Here is another video example of our traffic.

This is a picture of a spider that Ken took.  As a woman who dislikes insects in general, I find it distasteful that spiders exist at all and only like them in the form of Spider Solitaire. This post is mostly for Lucas.  After living through all the photos of insects that he sent from Paraguay, this is my answer.  Apparently Ken likes to photograph these guys for posterity.  Whatever...

Another picture of a loaded trike.  We saw this one on April 23, 2017 as we were driving from Siapco's house to the church.

     Last Sunday, both Ken and Leslie spoke in church and afterward went to three meetings and choir practice, which Leslie conducted.  Then we had a dinner appointment at Siapco's house (he is in the EQ presidency).  Sister Siapco gave us a tree/bush. (the picture is below). After that we met the missionaries and Sister Gemma, the RS president, and took Sacrament to Sister Romolo who is elderly and can't get to the church.  She has no means of transport and lives about a ten minute walk from the highway so even if she had transport, she can't walk that far.  The photo is of Sister Siapco and her granddaughter and us.

The Church has bought the lots next to many of the buildings here in the Philippines.  These are probably for future expansion.  This is good planning and far-seeing.  This is the lot next to our church in San Ildefonso.  The words mean that it's forbidden to dump garbage here.  This law, as other laws, goes unnoticed and ignored.
"Bawal" is a good word to know.  As missionaries, lots of things are bawal, like wearing smart-watches, wearing lots of jewellery, not wearing your nametag, etc.

We bought some outdoor furniture to go with our new house.  We ordered it specially so the seats were higher than chairs made for the local leg-lengths.  It took just over two weeks.

This is where we bought the chairs and table.  They are made from bamboo and cost less than $60 CAD.  We gave the wife of the chair-maker (who spoke a little English) an Aklat Ni Mormon.  She was looking through it as we drove away with furniture strapped to various areas of our car.

   Still no wifi yet. It will get done only on Philippino time. Things take a little longer to get done in the Philippines.
 Ken has been called as the executive secretary in the branch and also as second counsellor in the Young Men's organization.  Leslie has been called as second counsellor in the Primary.
     Our mission president has a "mapping" initiative which locates every member in our district on a map.  This is a place where street addresses do no good.  Streets do not have signs which give their names and houses do not have numbers on them.  Some streets look like alleys or lanes and a car will not fit in them.  So to locate people on a map (Google maps), someone has to recognize the area where a person's home is and mark it on the map with a "pin".
Once every member is located, home teachers will be organized for each individual.  Because many of the areas are remote and hard to get to, the mission is working to find a way to contact these members through social media or texting as a method of home teaching.  Ken has been collecting and compiling the results of mapping in our district.  We have five branches in our district and the leaders would like it to become a stake someday so we are working towards that.

     We went to our district center church building on April 8 and 9 to watch dvd's of conference.  The Saturday sessions and the Women's broadcast were shown on Sat. and the Sunday sessions and Priesthood session were shown on Sunday.  Because of the 14 hour time difference, if we watched it live, we would have seen it at midnight and 4 in the morning.

We have found something new that we like.  Yellow watermelon!  It actually is yellow or orange on the outside and they look like pumpkins except they are watermelon-sized, and they have watermelon seeds.

This is a picture of us with Gemma Ducado, the RS president (right), and Sister Priscilla (left), and Elders Stephens (left) and Racho (right).

On April 14 we had an Easter Primary party which was attended by the youth also.  Micalyn Cruz took this selfie which had us in it as well.

On Friday, April 14 there was a parade here in Baliwag organized by the Catholic church.  There were over a hundred floats, which are owned by families, and they are ornate and decorative.  The families show their devotion to the church by buying and displaying these floats.  Attendance at church is another matter altogether.  The floats have live flowers and plastic models on them which are dressed in costume.  They depict scenes from Jesus's life; mostly his flogging or crucifixion or death.  None of them show the resurrection.

 Elder and Sister Bremner's daughter, Kelsie, and their grandson, Davyn, were here.

This is our forecast for the rest of the week. They don't mention the mugginess, probably because it seems normal.


Suliban, Bulacan

TUE

High
100°F
38°C

Low
81°F
27°C

WED

High
103°F
40°C

Low
78°F
25°C

THU

High
99°F
37°C

Low
72°F
22°C

FRI

High
101°F
38°C

Low
74°F
23°C

There is a restaurant here in the Philippines named Kenny Rogers Roasters.  At conference yesterday, the district counsellors were teasing Ken about it and  when he admitted what his first name was, they were thrilled.

On Mach 29th we went bowling at a mall in Manila with all the senior couples in our mission (six couples).  We drew quite a few onlookers as we were twelve tall, white, older persons (who really didn't bowl very well at all).  The person in the far lane is our mission president, President Bertin.

We've noticed something interesting about the moon.  Probably because we are in a different latitude, a different portion of the moon shows in the crescent.




                  

This is a picture of our new house.  It's rented by the Quezon City North Mission.  We don't have wifi in our new place so last week we couldn't post on our blog.  We still don't have wifi but we're piggybacking on our neighbours' service.

We have moved! On April 4 we changed houses.  We are only a half-block away from our former house.  It was sold by our landlord to some gnomes, apparently.  Maybe Sponge Bob had something to do with it also.