I aboslutely loved reading your emails! I'm so sad that Starsha died... she was my favorite goat in the whole wide world! Though I suppose replacing her with Lady is really great :) It sounds like there are many many adventures that have been happening around there, I hope that y'all stay safe! Keep me updated on everything even if I can't respond to it all, just know that I read it and love hearing about everything going on! :) Just by the way, the food here so far I've had a lot of rice, dried fish... and spaghetti xD No Balut yet, but I'll have some one day and send y'all a video of my eating it ;) Soooo... I am officially in Urdaneta and actually out proselyting every day now! It's a really neat experience and my trainers name is Elder Q. He's a native Filippino who speaks 4 different languages... which helps because apparently the people here speak more Ilongo than Tagalog... which totally doesn't help! These past few days have been pretty rough, everyone speaks the language and tries to talk to me.. but I don't understand a word that they're saying! It's probably the hardest culture shock that I have ever experienced! But other than that, it's such a beautiful place here! My area is called San Leon in the Rosales zone... the Branch here is so small! But I'll get to that in a little bit. First, our apartment... it's actually pretty big! It's a small house with concrete floors! The water for the toilets don't work, so we fill a bucket with water that is used to flush! Also, there isn't toilet paper, so I went right out to buy some when I heard what they do instead.... literally... this is one of those places where people use their left hand to wipe. I just can't even xD The shower is very low power and is always cold... but it's our apartment, I gots to get used to taking cold showers every day now for the next two years of my life and probably eventually be forced to use the... cultural way of cleaning...
ANNNNNYWAY, I got here and there were two sisters having their baptismal interview the next day... needless to say, I get to baptize one of them next Saturday, which is a remarkable experience! They are the sweetest people, both are really old :) Which sort of leads to the branch, it's so small... there were 84 chairs set up for sacrament meeting, and they weren't all even filled! I mean... it's really really small! But then later, I got to see the list of members that have been baptized in the area... 6 pages of people... lots and lots! From what I've been told, there ARE 700,000 members in the Philippines... but that 500,000 of them are less active. Which is really sad! A lot of the work here that we're going to be doing is just helping less active members come back to church! I have no idea why though so many are less active, people here love religion... quite literally! Every single Jeepney and trike just about, have some sort of picture or something about religion! Which I actually don't mind TOO much because that makes it really easy to talk to people about religion and share our beliefs!
I love you guys so much! Thanks for being the best family in the world, I'll email you next Monday :)
Much Love,
Elder Morris
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