Elder Head in the Philippines week 9 - Happy Birthday Mitch!!!!

Happy Birthday Elder Head!  Eh.....it was alright. I was sick for half of my birthday so that wasn't too great, then when I felt well enough we went out to teach. It was super difficult to find people to teach, so I guess you could say that I've had better birthdays :) Haha! Thank you for all the birthday messages....they were pretty sweet! We are working hard to find people and during our planning session tonight will talk about ways to make this more effective. We had a lot of Christmas parties this week and it was way fun! A zone Christmas one where I got to see people from my MTC batch like Foote and Borrego so that was great! We had the ward Christmas party on Saturday too. This week though we were focused on helping one of our investigators Sister Francis get to church....and....SHE CAME TO CHURCH!! WHOO!! She's been investigating since September and are so happy that she finally came to church. Today we are going to go up to Liloan and play basketball with the Liloan zone for P-day so that'll be fun. Sorry, I am out of time! Later!

Elder Head

A side note from Mom:

So Mitch's birthday was for sure different than any other that he's had up this point in his short 19 years.....he was out sharing the gift of the gospel on his birthday. What a great opportunity that is! Also different for him this year is that he had not a gift to open himself from his family! (insert crying face emoji here)  Our Christmas/Birthday package has still NOT arrived!  Good thing we sent it International Priority with an arrival time of 6-10 business days! (insert sarcastic emoji face here if there is one) The package was sent on November 20th, by my calculations, 18 business days have now passed! UGH!! I really hope and pray that it will show up before Christmas. It also appears that as of February 2015, missionaries will only be able to send one email to a person who writes them....no more emailing back and forth. This is NOT being done to make things difficult or frustrating for the missionary or their loved ones but is being done so that the focus on the work that they have been called to do can be done with as few distractions as possible. (insert crying face emoji here too) It does make me a little sad but I totally understand why too. I will learn to adapt......I guess ;)  We love and miss Mitch but are so grateful that he's serving the Lord in the Philippines! 

Happy Birthday Elder Head!

Elder Head and Elder Larson working??

Elder Head in the Philippines week 8 - Typhoon Ruby :)

Hey Guys! So I'm not dead. Buyag. Bagyo Ruby really didn't hit us here in Mandaue. The mission helped us out a lot. It was supposed to hit us around 2am Sunday morning but ended up changing course and we got a lot of rain. But we prepared like it was going to hit us because we had no idea. But we're safe and sound! Hopefully it'll continue to be safe. The only real damage that Typhoon Ruby did in our area was push back our sacrament meeting a half hour. They also only held sacrament meeting. We used the other 2 hours to prepare and practice our Christmas presentation as a zone for the Mission Christmas party on Thursday. We had some missionaries from Bogo stay with us. Two Filipinos. Other than that is was really slow this week. Our most progressing investigators dropped us. So we have to start from scratch, really. Sorry to be so short today but not a lot really happened this last week! Transfers happened and I'm still here. I think I already told you all that though. This week was super slow. I'll just write a really super good letter next week. So stay tuned. Sorry again. Posaylo i ko! Have a great week!

Elder Head 



We received an email from President Tanner on Friday morning.  He informed us about all that was being done to safeguard the missionaries from this typhoon, this was a wonderful email to receive! We were grateful that they were prepared and ready not matter what! Missionaries learn so much while serving and this was a great reminder of that.  Be prepared :) It's still hard to believe that Mitch is half way around the world! His birthday is on Saturday! #96daysdown #only634daysleft??? #timeisflyingby #not #skypingin17days9hours22minutes!!  We love you, Elder Head!!!

Elder Head in the Philippines - Week 7 I sure miss my cute boy!!

Hey Guys! So sorry about the late email! It's transfer week this week so our P-day is Wednesday instead of Monday. We'll be back to normal next week. Good news, I'm still in Mandaue with Elder Larson for 6 more weeks! So that'll be good. So I'm not gonna lie, I was just a little homesick this week because of the holidays, but I'm over it now! For my Thanksgiving dinner, Elder Larson and I went to 7/11 and got an ube ice cream. This week was the Primary program here in Mandaue! My favorite song that they sang was "I Am a Child of God." They enunciated the "f" SUPER hard on "of" so it sounded way funny. But they really did such a good job. It went over a half hour though so it was a LITTLE long but they're super cute so it's okay. Haha. So our recent convert Sister Joana, just moved out of our area and out of our mission too. She's in Cebu City which is part of Cebu mission and she didn't tell us until a couple of days before she moved. So we have to refer her to the Cebu missionaries to teach her the Recent convert lessons. Which sucks. A lot. Haha. Also, word on the street is that there's a big typhoon that's headed or way that could do a lot damage to us. Which is scary. We're going to some of our members today to help them reinforce their "hobbles" as they call them. There's a chance that the storm might pass us and just go north to more ocean and not hit anyone, which is the best case scenario, mao lagi, but if not it could do some damage they say. So this week we taught our investigators about prayer and it just made me think about how our Father in Heaven really does listen and help us know what to do and gives us comfort. I was thinking about how in the MTC, I was a little homesick and all I wanted was some Graham Canyon ice cream because that's what my mom and I got a week before I left and every time I tried to get it before, it was already gone. Then on my last week, I prayed hard. I was determined to get that ice cream. I just wanted it sometime before I left. Then my last Sunday, I walked into the cafeteria and went straight to the ice cream counter and lo and behold, there it was. I was so stinking happy! So Heavenly Father wants to bless us, all we have to do is ask. He'll give it to us if it's for our benefit, even if it's something as silly as Graham Canyon ice cream. So have a good week!

