Miracle Sunday

We actually had a great week this week. We had lots of time to go and work this week so we really focused on the area and didn't have to do that many leadership responsibilities.
James is doing amazing. He is good to go to be baptized on Feb. 22 with his sister, Franchel. We are really excited for this baptism! We are looking at March 1 for Junjun right now. He was suppose to have his mom sign the paper so that he could be baptized this weekend. If that happened, we are good to go for March 1. After that we are looking at March 22 for a few baptisms. We got Jessica going again. She was suppose to be baptized on Christmas but it didn't happen. She came to church this week so it is looking good for her. We also have Mary Joice and her sister, Maritis, on March 22. We set these a long time so we might move Jessica up so that we can do a weekly baptism. We are also teaching two kids at one of our members houses. They are Mauren and Dieter Tapang. They are really good kids and they came to church on Sunday. In total, we had 6 investigators at church!!! That is incredible for this area. What was more impressive was that we had 8 less actives come to church on Sunday!!! We are short on priesthood and most were priesthood so we are very grateful that they came to church. We are now working to get them to stay at church so that they can be a strength to the branch.
Sunday was a really hard but good day. We ended up interviewing 9 people for baptism and still got to our area to teach 5 lessons!!! It was an amazing day for us.
There is a lot of transfers today. I am still in my area but it is kind of weird that they are happening because transfer day is next week. We will see what happens. Last week, one of the sisters in the zone went back to Tacloban. More are going to follow. All the Tacloban missionaries are getting a little trunkie now because they want to go there, most of these are new missionaries to the field. We will see when they get back.
That covers the week. It was a lot of work and we received lots of blessings. Sunday was a real miracle day.
Love you all,

Elder Nielsen

Happy Valentines Day

Sister Jorolan's baptism is really good! It was cool seeing her baptized because it was like a light came into her as she was baptized. She was definitely ready.
It is transfers for the Tacloban missionaries. I think one sister in our zone is going back but the other missionaries are still going to be here. I hear the problem is finding housing so we will see what happens. I plan to have 1 more transfer in Mabini.
Teaching was a little slow this week as far as numbers but we stayed very busy. There was a lot of trials this week that we had to go and solve within the missionaries and within the members of the branch. We had to go and work those out the last week so that the work wouldn't slow down in the future. That consumed a lot of time but we did pretty good for not having much time to teach this week.
James is doing great. He is right on tract to being baptized on Feb. 22. We are really excited about this baptism. We are teaching an 8 year old named Mary Joice. She is really good but sometimes very shy. We are getting some good progress from her. We are looking at about March 22 for her just because we have to go slow with the lessons with her. We don't know what is going on with Cleofe. Every time we go there they say they are busy. Hopefully we can teach them more in the near future. I should probably say, James brought a friend to listen to us. We hope to baptize him. We taught him on Saturday and then he went to church yesterday!!! Sister Jorolan's daughter brought a friend as well to church. We hope to start teaching her this next week as well. It is cool that we are getting referrals and friends are coming to church this week. It will help in the future to get baptisms. We also did a lot with less actives this week. We had 2 less actives at church this week. We are working on them so that they can help the work as well. Less actives are a good source of referrals.
That was about it for the week. I am doing great. Just loving the work and the people here.
Love you all,

Elder Nielsen

PS Have a happy Valentines day. There is always a lot of marriages here on Valentines day because the Catholic priest does them for free.

District Conference

We have a baptism on Saturday!!! We are excited about that. She is really good and her son is on a mission so President was more then ready to let us baptize her.

We had a very good week despite the little time that we had to work. We had the most amount of lessons in our area since I have been here. It was amazing! We got some new investigators that look pretty good and now we are moving forward. We just need to start setting up dates so that they can be baptized.

James is doing great! He came to the district conference and loved it, since he is Tagaloc anyway. Elder Ardurro was really good! He was really funny but I could only understand about half because he talked so fast and it was Tagaloc!!! We is still good for Feb 22 for James. Junjun is doing great as well. He is reading and having a great experience in the Book of Mormon. He still needs to talk to his mother if he can be baptized. The plan is March 1. Cleofe was going to come to church but we hear that her mom doesn't want her to be going to church. We will have to talk to her to see if we can continue. We hope we can because she is really great. We got some new investigators. Mary Joy went to work in Escalante so we can't teach her but we are now teaching her sisters. They are really good. They don't hide from us and they love for us to teach. The youngest is 8 and she even read our assignment!!! We are really happy for her!

