of her cousins is staying with her to help with the kids.  We decided to share about the Restoration, and then when we came back she told us she had prayed and knew our message was true.  Essentially we could end up with two baptisms from this family instead of one.  All that came because Brother Christopher went away for work, which we saw as a great downside at the time. Of course his baptism was postponed, but if his cousin gains a testimony in the mean time it will all be worth it.  
        This week we had one kind of funny lesson.  We were teaching a little girl and her grandmother.  The little girl is 10, her name is Jenalyn.  Her grandmother was not paying attention at all while we were teaching, so half way through the lesson we developed a new strategy.  We taught Jenalyn, then we would ask Jenalyn to tell her grandmother what she had learned.  Her grandmother paid attention to her.  So we would teach Jenalyn well enough and simply enough for her to understand,then she summarized it for her grandmother.  It worked surprisingly well.  Afterwards they were both paying attention to us and both understood.  
            I am out of time here, but I would also like to mention I met some people from Provo.  Well they are from here but now are living in Provo.  The Edos family (i am pretty sure)  Anyway Sister Edos teaches Tagalog at BYU.  She also told me there was a Filipino teacher in the nursing department. 

--
Good luck to you all and have a wonderful week,
                                                                           Elder Nathaniel J. Merrill

No comments:

Post a Comment