October 25, 2010

Hello family,

Hello ... I am... In the philipines! oh yah!
(also hello to anyone else who may be reading this i guess)

um. well this week has been pretty bad in comparison to last week. In the work I mean. Like last week we had 36 lessons, and this week we had only 20.
For one we went to carbunatuon (or whatever, the place i sent the last email from) for zone conference. It was alright. had some people like the mission presedent and the mission presendents wife, and others give talks to us. They give us food every zone confrence, which unlike everyone else, am not really exicted for anymore. The food isnt bad. actally pretty good. some real philipineo food. But my body didnt like it much to say the least. With out going into too much detail, the usually 4 hour bus ride back home, which took about 5-6 because of the storm, had made it harder to drive on the now very bumpy ride (over the mountain), was a great battle for me, in defense of my pants. I belivie I won, but couldnt really be sure. I actally almost threw up a couple of times too. I found a bag, but I managed to fight it off. Anyways I got sick.. sort of, at least the sickest i have been. It lasted until about the next afternoon. But now i am doing fine. Whats werid is that kinda stuff doesnt actally bother me too much, after hearing how John had a similar experence, and still went a sold 2 more pest control sales that day. I figure if John could do that, I could still finish a night, and teach a couple lessions... less then clean (this may have already happend).

Anyways, I was getting to that the work hasn't been the best this week. we were gone till wednesday, which was part of it. Then there is an election, actally today. Something that happens every 3 years or something. Dont really know. But i do know that all of our investigators are at partys all the time, and its harder to teach. hopfully the partys stop soon. Also something annoying is, that this was the first day i was going to try to send a letter.... but the post office is closed because of the election. great. oh well, .. some day. I also hear it might take over a month.oh well.

Our investigoraters are .... good and bad. our family of investigators who, i thought was going to be able to be baptized on Nov 6., just got extended again. The father has stopped smoking, which is really good. But keeps missing church. The rest of the family is doing really really good. though. like the mother has great faith. She had a great burn on her leg, from some boiling water. her leg had boiles on it. still she has been coming to church. yesterday, her kids were there, but she wasnt. we were bummed, because the father was gone, and the mother. half way through sacrament meeting, she limps her way in, using an umbrella as a cruch. She lives at least 10-15, maybe even 20 mintues aways, for us, the missionarys to walk to their house. she must have been walking for over 40 mintues... maybe more. really cool. The kids are very active too. they are going to a stake youth camp this wedsday till saterday. Really cool kids. One of them actally has a guitar. I dont think he knows how to play it, and its made of wood... like someone just craved it out of a tree. but its old, really old. I tryed to tune it, which was pretty scary.. as i got closer to the right note, the string would make a noise like it was going to break. I got the first 5 strings. I didnt finish tuning the last (weakest string) yet. I might later. My compaion has some simplifed hymns, and so maybe ill play them for the family. Or teach richard how to play.

We have other investigaters we started teaching. lots of youth. which is good and bad. Good thing, all of our investioragors and members are really good friends. most are even going to the youth camp. The bad is that we are having a hard time teaching the familys still, and so its hard to figure out what we are going to do.

Dad asked me a couple of questions so i anwsered him... might as well share here too.

About the weather its been fairly hot. But i belive it gets hotter later (and its hotter in other areas). There is a lot of humitiy. I have ether gotten used to it, or it doesnt effect me as much as the others. prolly because I am used to always being wet anyways... so it just means i dont have to sweat as much. In my area (really close to beach), it rains every couple of days... to every other day. Ussally not all day, but i'll rain pretty good. Some times its gets pretty hard. I think the rain is nice. my compaion doesnt like getting wet tho. he also complains about the heat. hehe.

I havent had any here, (ice cream). I have had a chocolate shake, i dont really know what was in it. could have been ice cream.
They do have something called a halo-halo. I havent had one yet, but pretty popular. has corn and jello, ice cream i think, i think some times more stuff.
actally i have heard the ice cream tricycle play its muisc... but i dont really know what they sell.

About my companion...
He was a convert to the church 6 years ago. He has been on his mission over a year and 2 mouths. masbateno language is his native. he knows 6 different philipino dilaletcs, and english. Masbate City, Which is in southern luzon (or centual Philippines). Hes family is all members now. He is the first to be in the mission field. go to school and study education. work too.
oh this part i am adding - He calls me tigar every time i burp at him, prolly because of the tony the tigar shirt i have. Thats werid. But he thinks when i burp its werid, sooo its ok. And i have been getting good at making super burps. its sweet.

