So this week had some interesting things happen.    One is that we met a less active named Pedro and learned that he had been hit by a grenade.  He was in the wrong place at the wrong time and a grenade exploded in front of him.  Strange enough you can't even tell.  He barely even got hurt.
  We met another less active named Nida.  She was really nice and it seemed like she would definitely be coming back to church.  Well it turns out she is under house arrest and cannot leave or she will get a 2000 peso fine.  It's sad because she seemed really excited when we went over.  Not everything that happened was that weird though.  We have one returning member named Liza and she has come to church 5 times now.  She is just a great find because she started coming to church immediately and has kept coming.  Now she is interested to go the temple in May with the ward.  We also extended a baptism date for her daughter this week, who is 9, on April 6th.  Sister Liza knew that April 6 was the day the church was founded and was excited for that day for her daughter.
 We also have a family we are teaching right now with a lot of little kids so we wanted to make it fun for them.  For our lesson we did a scripture chase.  Each child had a Book of Mormon and we would tell them a page number, the first child to find the page number reads the scripture for that page (all the scriptures were about going to church) and the child also gets a point.  Whoever has the most points at the end gets to say the closing prayer.  They were super excited about this, even though none of them are very good at reading.  Well after the game they understood a lot more about going to church, it was pretty successful.  I don't know very many situations where you can make the prizes for a game reading a scripture and saying a prayer but they enjoyed it a lot.
   I think I mentioned that we walk a lot in Mapandan, I think we broke the daily record this week.  We started from our home and walked all the way to one end of our area.  We had an appointment out there and when we were just getting close to the house we saw them leave.  We talked to the people in that area, and we did meet some nice people, but didn't get to teach.  We had planned to take a tryke to our next appointment, but due to our misfortune there were none to be had which meant we walked literally to the other end of our area.  I don't think you can walk very much farther in one day in Mapandan than we did that day.  That day we also saw a giant mango tree.  I took a picture.  In the background is a 2 story building.  We also got a referral the next day and we were told the person lives near the giant mango tree so it was good we found the tree because now we can go teach someone that lives over there.

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                                                                          Elder Nathaniel J. Merrill
                                                                        Philippines Baguio Mission