September 9-13, 2010

I have been working hard on learning the mapping, it is done on google earth. Salt Lake sends us maps they have of the stake and ward boundaries of the Philippines, we take what they send us and draw out the boundaries on google earth and then meet with the Stake presidents, bishops, ward clerks, or whoever the stake decides to send to our meetings and they make corrections to our maps. We come back to the office clean up the changes and they go to the area presidency and if they okay them they are sent to Salt Lake for approval, so far 32 are either approved or in the process to be approved. I don't know how many there are but this is only a handful.

Sister Clark and I flew to Cebu on Friday morning and met with three different stakes. The meetings are very intense and take a least 2 hours as they search for their correct boundaries, some are a little more prepared than others, in fact one Stake President come in by himself and we were done in less than a hour, was great. Sister Clark and I are they only ones doing the maps so I am really anxious to learn so I can hold meetings at the same time as she does and we can do twice the amount.

I really was not looking forward to another plane ride so soon. Their airplanes are buildt with short legged people with small behinds in mind, needless to say I have neither, but fortunately the ride was only about 80 minutes. We stayed at an old hotel but clean. On Friday we didn't get back to the hotel until about 7 pm so we decided to eat in the coffee shop connected to the hotel. There were several men when we entered so we sat way back in the corner and the next thing we knew it must have been one of those good ole boys meeting with lots of beer. Sister Clark ordered as tune sandwich it had almost a tablespoon of tuna on it, I ordered and bacon and egg and got bacon, egg and hamburger patty, at least I could taste what my was. Saturday we have a meeting at 9 am and then attended a session at the Cebu Temple, there was such a sweet feeling there, I felt rejuvinated and wanted to linger but we had been invited to a luncheon with President Ko and all the stake people who were invited to meetings, it was very nice. I took a picture of the luncheon set up and as soon as I learn how to take the pictures from my camera and put them here on my blog I'll do that.

We have not been assigned a ward/branch yet so we went to one of the guys that works here ward because they were having their Primary Sacrament meeting. It was wonderful, all the boys in the primary wore white shirts and ties and all the kids knew their parts with out help, of course some of the little sunbeams went up, looked out and saw all the people and hid their face in their dad's pant leg, cried or just stood there just the same as sunbeams in the USA. I got to hold a 2 month old baby for the entire meeting, it was great.