Hello everyone! How goes the battle? How goes life on the dry side of the world.  I would offer to share my rain with you but rain is the only thing that cools us down over here so I think I’ll keep it.  Especially when a typhoon knocks out your power!  

So I’m sure you’re all wondering how it feels to live through a typhoon.  Not bad not bad.  It hit us at night so I didn’t sleep much.  We were up worrying about it and talking so I didn’t get to bed till super late haha.  And then our power went out at 4, so we woke up then cause our fans weren’t blowing on us so it was killer hot.  And that’s about all the sleep I got.  Cause it was so stinking hot so I couldn’t take a nap.  I tried to fan myself and sleep at the same time but that didn’t work either.  Our house held up ok.  Half the roof off of our laundry room got ripped off and all my laundry got wet and dirty again so that sucked.  But we were ok.  Since we didn’t have electricity our fridge obviously wouldn’t work.  And that was awful.  Everything went bad and smelled bad.  We lost our electricity Tuesday night and we didn’t get it back till Sunday morning.  We did everything with candles and the few flashlights we had.  It wasn’t too bad really. It got a little old after a while though but we were fine.  We ate a lot of bread cause we couldn’t really cook much cause our stove is still patay.  We ran out of bread and so did all the stores haha.  So I’ll be happy when that gets restocked. We were stuck in our houses the whole day but the storm stopped at about noon so we spent most of our day outside.  We cleaned up all the tree branches and leaves and trash on our porch and we cleaned the neighbor’s porch too for service and because we were bored haha.  Then we played with the neighbor kids.  And we went to the court and played basketball.  And we went and visited the elders and played chess with them.  A lot of just doing nothing.  Our phone was dead and there was no power to charge it haha.  It was really cool because even though it was a big storm...as soon as it was over, everyone came out of their houses and started cleaning up.  No one just left it sitting there.  Within an hour it was all clean and good as new.  In our area at least.  Some of the other areas aren’t as lucky.  One of our investigators houses is like severely slanted right now.  They’ll have to tear it down and rebuild it.  And tons of people lost their roofs.  There were houses that had fallen down and it was crazy.  Kind of like we were watching TV but we were actually there living it. The crazy thing was that we didn’t get any information cause all the power was out and no one knew anything.  The kids got a whole week off of school. It was a good experience.  Anyway I’m sorry this is a short one.  And the internet is killer slow so I don’t think I’m going to get any pictures sent.  So sorry about that.  But I love you all.  Next email will be better.  Thanks to everyone that wrote me letters. I love them!  They make my day!  Keep sending them.  I’ll talk to you all next week!  Miss you lots!

Love Sister Van Tassell