I took a week off and had fun with Scott, Taylor and Mark and then had to run to make up for the time spend playing. I miss those guys but what a parcel of great memories they left me.
Again, we traveled last week, Thursday through Sunday. It was a busy time, exhausting and yet as we saw some beautiful sights we were revived. We flew to Bacolod Mission and did four mappings. Thursday we were at the seashore, beautiful, reminded me of seeing the beach in Hawaii, so blue/green water, however we just saw it from the car. Most of our time was spent traveling by car to four different chapels to do the mappings.
On Friday Sister Clark had a mapping so I had some free time, there was a massage class being taught at the chapel, so I peeked my head in and the next thing I knew I was sitting in a chair with 2 people massaging my feet/legs, 2 more people massaging each hand/arm and one person giving me a head massage. Actually when they were done, I felt very relaxed. A little girl about 6 yrs old came over and massaged my right hand, I was amazed how good she was, so I gave her 5 peso, she was thrilled, her first paying job.
I walked outside of the hotel we were staying at in time to see what we call a parade and filipinos call procession. This last week was holy week and Thursday and Friday most businesses shut down and the people had celebrations. I didn't have my camera to take pictures of the procession but there were more people in the procession with the floats then there were people on the sidelines watching. The filipino people really like to party, but the procession was very solemn.
On Saturday we went up to San Carlos District, 7000 ft up in the mountains. It was beautiful but really strange to see pine trees and palm trees standing next to each other. Everyone kept telling us how chilly it was but we did not feel a chill in fact we were comfortable. The brethern are so accomodating when we go to the mappings, if we are there around meal time, they always have a meal for us, we set down, visit with them and eat. Sometimes the food is from a local eatery other times a member prepares something, like in San Carlos, a member made hamburgers for us, not exactly McDonalds taste, but good none the less.
I had two mappings on Saturday, we spent 2 hours driving up in the mountains to get there at 12 noon, 2 hours doing the mapping, 2 1/2 hours driving dowm the mountain to Bago District for meeting at 5:00 pm and a little over 2 hours mapping, so we got back to the hotel about 7:30 pm. We attended church on Sunday at a chapel in Bacolod and caught the plane at 3:30 pm back to Manila.
The Philippines Jubilee celebrations is this weekend. The jubilee celebrates 50 years of the gospel being in the Phillipines. We have seen jubilee practices in chapels as we have travel and I am looking forward to seeing it all put together.
We have worked hard and will have the mapping completed by July 1st. My companion is going home on July 18th, so will be some changes for me. My mission president said we will wait for the Lord to tell him where and what I will be doing for the rest of my mission.
No comments:
Post a Comment