Elder Head

Elder Head in the Philippines week 6 - 1st baptism :)

Hey Everyone! 

So this week we had the baptism of Sister Joana and I had the opportunity to confirm her as a member of the church. It was such an awesome experience. I was so nervous but it turned out okay! I meant to do it in Cebuano, but I accidentally did it all in English cause I was more nervous than I thought, but luckily she knows english and I used simple english for everyone in the congregation. So that was the highlight of the week. The rest of the week was a little tough. Some of the people we've been teaching lately have lost interest and others were more interested in who was teaching rather than what was being taught. Nagingon sila ngadto ilang mga amigo nga mga uyab mi nila. (They were telling their friends that we were their boyfriends, which is dili pwede) So that wasn't good. So we're going to go talk to them and see if they're actually interested or not. I struggled with the language a lot this week. Some days I'm super VisDak and other days I'm basically useless in the language, which is hard but I know that with practice and with help from our Heavenly Father, it'll come. I ate Durian pie this week, yeah. It wasn't good. The people were all like "Oh you'll love it! It's the fruit of the gods! You're so lucky!" Yeah it wasn't good. I ate the whole thing though cause I didn't want to offend but it tasted like foot. So funny story, this week we were tracting out in Cabancalan and we found this family who is super awesome and they're very accepting of us. But they're super devout Catholic. The mom gets up every morning at 2 AM to walk around with their Virgin Mary statue and takes it to the other members of their congregation's houses so they can kiss it and receive blessings... Basta, we were talking with them and they took us to their prayer meeting. It was super weird but we couldn't stay cause we had a dinner appointment but we were just sitting in a room with them with a shrine up to the virgin mary up at the front and we were just talking with them about churches and religion. Then we left before things got too weird for us. It sounds like the start of a joke though. What do you call a room with 10 Catholics and 2 Mormons... I'll let ya'll figure out the ending to that one. Haha. The church is true! Have a good week!

Elder Head

Elder Head in the Philippines -week 5 is a little slow :)

Oh what's up everyone? So this week was kind of slow. Haha. We had Stake Conference on Saturday night so we had the Priesthood session that night and right after we had the adult session. Which were both good. We had Elder Collado come who is some sort of general authority. I'm not sure if he's an area 70 or a member of the second quorum of the 70 or what, but he killed it. He was super adamant about how the Filipino members need to all be full tithe payers which is definitely a good goal, I think. We'll have the baptism of Sister Joana this Saturday! WOOHOO. I'm super stoked. I love Filipino food but on Tuesday we went to eat dinner at the Bailey's house, and man I miss American food. Well, technically Mexican food. The Bailey's are an American family from Utah here on business. They go to the Talamban ward because that's an English ward but they're in our ward boundaries and have the missionaries of this ward over sometimes for fun. They can't have the missionaries in their ward come over because their ward is in the Cebu Mission so their house is out of the mission boundaries, but they cooked enchiladas and it was super good. Well enough trunky stuff. So on Sunday Elder Collado slipped into some Tagalog during his talk and at that time he was talking about following the commandments, and I guess the Tagalog word for follow is like "libong" or something, which sounds JUST like the Cebuano word for "Go poop" so his talk sounded like "Kinahanglan ta sa paglibong sa mga kasugoan" So I was super confused. Like why would we poop on the commandments??? Then Elder Larson told me that it means follow or something in Tagalog. So that happened this week. Haha. We're working hard to find new investigators so hopefully this week we'll be able to tract out in Cabancalan a little more. Sigi. That's about it for this last week! Love you guys! Have a super nindot week! 

Elder Head

Elder Head in the Philippines week 4 - I made it. I did it. I ate balut!!

