Week #51: Transfer week and guess what... I'm still in Vigan!

Hello family,

So this is the news for this week. When President said I was going to move this transfer, I think he changed his mind because I'm still in Vigan!!! Auntie Jean was super happy when she found out I'm still here. So now I have more time to do whatever. Well missionary work obviously. I started making a family tree here. I'm just getting names. I'll start getting birth dates, death dates, marriage dates, whatever dates, children. All the stuff for family history. I love playing with my nieces and nephews here. They're marami. It's like spending time with Esa or Mak mak or fredrick or liam or auraya or ... well there's so many. Especially here. It's weird sometimes because one of my niece, Vanessa, is almost as old as me. That's probably how mom felt since ate Sally is almost mom's age.

So last week, it was pretty discouraging since Vanessa and her husband are not really allowed to come to our church since their barangay made it bawal to listen to other people. Parang wala nang free agency. Ayos lang. I found a scripture to motivate me. 2 Nephi 28:18. So all is good. We'll just keep teaching them. Later this evening, we're going to visit ate Karen. I thought I was getting transferred so we planned on visiting a whole bunch of them and have despedida but nevermind. I'll just go visit them anyways just to finally visit them!

Anyways, this these last two days were medyo pangit. We have this minor leak under our the bucket underneath overflowed. So I emptied it out last night. This morning, we walked into our kitchen and it was super flooded! So we called over the landlady and we temporarily have no kitchen sink. Good thing though is that we have 2 other sinks in our apartment. That's our adventures here in Vigan. Me and Elder Oberg were also walking around 3 of our barangays (centro ng Caoayan) and we saw all these crosses outside on tables with candles. We we're pretty weirded out... We later found out that there's procession going on. When it comes to missionary work in Vigan, all I can think about is 1 Nephi 13 and 2 Nephi 28. It's one of the hardest areas I've been in.

The work actually has been at a pause for some reason here. We have been struggling finding our investigators. So we dropped most of them. We are spending this whole week finding. Our investigators who have a baptismal date are still not going to church. One of them got a job and had work last sunday... how unfortunate. She was so close to getting baptized. As for our friend Arthur, he didn't come to church again. We bought glue for his shoe because we found out the reason why he didn't come the week before is that his shoe actually fell apart. I guess he didn't use it. It's slowly working it's way back up though. We found the daughter of our recent convert, and she and her husband already accepted the baptismal invitation. All we need to do now is commit them to a date.

Anyways, this month is gonna be a tough month. We're gonna start going cheap on food hehe. We're going to eat mostly fish so time to learn some new fish dishes. Actually, last week, I cooked sinigang and we didn't have the packet for the sabaw, at walang sampalok or any pang-asim sa apartment. So we grabbed a green mango from the tree and chopped it and used it. And... the sinigang tasted really good. Unfortunately for Elder Hunsaker, ayaw niya talaga ang fish. So he's going to buy chicken nuggets in Solid West.

Anyways, wala nang balita. At least I don't think so... anyways. Take care all of you! Love you all!

Elder Morales