We went on exchanges this week with the elders in Old Escalante. I was with Elder Sio which is from Herriman! He is Samoan but lived in Herriman before the mission. He is really great. We went and worked in Old Escalante and had a great experience. I learned a lot about how to better use the pamphlets in lessons and how to get investigators to read. It was really useful and will really help our area.

I think that is about it for the week. It was really good but it flew by. We are heading to Bacolod later so that we can go to a meeting to prepare for a training on Wednesday that we have to give. By the way, the trainings are going very well. We just have to teach the missionaries and then we go back to normal.

Love you,

Elder Nielsen

Chicken Curry

This was another rainy and cold week but the sun came out at the end and dried up most of the mud. It was a decent week, a little harder than normal but it turned out alright. We will continue to get rain until about the end of February then it will turn into summer.

Elder Lapitan is a zone leader as well. In a zone there is 2 zone leaders, usually they are companions, then you have district leaders underneath. In our zone there is 4 district leaders. Then you have everyone else. We have 20 missionaries in all in the Escalante zone.

As far as investigators, we didn't do so bad getting them to church. It is now getting them baptized that is the problem. James didn't come to church because his aunt didn't come. It was a sad deal but we just moved his date to Feb. 22. We went to Cleofe last night and talked to her grandpa. They were both sick so they weren't able to make it to church as well, by the way, a lot of Filipinos get sick if it gets cold because they aren't use to it. We still need to give her a new date. Junjun and Jonnel came to church. They are really good. We are just having a problem with their mother and grandmother. They say they have to wait until they are 18 years old to be baptized. That means Jonnel will have to wait 3 more years. Junjun still has to talk to his mother to see if he can but we are planning March 1 for him. Sister Jorolan is doing great. She is living with someone but they aren't married. The husband doesn't really want to get married so President Lopez is going to interview her this week to see if we can baptize her. We are praying that she will. Puricima family is doing well. We got them to realize church is important and we are talking about it is ok to be baptized again right now. Maybe next week we will get them to church. Mary Joy is good but is sure hard to get to her. We went to try and pick her up on Sunday for church but she was washing clothes. We are trying to figure out what to do with her right now.

We are struggling a little bit getting those that can be baptized to church right now but I am sure that the Lord will provide a way for us to continue to progress and baptize. This next week will be interesting. We have a training with President Lopez then Saturday and Sunday we have district conference, like stake conference. We will see what happens with our work. We will have a lot less time this week to work.

Love you all,

Elder Nielsen

PS Here is a picture of something I cooked. It is called chicken curry.

 

Wet, Wet, Wet

This was a very cold, wet week. We haven't used the electric fan all week and have been wishing we had a heater here because it has been so cold. I even broke out the heavy blanket a few times!!! I am going to die when I get there. It fills like it is the 40's here!!!

We had Mitchelyn's baptism 2 weeks ago but still not confirmed. Its been muddy and they had a celebration at their house on Sunday so she wasn't there. We were excited to get some new investigators at church this week! We got James Dino to come to church. He is a part member who's aunt is active but parents aren't. We were excited to see him there. We also had the Alverez family came. They are doing good. We just need their mom to say it is ok for them to be baptized. That might be hard because she is working in the Middle East and she said before that they have to wait until they are 18 to be baptized. The other investigators didn't come. It was a little sad but we will work for next week. Cleofe Ondoy is really good. Her grandpa is less active but she wants to be baptized. We had some good lessons with her this last week. We hope to get her to church this next weeks so she can be baptized on Feb. 22. James is on Feb. 14. If we can convince the mother of Alverez to let them get baptized, they will be on March 1. We set up a date for Sister Maet, an ivestigator that showed up to church last week, on March. 8. We hope that continues. We also working with Mary Joy to listen to us. If we see her, then we teach but if we don't, she hides from us. She is really shy because I am American. We hope that we can get rid of that so she can be prepared for baptism. We are also working with the Pericima family. We had some great lessons with them. They went to church last year but sister got sick after and couldn't walk. She said she would return to Catholic and the next day she was good. We got them to the point so that they are willing to try again to attend church. They know that Joseph Smith is a prophet and the Book of Mormon is true. We had to work on that so they knew how important it was to attend church. They are planning to come next Sunday.

