Joy to the World!

 It's the beginning of Christmas in the Philippians. The "Ber" months.

The first of September we began singing Christmas songs in church. 
                    The businesses are all playing Christmas music.

                    Look at this picture carefully and tell me, 

 "How many sale persons does it take to help me buy a curling iron?"

The next question is, "Which head of lettuce  would you pick out to eat"?

Next question, "Who is the strongest Sister Missionary in the Laoag Mission"?

Yes that is cement on the end of those bars.

(We took a trip to Vigan once again and stopped at the missionaries' apartments. Sister Snyder found a toy to play with in one of the Elders apartment).

Welcome to the Sisters' Apartment!

A Sister using a creative way to stay cool at night as well as to keep the bugs off.

 Our Senior Sisters, known as "R&D" gave every apartment a basket with cleaning supplies in it.

 These elders are happy to get the cleaning supplies. We hope they will use them now.

We actually went along to see the "Hidden Gardens". 

It's a place to eat and they sell plants.

 Notice the bag of fertilizer on top.

 The fertilizer.

 We couldn't resist getting a picture of these, "Dirty little angles".

It's time to plant the rice and watch it grow. We have been so fortunate to not have any Typhons to mess up the crops. This is our rice fields out back.

In planting, they just throw the seeds out. Later they pull up the rice plant and replant it spreading it out more.

NO rice seeds yet.

 The plant grows quite tall. You can now start to see the rice.

RICE!

 The Senior Sisters had us over to dinner and somehow the elders must have smelled it because they were soon knocking at the door for the left overs

Got to love those elders! 

Our ride home from church.

One of our last rides in the van. It is gone and there is no plan for a new one yet.

Not sure you have met our Elder Griffiths. 

He is new to the office. He was given a shirt that had silver threads through it and he wants to wear to in the temple. In his free time, he picked every single silver thread out.

The left sleeve is finally done.

Half done!

At our District Meeting, we had a special musical number.

This is our sweet little Kit and Kim. Their parents are investigating the church. When they come to church they are our companions and we get to dote on them all through Sacrament Meeting.

Our whole primary.

A special number at Zone Conference. 

(You will see these two later in this post).

                                             

One morning our elders got up extra early to come and work out. 

We are so glad to see them.

You may ask why we are glad to see them? 

Yes, they had a very close call the other day.

We are all counting our blessings here in this mission. 

As you may have heard we had a New Mission President come to the Philippines and within the month he had a stroke and died.

Then there were the two missionaries that were killed in the car crash in Canada a few weeks ago. 

So yes, we count ourselves very blessed.

On a lighter side, we had a District Meeting. Here is a little taste of it.

                                         

Elder Clark leaves for home this month. I want to quote some of his blog to you.

"So I don’t know if you know but there's this weird dessert here in the Philippines called Halo-Halo...

It's like a fancy ice milk, gummy cereal, ice cream mashed up drink that has like 27 ingredients with weird textures and flavors you have never tasted before...tough to paint in words so yeah, here's a picture..                                                  

Yes, this is how I feel emotionally about my mission ending..I’m not sure if that makes sense. Sad, happy, scary and weird, is a good way to describe how I am feeling. Like I feel good and happy, sweet and delicious but at the same time I feel weird and out of place like maybe I can just be a missionary forever... I just love my mission so much and I am doing my best to soak up each and every moment of this spiritual high they call the best two years....     I feel as if I have learned more in these two years than I did in my entire life before the mission. I truly believe the Mission is the best training/preparation for the rest of our lives. I am ready to face the future with faith and courage." So as you know our Elder Clark left us. Before he left he asked for a picutre with all of us Senior Sisters (mothers or Grandmothers to them) So when they counted "Three" we all turned our backs.

Okay, we'll try to behave this time but it's going to be hard!

Just a little information: Our highest amount of baptisms has been 111 in one month. That was with the past Mission President. Our President, President Peterson told the missionaries that they were NOT to baptize children under 12 who do not have family. The older children 12 and up, must have family support. We are pleased to announce that we got 122 baptisms this month without the children. These are GOOD baptisms! We were losing so many of those children that had no family support. Here is our October Batch that just left. Goodbye Elder Clark and Elder Denkers it's been a blast working with you!

This is one of our new missionaries from St. George Utah. The office is losing a couple of elders and we have an upcoming birthday so we went out to celebrate. This is the gang soon to become much smaller.

We had "Family Week." To close the week we once again had a stake activity and walked down to a High School Gym.

This is some of our ward members ready to walk.

And the fun begins!      No it's all been fun so far.

The youth start to really get into it now.

Our youth having so much fun!

We wanted one last picture of our office group before we lost Elder Clark. Oh yes, that little Filipino sticking his head in the back is Elder Alarin. He just wants to be an Office Elder. You saw him in a video clip and in the photo where he's at the door looking for food. Funny, funny Elder......

        Okay Elders it's time to break out the "Welcome Sign" for our new           missionaries.

Meet the Ward Family. They are our new Laoag Senior Couple. They don't want to work in the office so we're afraid that there will be NO replacement for our jobs. It's so hard to think about leaving with no one coming to replace us.

Love and miss you all. 

   The Sister Sisters