#1's Weekly Email: Week #23

Week 16 pala! Ano bayan?! Wala tayong oras ngayon. The time is far spent!

Well just so you know, this week I hit my five months. Not that I'm counting but my 6 month mark is super duper close. The time goes by so stinkin fast. It's almost scary. 

Well now we have 8 missionaries here in Masinloc. 4 elders, 4 sisters. We got one elder that was supposed to be serving in Tacloban but never made it there, Elder R. He was at the MTC at the time of the typhoon, and he came directly here. The other new elder here was serving in the office here in Olongapo mission, Elder P. He's from Idaho. We have a lot of fun here in Masinloc. The only downside is that we had to split the areas again. We split it north and south between the elders and sisters. And then Sister J. and her comp and me and my comp are splitting it left and right of the national highway. We had to give up Santa Rita which made me super sad because that's been part of my area since I've been here in the field. I love the people there so much. But I know the elders, they'll take good care of them. 

Our area now stretches all the way to the farthest barangay here in Masinloc, Taltal. I realized yesterday that by the time I get transferred, I will have served in every single part of Masinloc. Pretty sweet. Not many missionaries can say that they did that. 

I'm really going to miss this area when I get transferred. 

Because we have a new area, we have very few investigators which means that we've been finding like crazy this week. It's been a lot of fun getting to know the people around here.

One of the people that we taught this week is the owner of our apartment building, Sister Jo. Elder and Sister D. have been trying to get her to listen to the discussions for a really long time and she finally caved and we got to teach her. We taught her over at the D's house and she's very good at speaking English. President Q told us that if we have investigators that speak English, we should teach them in English. So we taught her the first lesson in English. Man, it was SO HARD. I've never taught lesson 1 all in English so of course there were a couple of spots that I hard to speak Tagalog because I had forgotten the English words for them... Weird. But it was a super fun good lesson. 

So yeah. That was my favorite part of this last week. 

This next week should be fun. Thank you for all your prayers and thoughts in my behalf. I love you all so much.

Mahal na mahal ko kayo. Have a great week!

-Sister Hess