KAMUUUUUUUUSTA!

Kamuuuuusta!

So yeah the work is going good. We have a boy who will be baptized I feel it. He has to go to church 12 weeks in a row. The baptism rules are strict here but it is for the best. We are having success with bringing people back to the church. I got together with the mission leader and told him I want to help the branch progress to a large branch, but most people weren’t as on board with that as was am. The youth are pretty strong. They will make the difference in the coming generations of what the future of san Quinton is. Mom I fasted for you and let me know how it goes.  I’m glad grandma is coming down to help you out. Girls @ I’m proud of you… be strong and of good courage and enjoy life and school.  Love mom and dad and watch TV shows together and enjoy each others company. Ha-ha sometimes I have to pretend like I don’t have a family back home until Monday emails, but that is for the best. So about Skype yes I can Skype.  It would be difficult, but I want to do it because who knows what rules the new mission president will bring. I am roughly 15 hours ahead of you all. I can talk with you anytime the month of May. I get an hour of total talk time which is generous I am told. I can split that up or whatever. I get up 630 on Monday. So call me any Sunday night when it is around 7 here I guess on my pday, and I will talk with you for an hour. I am totally down to Skype I don’t know how to though. I would have to send you a request from the internet cafe. I’m torn on the matter maybe just a phone call for this one. We can talk for a half of an hour and figure out how to Skype, and for the next 30 minutes Skype who knows?? Yeah so I won’t get to talk to you again until December. So if you want to talk this week that is okay if you want to wait until the last Monday for me in may that would also be good too. You have my number. 20 cents a minute for you to call I believe. For an hour that would cost about 12 bucks. No I haven’t gotten sick.  I have a water filter bottle. One day I had some LBM kind of because a member gave me TANG and I had to drink it that would be rude. We were thatching his roof for a service project. Good ole elder savage I miss him. But me and Elder Tan are doing good work. Teaching lots of lessons and coming together into a unit. Don’t worry about sending me stuff through out my mission. I am ok! I have lost weight but I am healthy. One morning this week, I was thinking to my self staring at a picture of Dan Jones.  I want a soap box moment later on in my mission. Ha-ha like they did in the early days of the church. Later that night elder tan and I and a couple members went out into the bukid or country to teach a lesson to supposedly two investigators. The whole town basically showed up. I learned to be careful what we wish for. There were about 40 people there. Mostly teenagers or standbys as the teenage boys are called.  Boys with no direction in life who, like their slang name indicates, they just "stand by" ha-ha.  They don’t go to school they just smoke and follow the world. Anyways this group was mostly made up of them. My Tagalog is sketchy and so I was like ohh boy. They are gonna laugh us out of town. Elder tan started us off.  I prayed which I’m good at. And then we began to teach the entire first lesson. It came to me and I felt calm and sure.  I talked about the Saviors ministry and pagbabayad-sala or atonement and the great apostacy. No one laughed I was shocked! They just stared at me. Then I gave an account of the first vision (totally skipped one line of it by accident) it still made sense mind you, and no one said a word. My accent even made them lean in closer and crowd around to try to understand. That event testified to me whose work I am doing. By all rights they should have jeered.  We handed out lots of books of Mormon.  I gave one to the meanest looking one standing by that I saw. He had a mean mustache, rat tail, tattoos, earrings, and a gangster Lakers hat. He took the book looked at me said “tank you”.  He kind of laughed, but I was just glad they allowed me to give my message in peace. They can laugh or burn it after I’m through with the message hahaha. So the Rambo pic…so I bought that hat in the palengke my only souvenir…I guess you could say. I use souvenir money on the cherished peanut butter, and the gun is a broken air soft gun the previous missionaries left to scare off anyone who tries to hastle the missionaries. Their “bawal” now so we got rid of it haha literally the day after I took that picture they started the prohibition of air soft guns. One member gave me a cool looking jersey from his barangay team MABINI it is way cool and I will keep it forever. We are trying real hard to get them ready for the temple trip this following week, but I don’t think it will work. It kills me on the inside. The dad is so strong too. The hardest thing people have with here is tithing and Salita ng karunungan or word of wisdom. We would have gotten to go with them to the temple in manila as well to witness. Well God is in control. President Jensen has told me that in my last letter along with other words of advice. He is a very wise man and I will be sad to only have gotten to work under him for so short of a time. But I’m sure President Manahan will be awesome. I want to Skype you all though.  We will figure it out. Just call me. Please research for me, so when it is like 7-8 ish here you call. Man ha-ha these things are difficult. Well I love you all very much and I am doing this work now so that we can rest together for eternity. I will read your scripture Lou.  I’m so sorry, I get only so much time to email 45 minutes to read respond so I breeze through them and sometimes I cannot respond to every single question, but I do read every single one. Dad, I found your letter.  I didn’t want to tell you I lost it until I found it. I was dead inside when I couldn’t find it. I found it though and have taken a lot of the pieces of advice and have put them on my small plates of Nephi in my smaller journal. It helped me a lot this week. I had pizza today and pineapple juice masaya ako na maglinkod dito sa san quinton ADIOS.

Elder Barney