Oh so dad, there is a word here that I think that you would like. its 'grabe' (gra-be). Its an expression used here .. a good amount. I asked people what it ment for a while.. but no one could explain it. I think i figured it out.
I think it comes from the word, gravity (or my guess). Or heavy. Like the word you always say 'its not heavy, its your brother.' Its really similar for what i understand.
one meaning, people will tell me is that you use it to say, "thats terrible".
but its more like.. thats extreme (or.. intense).
Ill give a couple examples: Ill tell someone that i have 12 siblings. then I hear, gra..be.
or someone gets a really nice hit at mtc volleyball. 'graabe.'
If I tell someone that I left my watch on a bus and now its gone. 'grabe,'

anyways, I thought that was cool, because from what i understood from the word "heavy", its pretty similar. But they still use it here, a ton, unlike heavy. haha.

Well I think ill take off. I prolly forgot a bunch of stuff i wanted to say. oh well till next week.

Elder Dickinson

October 18, 2010

Hey,

um, again I will start with that I my worm count is still 0.

Yah. So I am in the Philippines. Oh yah. Ummmm hmmm

well some people were mentioning a typhoon or something. Right now I am actually back in carbernatuon, for zone conference. There is a level 2 typhoon warning here. I don’t know what that means. I think if its level 3 we aren’t supposed to work.

Anyways, today I am in carbernatuon... left baler, this morning at 5:30. For a 4 hour bus ride or something. Yah. So are at the mall for p-day, while we get some things done. While we were here, some missionaries went to a shoe store, to get some new slip on shoes (used for missionary work... laces have got pretty annoy... have to take them off at a lot of houses). It’s the most popular shoe I have seen with the missionaries. I looked at the price. 200 pesos. That’s about 4 bucks. Yah. I got some new shoes.

Well, about my area. Dipaculao . It’s pretty cool. Much less traffic than any other area I have seen. There isn’t an ATM in this city. I think there is a normal(ish) grocery store in baler, about 6 miles away. But there are plenty of tindahans (little street corner shops). Mostly we are on foot here. We go every other day between the south side and the north side of the city. There are a couple investigators that we take a tricycle to, but we don’t go there very often.

About food. Well I eat rice everyday breakfast, lunch dinner... that’s the good stuff. Well I try to eat it so much that my companion, who is Pilipino, got sick of it. Ha-ha. A couple of days ago we bought a whole chicken, some potatoes, and carrots. That with rice or this thing like Ramon noodles is pretty good.

Um well, this last week I think we had 36 lessons taught. From what I am hearing that’s a lot. Pretty much we have lessons all the time. We have 1 family, and another 13 year old boy who are getting close to baptism. One had a smoking problem, but has gotten over it, and there family has a strong testimony. The problem with them is the father missed general conference, and then this last Sunday, so they might have to wait longer now.

The teaching is interesting. Most of the time I understand about 1/3 of what’s being said, and if I guess about 2/3's. And then I am to teach. Yah. Hah I am getting better. We had another investigator who committed to baptism, but I didn’t know what he said. Yah... it’s kinda hard to teach when you don’t know what they are saying. Oh well.

Its kind of crazy some of the things that happen to us while we are out here. Good and... Weird. I’ll start with the good.
So we were walking to an appointment, and some family at their house said, "hey elders." or something. I or my companion weren’t sure who they were. He thought they were members or something. Anyways we keep going and go to Brother James. After teaching him, we are heading back the same way and they call out to us again. We go over to them, to talk, and they start by giving us 10-15 of these fruit things. I didn’t really understand who they were, but after wards I talked to my companion, and apparently it was 2 different families, nether one member. So I think we are going teach them later this week.

Another thing that happened. While we’re teaching a lesson, and just about to say the closing prayer, a nonmember and a member come over to the house we were teaching at. She said she wanted to hear the about the church. So we gave the closing prayer. And then she came in, and we taught her right there in the part-members house, we were already in. She is our most progressing investigator.