I made it. I did it. I ate balut. It's official. I'm a filipino now. Jokes lang. But I really did eat balut this week. It wasn't my favorite to be honest, there's this SUPER hard white part inside the egg, which is gross. But I took it like a champ and ate the whole thing. Baby chick and all. Atta boy. Basta, hey guys. So this was a super cool week. We did a lot of tracting out in Tipolo which is a part of our area and we met a whole bunch of people who could potentially become investigators, we're praying for 'em. There's a Tatay named Arthur Pakadin (I call him Tatay Pakadin) in our ward who has been inactive for a few years in our ward that we've been visiting the past few weeks, and this week he came to church for the first time in years and received a big welcome from the ward. So hopefully he'll keep coming back. This ward is so great about missionary work. If the missionaries bring someone to church, they all go and introduce themselves to them and just make them feel so welcome, which helps us out a lot. It makes them feel like church is a welcoming place. A place where they belong. Because we all do belong. :) This past week we challenged some of our investigators to a Book of Mormon reading race, to help them start reading, and I am getting my butt KICKED. They read so fast, it's ridiculous. Haha. Its okay though because the winner gets a coke is all. Which is 7 pesos. Which is like 15 cents. Haha. Anyways. Today we had a Thanksgiving devotional which I spoke at in front of all the missionaries that are in our mission on the main island. It was only a 3 minute talk though, and it was in english. I'm a lightweight. Haha. Basta, it was way cool. So we've been teaching the Alibo family who are a Catholic family a lot this week. They're super eager to learn and I love them. They're the reason I ate balut. So we were almost done with our lesson with them and then this salesmen rode by on his bike and he was selling balut. Then Elder Larson called them over cause I hadn't eaten it yet. So because we were teaching them, I tried balut. It was gross so I tried to be strong and keep a straight face, but I failed. They laughed super hard but it was a good bonding experience for us. Haha. So that's about it. Ang Simbahan ni JesuKristo sa mga Santos sa Ulahing mga Adlaw mao ang simbahan mismo ni JesuKristo. Ang Basahon ni Mormon mao ang pinakatinuod nga basahon diri sa yuta. Si Joseph Smith mao ang usa ka tinuod propeta nga gitawagan sa Dios. Si President Thomas S. Monson mao ang tinuod nga buhing propeta diri sa yuta karon adlawa. Have a good week everyone!

Elder Head

We were emailing back and forth with Mitch last night and it seems that he is really enjoying his time doing "the work".  Cebuano is coming along and he has a great companion/trainer in Elder Larson! Elder Larson takes a lot of pictures which his mom sends to us....awesome! He was looking forward to going to Liloan for the devotional as they were stopping for lunch at MacDo (McDonald's) So he was going to order fried chicken and gravy with rice and a cheeseburger. 

Balut - He did it..he ate the whole thing!

Don't know what this is?? Yummy I'm sure!

Studying so hard he fell asleep??? But his hairdresser mom
only noticed his really short haircut....first one in the Pines!

Kids love the Elders!

Christmas begins whenever a month ends in "ber"!!!

Elder Head in the Philippines :)

Hey Guys! So far so good. I'm not dead. This week went by ridiculously fast. We taught a lot of
people this week! The most progressing investigator that we have is a sister named Sister Joana who
lives in Tipolo. She's been to church the past five weeks but didn't start taking the missionary lessons
until this week. She's already committed to baptism and will be baptized on November 22nd. Malipayyong kalag kalag! Halloween here is like three days. Kalag Kalag (Halloween), followed by All Saints Day, then followed by All Souls day. I don't know much about how they celebrate
besides that they sleep in the cemetery. So this weekend was a little slow but we taught a lot of 
lessons during the week and worked really hard. It was a good week! The kids here are so funny. They love the missionaries. They all call me Elder Ulo cause that's Elder Head sa Cebuanp and they will freak out every time they see Elder Larson and I. So this week I finished 1st Nephi and started 2nd Nephi. I challenged one of our investigatrs named Sister Frances to a race to finish 2nd Nephi. She works at a little tindahan (It's like a lean-to convenience store thing. It's hard to explain) so she has all day to read so I'm PRETTY sure I'm gonna get killed but hey, it'll get her reading, right? Haha. 
Filipino food is the best. Especially Mango floats. I can't really explain them, other than they're the best dessert in the Philippines. We taught the Alibo family the first lesson this week. They're a happy family out in Tipolo which is a part of our area. They're super awesome and ask a lot of questions which we're happy to answer of course. So we went to talk to a less active sister in our ward named Sister Sala who's husband died earlier in the week, except I didn't know she was less active. I thought she was not a member but her husband was. So at the end of the lesson I almost started to extend the baptismal commitment to her... "Buhaton ba nimo mosunod sa ehemplo ni JesuKristo pinaagi pagpabunyag.." But Elder Larson closed our lesson before I got the chance to and walking out I was like "Pastilan, Elder! I was just about to commit her to baptism! Unsa manat oy??" Then he proceeded to tell me about how they were talking about how she and her husband were sealed in the temple and how he's in a better place and I just misunderstood the whole part of that lesson. Awesome, right? So that was a close call. Haha.

Basta, have a good week! Kitakits!

Elder Head