June 11th, 2012

Hello Everyone! This email is going to be a little short, I don't have a lot of time to email today. Actually, right now I'm in the Manila zone. Elder Berse wanted to go to a mall where everything is really cheap because he is going home soon. This place is called Di Hello Everyone, this email is going to be a little short, I don't have a lot of time to email today. Actually, right now I'm in the Manila zone. Elder Berse wanted to go to a mall where everything is really cheap because he is going home soon. This place is called Di Visoria and everything here is really really cheap. I bought a few things today. It's a really cool mall. It's super different and there are a lot of things you can buy for really cheap. It's a cool place though. Kinda hard to describe though. I bought a 16G USB for 700P. So now I finally have something to save all my pictures on which is great. I also bought a nice neck tie for 125P. A pair of shorts for 200P and a nice new belt for 250P. Everything looks really new but it's all fake stuff. It's cool though. Anyways, so I spent a bit of money. I will probably come back here when I'm going home to buy some stuff because its really cheap here. Last week was a really good week, we taught a lot of lessons and found a lot of new people to teach. The focus of the mission right now is finding and we're doing a pretty good job at that right now. Last week we found 14 new investigators and had 7 investigators at church. Carlo is doing really good. He will be our only baptism for the month of June. We have a few other potentials in July though, which is good. I can't believe how fast this transfer went by. Elder Berse goes home in 16 days. Hehe. He's pretty excited. It's really weird for me. He has a pretty good idea for what he's going to do when he goes home and I still have no idea what I'm going to do... I'm not too nervous about it though. I know things will work out. Oh yea, last week 2 of our really progressing investigators left and are not coming back. So we referred them to the other mission and hopefully they will get taught where they live. It was too bad though. We're working really hard in our area though. Things are going really well. We didn't get 73% of the standards of excellence last week but we got 62% I think. The zone improved a lot last week too. Things are going really well for the zone. We have only had 1 baptism so far for June and this Saturday and Sunday there will not be any at all because there is stake conference. But for the last week we are looking to have 8 baptisms for the whole zone so that is good. Things went really well with our zone meeting last Tuesday too. We still have our goal to get 100% percent priesthood ordination. And since we made the goal when Elder Duero and I were companions the percentage has gone from 68% to 82%, so we're getting there. :) This week we have plans to give out a lot of baptismal dates for July so hopefully everything goes perfect this week. Last week we also got to go on 2 exchanges. I got to go on exchanges with Elder Young in my area. He was Elder Christie's companion in the MTC. He is a good elder. And we had a good day. We were able to teach Zaldy, who is finally feeling better and is able to get taught again. We taught a good lesson on scripture study because that is the focus of the whole Philippines. It was a good lesson and it was also really good to teach Zaldy again. Later that week I got to go on exchanges with Elder Gadberry, he is also a really good elder. He works in the office so him and his companion don't have a lot of time to go to their area. But we were able to go for a little bit and work. It was also a really good day. Last Sunday we had a really good talk by Sister Corry, she teaches institute and she was asked to speak about the seminary program. It was such an amazing talk. She even had some of her old Sunday school students come up(during the talk) and talk and bear testimony of the seminary program. It was really amazing! One of her students was from Makati east, one now lives in Cavite and one other one lives in Florida and she came here to speak and talk about the seminary program. It was really cool and something that I've never seen anyone do. It definitely made me want to take seminary though. It's a really important program of the church. Anyways I really liked her talk. That was about it for last week. Sorry if this email is short. I gotta go. I'm going to try and send some pictures though. I hope you have a great week! Mahal ko kayo! Elder Chris Gagnon