Well I think we got 8 investigators to come to church this Sunday, which was pretty cool. At church I blessed the sacrament in Tagalog. And I gave a short talk in tagalog. I am thinking now, that I should have went to my bag and pulled it out, instead of just winging it. yah, I am pretty sure they know my name and that I are from Oregon. That’s good enough.

so this isn’t one of the good things. kind of funny. though. So it was about 9:10, heading home. some guy is like elder elder. well he starts walking with us. I didn’t exactly know what he was saying, but my companion was saying that we needed to get home now. well he keeps walking with us, and it started to rain. So this guy throws his coat on my head, and runs under some one house roof-thingy. Well we go to him, to explain we got to go. Oh by the way, his coat was nasty! smoke, and a pretty sure he was drinking. He insists that we stay... and it starts raining really hard. hardest I have ever seen it rain. so we weren’t sure what to do, but he starts saying something to me, and my companion says hey, let’s just run. well I look back at the guy, and he is doing something really weird with his mouth, like he wants to kiss me or something. So I look back at my companion and we start running... really fast. hahaha. my companion couldn’t stop laughing the whole way. We had like 2 blocks to run, and people would tell us on the sidewalks (undercover) things like, Hey did you know it’s raining... haha... anywho, it was pretty funny. when we got back to the apartment, I locked all the doors, and my companion still laughing, writes under "elder Dickinson’s fan club members" 6.reynoldo. I was very scared that night. hah

hmmmmmm well, I haven’t figured out how this missionary work is hard yet. Maybe I have been just lucky or, I am still delusional, or am not working hard enough.

I mean we get up in the morning 6:30. eat rice. get clean from a nice cold shower (or scoop and bucket if we would like to). Then we get time to study, for a 2 hours. Next we go and try to make a couple appointments, or just go walk around and talk to people. Then from 12-3ish we are home because it’s too hot to be out. have lunch. language study. Then from about 3-9:20 we are at people’s houses and talking and teaching to people in some language I don’t understand. Then we eat dinner if we haven’t had it. then sleep which is really easy. usually am pretty tired by then. sun goes up at 6, down at 6 every day. meh.

oh well, I think that’s enough for now. ummmmmmmmmmm bye

Elder Dickinson

October 11, 2010

First letter From the field

Hello, I live! I am here in the Philippines.

To start, ill would like to say my worms count is 0.

Okay well,

I’ll give you a little run down what’s been going on. I landed in Manila, (can’t remember when), and when we got out, I my first thought, that it wasn’t as hot as I thought it was going to be. (It was still hot, but yah). We got in a van to head for Angeles. I think 3 hours. Melina reminded me of Egypt. Crazy traffic, (I’ll talk more about that later I think), and hot. Less sand thou, and more green and less heat then Egypt.

Any who I got to the mission home, and we stayed there a night. Oh hey, you know that joke (or whatever) that is like where you shake hands with someone, you live in a house, I live in a box.... you use toilet paper, I use my hand. Well... the box thing isn’t true here, (they have house thingys, with water and electricity, usually a TV too), But... I haven’t seen any toilet paper since I have been here. Maybe I am just not looking good enough, but.... not sure what I should be doing... yep, somehow I manage. I guess that enough of that. (Actually, in my apartment here (Balare) there is a toilet paper holder... no paper though. there is hope)

The next day we met the rest of our 'batch'. We met up and got our new companions. My companion is, elder Natrual. He is Philipino. Pretty sweet. Speaks English pretty good, which is mostly good. Anywho, we are assigned in Balair (daliinasdfgsgkhsf (some city that starts with d)).
-well the problem with that is that from Angeles, it is the furthest zone. (Most awesome too) [It’s the zone way in the top right corner of the map, at the beach]
so it’s a 3-4 hour drive to Carbonotion (the middle) (or something), and then 4-5 hours past there to Balare.
-the other problem (well kind of), is that elder Cook from the 12 apostles was coming that Saturday, to meet with the stake leaders, and then with all of the missionaries of our whole mission. so if we were to go all the way to Balair, then we would have to come right back. So we stayed in carbonotion for a couple of days.

Anywho on Saturday we saw Elder Cook, and shook his hand. Um, then that night, we stayed in Carbonation.

Anyways, by Sunday night we it made it to my area.

Ok now some stories.

Um ok the traffic is pretty sweet here. So I have only see lights by the mission home, in a richer area. (But those lights are sweet; they even beat the ones in Argentina. (Sorry dad) they don’t go red, yellow, green... but they have a counter that sits next to the light. when its green, or when its red. so everyone knows exactly when it’s going to turn green. pretty sweet)

but besides those, no lights. No stop signs. Really. Um they drive on the right side of the road... kind of. Mostly it’s like Mario cart. Just kind of weave in and out of your side of the road. Some times when the driver trys to go, and then realizes that a bus is coming. Then it’s Not like Mario cart. Quickly tries to get back in to his lane. Dying is bad.

The highest speed I have seen is about 30-35 miles an hour. Add that to just stopping and going/ dodging people and cars... its gets slower. I messed with some numbers and it looks like on average cars are going about 20-25 miles an hour. Yep like Mario cart again.

