On June 20 Ken and Leslie were in charge of organizing a Senior's Activity.  Because we haven't done a service project since we planted trees in the landfill, we organized an activity where we took food out into the community and fed the children (and also a few adults).  These are pictures of the activity.

The kids came running up the hill to get their soup.  Some of them brought their own containers. They formed a line, and waited for their turn. They must have done this before because they knew the routine.

This picture of a little boy is a visual representation of the experience.  Even though we've lived here for over 16 months, we were still touched and surprised by the poverty and humble circumstances of these children/families.  They were very gracious and thankful for the food we gave them.

This is a picture taken after the activity was over.  The lady on the left wearing the blue T-shirt is the RS President of Batasan 1st Ward, Fedelina Rimando, through whom we organized the activity.  She is also employed by Social Services.  The older woman in the purple T-shirt is Sister Rimando's mother, who cooked the food.  We gave Sister Rimando the money to buy the food and  her mother cooked the soup.  The girl on the far right in the burgundy shirt is Princess Rimando, Fedelina's daughter.  She recently returned from serving a mission.

We have noticed that the Philippines is really a culture of contrasts.  Today we drove to the Bazaar in downtown Manila and saw some sophisticated and modern buildings, but on the way we passed some slum-like dwellings that are also located close to these areas.

People rent this beautiful apartment building but laundry is still done by hand and then hung out to dry in the sun.

This is Congressional Road, a lovely 6-lane road, which is a pleasure to drive on, except for the cows and goats which wander at will.

We met Daniel Torres at Sampaguita Ward on Sunday June 17.  His family was baptized by Mark Cahoon in the 70's when Daniel was a child.  He was happy to see missionaries who knew Mark.

We celebrated our second Father's Day here.  Ken has a new tie! Yay! He's also wearing flip-flops he got for Father's Day.

  

We have been experiencing Severe Tropical Storm Maliksi for the last few days.  What it has consisted of is mostly heavy rainfall.  There is also a breeze, which for us from Alberta seems very slight, but here they call it a wind.  We got notifications on our phones about impending danger from rainfall and possible landslides.  Actually what we have witnessed is that the temperature has dropped from 36 C to about 29 C.  We have appreciated that.

As we said last week, we've been working a lot with members.  June 6 we took our car into Novaliches Ward and got GPS coordinates with Elder Every, Elder Obligacion and Bishop Movilla. The missionaries are trying to get a GPS coordinate for every household in the ward and some of them are really far away from the missionaries so we drive them.  On this day Bishop Movilla was showing us some of the members' homes that the missionaries didn't know.  We followed him on his motorcycle. He is the one on the left, closest to the camera.

We had Zone Conference on June 7, 2018.  It was basically about working with members.  It  was inspiring and motivating, as usual. This is our zone.

We took this photo on May 31.  As a former school teacher this was painful to see.

We have spent a lot of hours this last week working in the streets and in the ward buildings with elders and members. These are some of the pictures of those experiences:

This was on May 30.  We worked with Elders Morris and Jones and Bishop Desales of the Santa Monica Ward.

Later that afternoon at the church we dealt with a young man who was under the influence of a mind-altering substance.  The bishop and Ken ended up dragging him out of the church and locking him out while he was wailing and howling.  He sat on the outside for a while and then broke some windows and tried to get back into the church but was stopped by the bars on the windows.

It's summer right now so the neighbourhoods are full of children.  We decided they must be attracted to white shirts and ties because they follow the missionaries around wherever they go.

This is us working with the Deparo Ward elders and members on June 2.