Catching Up

My goodness, where does the time go. I have a lot of catching up to do, but will make it short. Our daughter will be helping me stay current with the blog from now on. I certainly do appreciate your patience during my time of “adjustment”.

Christmas came and went, without much fanfare on our part. We had many children come to the gate of our triplex and sing Christmas Carols to us, for which we get to give them a piece or two of candy. We also kept hearing noise, like gunshots, in the middle of the night, a bit unsettling for foreigners. We found out later that here in the Philippines people start celebrating in October and part of their celebration are fireworks, just the noisy kind, until New Year’s Eve. We had our Zone Elders and Sisters here for Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas morning breakfast of strawberry shortcake. We have amazing Elders and Sisters, their parent’s are, and should be very proud of them. We are happy to have them in our home away from home.

New Year’s Eve brought our Elders and Sisters back for a relaxing evening of games, movie (Kung Fu Panda – approved by our Mission President) and then the fireworks. It is difficult to explain how loud and long the fireworks displays go on, all over the Philippines. The displays started in every neighborhood of Naic about 9:30pm and were still going on, here and there, the next morning. From 11:30pm until 12:30am, the noise and displays were constant, loud and colorful. We made s’mores during all of this, yummy and messy. Some of our Elders and Sisters had never had them.

Back to work for all of us. There were over 250 baptisms in our Mission the month of December and already over 100 for the month of January, in our Zone alone. Elder Peterson and I are way behind in our work to teach them the importance of fellowshipping, but we are running to catch up. Retention is over 80% without our efforts, we hope we can make that even better.

We had a slight set back a week or so ago, Elder Peterson felt we needed to check out the medical facilities here in the Philippines, so we did. We started out here in Naic, in our local private hospital. The preliminary work and diagnosis was done here and then we were transferred to a very large, state of the art hospital in Global City. Elder Peterson’s gall bladder was removed on a Friday and he was released the following Sunday. He is still recovering, but getting his strength back slowly. We certainly hope we are done with that now, we are most anxious to get back to our missionary work.

TTFN, E and S Peterson