This week was good when we could teach. We just had a couple of days that we could only walk around and look for teaching opportunities. Other days we were filled with teachings. It just depended on how much rain was falling.

We had a few interviews this last Sunday. We decided that we would split on Saturday so I could interview in the north of the zone and Elder Lapitan would take the south. It was a little weird but we got them done pretty quick. Hopefully next week we can do some of Friday and the rest on Sunday so we don't have to travel as much and can teach more.

That is about it for this week. I am doing well. Just very busy.

Love,

Elder Nielsen

 

Done with Trainings... for a while

This was a great week but hard to remember. We have been so busy that I can't keep up with things.

Monday, we had our preparation day. We did our e-mail and then we headed for Bacolod to do our shopping there. It was good but next time we will go later because we ran out of things to do. We just prepared to take a lot of notes for the next day.

Tuesday we had MLC (Mission leadership council) that took up most of the day. That is where we are trained to give our training for our zones. It was a really good training and we learned a lot about how to teach better and be more convincing missionaries. Then we traveled home and we prepared to give our trainings on Wednesday.

Wednesday we did our trainings and I think that mine went well. We had the Assistants come and they said that I did a good job so I hope that the zone learned some things so that they can be better. After the training, we had exchanges with the Assistants. We all worked in Mabini which was quite interesting. We had to really coordinate our visits so we didn't go to the same houses. It was a great time. I learned a lot about how to find new investigators and how to teach more in the area. It was a huge bust to our numbers this week. We ended with 8 new investigators and we have taught more lessons in this short week then I have ever taught in Mabini. It was great!

The rest of the week was normal. This whole week it rained. It made things really muddy. Attendance at church was the lowest I have ever seen it. It was just to hard for a lot to come.

We had Mitchelyn's baptism though! We were excited that she came. We kind of thought we would have to wait because it was raining so hard. She came and we had a great experience. She couldn't come on Sunday. We think that they had no money for travel so we will have to confirm her next Sunday. We set up a lot of baptism dates this week. We went to Jessica again. We gave her Feb. 14 for her baptism. Her parents really want her to be baptized so we are hoping to get that to help us. We also went to the Lumantad family and taught their daughter. They are less active but the daughter isn't a member so we are working on her. We started teaching Mary Joy Dalaguit. She was taught before. We are starting her again so she can be baptized. She is ok with it. We also have several others but these are the ones we are focusing on right now. We tried following up with some from last week. They aren't interested. Maybe the new ones will be.

Love you lots

Elder Nielsen

Unexpected Transfers

Don't worry, I'll be home for Christmas, you can count on me! Hahahaha.
This week was a bad start but a great finish. We had trouble teaching at the start but after the New Year, the work took off. Lots of missionaries are seeing this in their areas as well. It might be because of the new year resolutions.
To start off, we had an unexpected transfer this week. Elder Torres transferred and I am now zone leader in Mabini. My new companion is Elder Lapitan which is a funny name because in Ilonggo it means to to get closer. He is pretty close to the members hahaha. He is from Isabella in Lazon, the big island. He doesn't know Cebuano so we are working on that right now. He goes home a transfer before me.
Razel and Macmac where both confirmed this week. We were a little scared because they weren't there at the first but they walked in during the sacrament hymn so we did the confirmation after the sacrament. Mitchelyn came to church this week so her baptism is on Saturday! We didn't make it to a lot of our investigators this week because some of our plans failed and then we have been booked with meetings lately.
We did get a few new investigators this week. They look pretty good. I think a couple will get baptized but I am not sure about some of them just because they were taught before and their husbands didn't like them being taught before. We will see how that plays out.
The first of the week was pretty rainy, that is because we are in the rain season. It was very muddy and slick. It makes travel hard. We were kind of happy we didn't go to Paitan this week.
I would talk about individuals now but because it was mostly first visits I will talk about it next week. I would like to tell you our schedule on Sunday. We had church 9-11. We left early to do interviews. We got to Toboso at 12:20 and did an interview there. We then had an interview at Stop Aguinaldo at 1:30. We interview 3 people there. Then we went and changed at the apartment. We then had a meeting at 4pm with the district president that happened at 4:45 with the district executive secratary. We went and worked at 5:30 and then caught the 8pm bus to go home and get ready for reporting. It was busy! I was happy we had a plan. It looks like most Sundays will end up like that. We didn't get to go to some other meetings because we were so busy.
Love you all,
Elder Nielsen