Tricycles are sweet. It’s a motorcycle, with a side car attached. Pretty much they rock. Pay like 15 cents and they will drive you somewhere. Crazy drivers. But I haven’t seen an accident yet. Kind of like going to Disney land, but without seat belts, and... More rad.

Um, the heat has actually been worse than it was the first day. But it’s not that bad.
It’s pretty nice. Sure you’re wet a lot. But it kind of feels good. Comfortable feeling.

So you know that feeling you have on a Thursday in the afternoon, it’s the summer going to play Frisbee in a hour, and you thought about changing your shirt, but you still got inside-out and backwards left, and last time you were playing Frisbee that week your were wearing a sweater. You also thought about showering, but you took a shower on Sunday, and you know water polo is going to be on Saturday, and that counts (right?).
Um, well that what I get at about 12, when we go in to our apartment (we can’t be out between 12-2, too hot). And if we don’t shower then, and wait till 9pm, you get that feeling like it’s been a week past that last one, and water polo was canceled, and you get up late for church on Sunday, so still no shower, and if you aren’t going to shower you might as well, just wear that same shirt again. Kind of like that. Feels nice... well at least... familiar.

Um, well today is P-day. Yep. We went to the beach. That was cool. I took a picture my house. In Oregon. Well I just needed a bigger zoom on camera. Mummy yep.

Oh, how the mail works here. Don’t send packages. Or if you do, well don’t. I’ll have to pay a ton on taxes on it. They say if you write "birthday present" or "missionary supplies", that customs might not tax it... but meh. I got too much stuff anyways.

For paper mail, it goes to the mission home, and sent to me. Somehow.

1827 Gumain Street, Redwood Villas
Clarkfield, Pampanga 200 Philippines.

Well it looks like the post office picks up the mail for the week on Mondays (which is my P-day)... so I missed it. I might send some stuff, but not sure... maybe next week.

Oh ok so on Friday, I went and talked some "real" people for the first time. It was this older lady from the ward. Was pretty fun. But... ha-ha. When she was talking to me and raised her eyebrows quickly, creped me out real fast. (Here they do that to say, hey, or yes, or something.) That was funny. I knew that already, and did that with friends at the MTC... but that was the first time an older lady did that to me. Ha-ha.

Um the people are really cool. They eat rice all the time. Which is cool because I like rice. my companion thinks I am weird because I will eat rice plain.( reminds me of freshmen year in high school where I had 2-3 boxes of rice everyday for lunch)

oh tuna is still nasty.. Just throwing that out there.

Well, hmmm. I’m rad.

Elder Dickinson

October 4th

Hey, everyone.

This is Elder Dickinson here. I leave today to the Philippines. Um, yah. Its been kinda crazy last couple of days. And actually last couple of months.

Still not really sure what to expect when I get there, but I .. Well that’s all I got.

Um, yah ..... Only thing I can really think of right now is that I am leaving soon which isn’t very helpful information. mmm,

Well Lucy sent me a letter... well actually 6 post cards. That was rad. um, So I hear you killed all the the spiders that don’t have an immunity to poison. Now there are super spiders now at home. Nice. Got to love those.

I did get the army men. And used them,... but not very much. I was actually pretty busy most of the time. ummmm yep.

If I was going to tell what I learned from the MTC? Or what happened? I would probability say, I learned to understand and bunch of crazy words, that sounds like nonsense, tried to learn how to teach, which is hard, and then try to teach in gibberish. That’s a little more fun at least. got to know and a group of 8 other misfit kids, which somehow bonded, even though we had nearly nothing in common.

I also made up a lot of stories like about how chocolate milk is important and is life changing. I also told a lot of jokes here. Mostly I think the people here just thought the things I did were funny, so when I told a couple jokes they always wanted to have me tell more. I think I told the joke "what is a pear like" at least 200 times. Maybe I should come up with a couple more jokes.

Oh yah, so I was thinking the other day, what is the thing I miss the most from home, or outside of the MTC. I know some people thought I would have a problem with not getting on the computer or something. Really that’s not it, (Although I know that’s a problem here for some, I mean I have seen I phones and stuff here every once and a while).

For me it’s been ... it’s weird to say, but going to the tunnel singing on Sundays at school. I didn’t go that much before, and i didn’t even care for it much before. Which to me is weird, but I guess I liked it more than I thought.

Well I going out to the plane in a couple hours, (and out of email time)

so till the next time, in the Philippines.

Elder Dickinson