The long way

So this week was really good and really awful at the same time, basically my kasama and I rock at finding people, btut as far as getting them to come to church it is a gigantic fail! We found 17 new investigators this week.... 12 of them said that they would come to church and 0 of them actually came. So there's that.

Other than that though we did have a baptism this week! Meet Kayezen, she's 9 and now probably knows more about the church than most members do.... her grandma had us teach her everyday for like 3 weeks so that she would be ready for baptism and we had already been teaching her four .... it was time. After her baptism I was shocked when she started bearing her testimony, due to the fact that she is always really quiet and I could actually hear what she was saying, she'd been going for about three minutes when I finally looked to the back of the room and saw that her grandma and cousin were mouthing her testimony along with her.... hahaha she had the whole thing memorized! She went for a good four to five minutes so I was definitely impressed! Astig si kayezen!

One of the young women in the ward worked all day with us on saturday, her name is Jozel, she is bassically one of my favorites, after the baptism we cleaned the church building with Sister Nancy and President Asuncion, it was way fun, Sister Nancy is my new favorite.

It's getting harder and harder to do anything here everyone knows me and it's more like I'm a celebrity than a missionary:( Still keep pluggin away though. 

The other day we were going to a teaching appointment when a whole herd of kids came and wouldn't leave.... they stayed with us for about 45 minutes but we couldn't go to our next appointment with them because there wouldn't be any spirit.... so I raced them..... then taught them a song... and by then we were down to maybe 20 and they just wouldn't leave, so we walked through "the snake field". There were no snakes of course, but the kids thought that there were, so we walked through this huge field and around onto the beach and we were walking through all this sand and then who do we run into but our teaching appointment! She was hiding from us but then took it as a sign from Heavenly Father that we had found her and committed to be baptised!! Thank you small children for following us so we had to take the long way around.

The world works in mysterious ways!

Special shout out to Melissa Kam and Mckenzie Edstrom!!! I miss you two! Also to you Sister Curtis! Mahal na Mahal kita! Agganad kayo!

I'm Miss Universe

This week I was accosted at the beach. A drunken man came up to me and grabbed me by the arm and told me that I was his one true love and his name was Robin... like Robin Hood. It was actual super frustrating because everyone just thought that it was funny and no one would help me so we ran away.... It's super hard for me to teach in this area because the new miss universe or whatever was from America.... naturally that makes me basically famous and people will just flock to me..... even when we are teaching lessons to our investigastors they will all just come in and stare at me. It's good for them cause they get to listen to the gospel I guess, but bad for our investigators because they get very distracted. We have to find sneaky ways to get to all of the houses that we teach now... sigh.... it's a little more than frustrating.

My look a like

No time for a big blog, but I will just tell you real quick, this last week we were out finding and we walked past this one lady that I didn't even see, but my companion was like, sister Schultz can we stop here and we stopped and talked to this lady. It turns out that her whole family was former investigators, but the missionaries got pulled our right before they were supposed to be baptized so they were upset and didn't get baptized but they were really excited to learn from us again. When we came back we asked why it was that they are letting us teach them again if they were offended by their last missionaries? They said that I looked like their first missionary's sister and they had thought that I was but they just took it as a sign that Heavenly father wanted them to be baptized... I'll take it:) Thank you Elder Travis Mumford from 7 years ago for looking like me:)

A couple pictures I missed from last week. The top one is with Sister Woahn and the bottom one is her new companion Sister Sabio.

Training, finding and playing the piano

Well this week was definitely a crazy week for sure! ON Monday we got the information that we would be training and being transferred (me training and sister francia transferred) on Tuesday we traveled to Laoag, where I stayed for the rest of the week and Sister francia continued on with her new companion to her next area. While I was in Laoag, my temporary companion was Sister Incognito.... Usually I could find her though:) But I worked a lot with Sister Boekweg from Utah. I actually really loved working with her because neither of us by any means are fluent in tagalog, so we really worked off of each other to be balanced in how much we taught in the lessons, something that up to this point in my mission has been hard to come by. We did a lot of finding though which is pretty much my favorite thing to do, and we only had one hour of companionship study! Since i have been on the 12 week training program, I have had 2 everyday....wow.... and now that I'm training I get another three months of it...yaya.... but don't tell my companion I hate it, I'm trying really hard to convince her that I love it so that she has a better attitude about it than I did:)

Speaking of my new companion! Sister Sabio! She is from Bacolad and she is so great! She really only speaks Tagalog right now.... so I'm learning a lot!!! But in the last couple of days we have worn ourselves completely out!!!! we've been filling in any extra second that we have with work and I am loving it!!! It's nice to have someone that loves finding as much as I do!!! because of our finding efforts, we have found 7 new investigators in three days!! I know I know... we're pretty great!!! I'm really excited to be her companion:) She's right now in the homesick stage so I'm trying to keep us as busy as possible, because when we are busy it's not as bad (this I know from experience)

Yesterday while we were teaching a 9 year old about fasting and giving service, we were both so tired (and hungry) that she fell asleep during the lesson which left me to teach a lot of it..... grammar for fasting.... not too good! It's in times like those that I am grateful that I at least have some ability to draw pictures:)

On Sundays, Sister Francia was always the pianist in the ward because none of the members here can play, since she is now gone, what a blessing it is that I GET to play the piano now! haha it was awful! I practiced for 30 minutes only before the meeting. Mind you I've never taken piano so I was relying on my one year of playing the bell set in band from the 7th grade. I did okay with count your many blessings, the sacrament hymn though.... I don't even remember what it was, my mind must have blocked out the details because all that I can remember is that it was awful awful awful. The last hymn though (sweet hour of prayer of course) went really well and I was able to make it through the top hand without a flaw:) there will be a lot of practicing this coming week:(

Love you all! Hope you are having a great new year!!! I just reached the 5 month mark!!! Well... I will... Tomorrow...

Sister Schultz