We Made It To The Philippines!!!

Well, we made it to the Philippines and today is our first P-day. 

Arriving in Cebu. We were picked up by Bishop Sanchez, the patron house director and Krey and Wendy Stirland, another missionary couple from the US.

It seemed like the week went so fast and yet it also feels like we have been here forever. We have been upside down with our internal clock and are just now beginning to adjust. Maybe by this time next week we will have completely adjusted to the time difference. We have a cute little apartment on the third floor of the patron apartments. There are 11 other couples that work in the temple on our floor. Three of us are from another country, two including us are from the US and the other from Singapore. The others are from here in the Philippines and are considered volunteers instead of official missionaries.

The patron house - We live on the third floor in the back corner

Everyone is so kind and welcoming

Shortly after arriving we met a young man who served with Bethany on her mission. He was so excited to meet us. I think he works here on the grounds. That was super fun. 

We met with the temple president Tuesday morning at 8am and he set us apart, by 11am we started our first shift. We work the afternoon shift Tuesday - Friday (11:00 - 5:00) and the morning shift on Saturday (7:00 - 12:00). It is wonderful to spend so much time in the temple but is also a little exhausting. The temple is so beautiful and quite a bit bigger than the Redlands temple, however the ordinance rooms are about the same size. The workers have their own locker room and permanent locker. It’s great except that there are no stalls and we just dress out in the open. That took some getting used to. Most of the people here rent clothing and there is a paid laundry person and staff so we don’t have to work in the laundry. There is also a cleaning crew that comes in during the night so we don’t clean either. It is a busy temple and so many of the patrons are young adults. It is heart warming to see their love of the temple and of the gospel, most of them are either getting ready to serve a mission or have recently returned. I was amazed that there are several own endowments every day!!!! Things are much more laid back here and I’m working on getting used to that. It’s so wonderful that where every we go, we feel at home in the temple. When we are not at the temple we are pretty much free to do what ever we want to do. We are getting good at flagging down a taxi to get around the city. There are two 10 passenger vans available to us temple missionaries but neither Joe nor I are brave enough to drive in the city. The other Elder from the US drives and does a great job. The traffic here is crazy and this last week was even crazier since there was a festival celebrating Christianity coming to the Philippines. The population of the city doubled so we just stayed in the temple complex. Church was interesting, they are supposed to speak English and try hard to do so, but they actually speak about 1/4 English and the rest Cebuano. It was a little difficult trying to keep up. We have determined that we need to work on learning as much of the language as we can so we can understand what is going on. It is beautiful here and we are looking forward to seeing as many sites as we can. Most of the food here has been really good. I did decide I will skip going to the dining room on my break since the other workers are always trying to feed us. I had to eat some chicken intestines the other day because I didn’t want to offend the sweet sister that offered them to me. Sorry this is so long, so much happening here. We miss all of you so much. I do pretty good fighting off the homesickness unless I start talking about my family, and then I get all chocked up. Thank you all for your support we love you. Please write when you have time, it’s so great to hear about what is happening at home.