Elder Gagnon with the both the Narra and Puerto zone missionaries
Elder Gagnon with Sister Juliet Ramos and her family
Las Pinas zone Family Home Evening at the Razo family home
Sister Penaranda's baptism with Elder Guarino, Sis. Penaranda and Aljie
Elder Gagnon, Elder Guarino (Chris' trainer) and Elder Guarino's trainer
Hey Guys!
I had a great week last week! Got quite a few new investigators and quite a few are really starting to progress really well! I'm going to start off by saying sorry. I did not bring my camera with me this time because I thought it wouldn't work..... I will bring it next time though and will send a few emails of pictures. I promise. Sige!
So last Tuesday, we emailed first thing in the morning, then that day we taught Sister Lee, Brother Alfred and their neighbors, Tatay Guilliermo, his wife, and Sister Lee's mom! We taught them part of the Plan of Salvation. That was the first time Tatay's wife actually listened in, usually she was too busy, or just didn't want to, so it was nice to see her listen. She participated too and had lots of questions and everything. It went really well. Then we taught Marilou about tithing and she said she has no problem with it. Her baptism is still going to be on the 9th of July and we're really excited for her. After her we taught the husband of a member, Brother Anthony. He is really nice, we taught him a small message about prayer. After that we went finding for a while and that was it for Tuesday.
Last Wednesday we went to see an inactive member who lives at a castle. Yes. A castle. She doesn't think she will come back to church which is really too bad.... It's because the owner of the castle is Italian and has her watch the house all the time. She is really nice though. Don't worry I got some pictures of the castle :P After that, we went finding. But no one is really around.... Like no one at all. Our area is like a ghost town during the weekdays. At night we visited an inactive family. They don't want to go to church, they don't want anything to do with it either. :(
Thursday, the Elders from the Taytay area (an area from our district) came over because it was their Pday on Thursday. They asked to take it on that day because the next day was zone conference, where all the Elders and Sisters from Palawan go to the Puerto Chapel and have a meeting with the Assistants to the President and President Howard. I'll talk more about that after, but anyways the guys from Taytay live 4 hours away by shuttle and on the way there is our house, so they came to our house and emailed here, had lunch with our Branch president, President Bayaras, then emailed and made their way over to Puerto, which is 2 hours away for us. So we only got to work till 5 that day because we had to catch our shuttle ride at that time. We stayed at the Elders house in Puerto that night. That day we taught Sister Marilou from 1 Nep 8 and we also shared a small lesson with Sister Lee and Alfred about going to Church. We didn't teach them about the Plan of salvation because Sister Lee had questions about Church. So that's what we taught :) After those 2 lessons, we made our way over to Puerto.
Friday. Woke up went to zone conference. This would be the last time we would see President Howard and I think it was also his last zone conference so that would have been the last time he had seen a lot of the missionaries. It was a good conference; we spoke about heroes and we practiced contacting and how to begin teaching, which went great. President Howard also spoke to us about how much of a miracle Sister Howard was. And how we really do need to be obedient. He also said that the Manila Mission might split again next year as the Manila mission North and South. I also spoke with Elder Afaga, he is one of the AP's and he said he read my blog, which is funny. He said he found it by accident when he was looking for pictures of the Philippines Manila mission. So, Elder Afaga....if your reading this. Stop! :P Elder Afaga also told me that I was lucky because for a long time when they were doing transfers trying to figure out where everyone would go, he said that my picture was in the Pasig zone, which becomes part of the Quezon city mission July 1st. If Elder Jance(the last Elder here in Roxas) didn't get sick and go home, I would have been there in the Quezon City mission. Haha. So also at that meeting, since it was President Howard's last, he gave every missionary a mission president's blessing. It was a great blessing. And then at the end we all sang God Be With You Till We Meet Again to him. It was pretty emotional. I am really going to miss Presidnt Howard. He was really great, nice, exciting, and really hard working. I also loved his history here. He was one of the first 17 missionaries sent here to the Philippines, he was set apart by President Hinckley and got to watch the country go from like 6 members to 650 000. I'm gonna miss him a lot. After that we just went home, we got back at around 7.
Saturday we did a lot of finding and found quite a few new people. We taught the Plan of Salvation to Sister Lee, her mom, Brother Alfred, Tatay Guillermo and his wife. We invited them all to come to church the next day. The lesson went great. Tatay has a harder time understanding because his main language is Ilongo, which I don't know. But Anne does and she was with us, so she helped him understand. It went really well. The wife of tatay had a lot of input and it was really great. After that we went finding, taught Anthony, and visited a few inactive members. 2 of the families asked for blessings for their sick children, so we did. And Yea. One of the less active families came back to church the next day.:)
Sunday. What a crazy day! K so it started off...I went to go remind Tatay Guillermo and Sister Lee about church. So I did that with a ward missionary, Chris, while Elder Glodo went to remind other people in another part of our area. So we went to church, got there about 8:30 and President Bayaras says "Elder, we need you to introduce yourself to the ward because I didn't get to do it last week." Then he found out that the 1st councellor in the branch presidency wasn't going to come in that day, and he is the only person in the branch who plays piano. So he asked me, "We're also going to need to you to play piano." And this is like 10 minutes before church starts, so luckily they had a simple hymn book there that I used and played the 3 songs for sacrament. Another thing was before church started we had 11 investigators there! So we had a pretty big investigator class. We watched the Joseph Smith story and it went really well. Like really well. Yea. So after church we went on splits, I worked with Chris and Elder Glodo worked with Sam, our other ward missionary. It went alright we went finding and we taught Sister Marilou about Charity, which also went really well.
And that is about it for last week! It was a good week all in all. Please tell Elder Bell I said "Hey", and I hope he is having a great time doing missionary work in greatest place on earth. The last missionary had high blood pressure and apparently he was also a little home sick and wanted to go home... So I do not think he will be coming back. He was out the exact same time as me. We did not get any rain last week. All is great over here in Roxas! We are in a branch, but there was more than 100 people last week at sacrament. So I don't know why it isn't a ward yet.... Anne is also leaving tomorrow. She is moving to Manila tomorrow. The other language, Bisaya Ilongo, is nothing like Tagalog. At least to me it's not. My companion doesn't understand it really. It's a different dialect, so Im sure there are some similarities.
So that's about it for now, I gotta get going... I got your package last week by the way! Thank you! Thank you so much for everything! I love it here on my mission. I'm doing great! I love you all! Talk to you next week! Thanks for everything!
Elder Chris Gagnon
P.S Tell Dad I said Happy Father's day. I know it was last week. But yea! Happy Fathers Day Dad! I love you!
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