So happy!

Dear loved ones,

SO this week has been great! I love Silay. It is a huge area. I am in Silay East ward and there are two sets of sister missionaries in the ward. The other sisters (Sister T and Sister R) are our housemates. Sister D is my companion, and I love her! She's great! She has only been out for four weeks, and I realized the other day that that means that I am a senior companion. How time flies! Even though the ward is split between to areas, our area is still super big, which is great, but also hard. Great that there are progressing investigators in all of the different places, but hard to plan effectively in order to be able to visit them frequently. We mostly travel by tricycles, which of course is my favorite way to ride!

Our apartment is a duplex, but all four of us sisters are on one side of the duplex. We alternate cooking everyday, which has its advantages and disadvantages. I bought a lot of veggies last week and then only ended up cooking twice. I'm hoping they won't go bad.

Then I ate sugar cane on Wednesday! Which is called tubo. The fields are called campo. The sugar cane was yummy! It's like moist, sweet wood. You just chew on it until you've sucked out all the sugar and then spit it out. Some members/investigators gave it to us, and I didn't know how to eat it, and of course they gave it to me first and were all looking at me. I said, "Paano? Kagat lang?" Well, turns out that's exactly how it's done.

Sister D and I ask each other about each others families in our downtime, or sometimes we talk about our common acquaintances here in the mission. She was a child of record, but wasn't baptized until she was nine because her mom "forgot." Her dad spent most of his working life in Saudi Arabia, etc. So that's hard. She is the very last in her family, and there's a huge age gap between her and her closest sibling. Last night we had a meeting with our ward mission leader, while we were waiting for the other sisters to arrive, I chatted with a Sister Casteneda, who turned out to be the trainee of Sister Rosario! Haha! When she learned I just transferred from Alijis, she asked if I knew Sister Rosario. I said, "Companion ko sya!" And so we chatted until it was time to leave, and then I returned to Sister Dumapias who was nearby having a conversation with a member of the ward. At that moment I just felt SO HAPPY! Sometimes that's how I just feel. Just oh so happy! 

My bed? The beds here in the mission so far are the same. a wooden frame with a skinny mattress, comfortable, usually clean. It's nice that they're all the same in the mission so that I don't have to adjust to a new mattress every transfer. I hated that about moving apartments as a student. 

I LOVED conference! I cried every session. I'm not sure why. I just loved it so much. This past six months I've actually been really good at reading and rereading the conference talks from April, and I felt that really helped me be ready for this conference.

Salamat gid sa inyo! Da best gid kamo!! Palangga gid kamo nakon! Salamat gid para sa mga pagpangamuyo nyo. 

Sister Marriott