It’s almost April….What????        

Happy pday everyone.  I’ll just start out this email by letting you know that I got my 'trunky letter' This week. It’s just a letter that you have to fill out things about how you are going to travel home so they can get your flights booked. But everyone here calls it trunky letter. It means you have 4 months left.  It was pretty cool I guess.  But it got me thinking about what it will be like to come home...so that was a little weird. I guess I don’t know what all to expect and it’s weird that I’m one of the older missionaries now.  So that was a highlight of my week.

   Also this week we had 6 investigators at sacrament meeting! It was super exciting. We have one old tatay who is really progressing and is scheduled to be baptized on April 18 so we are really hoping he makes it. He is also an amazing cook so every time we teach him he makes us lunch and it’s so yummy. It’s exciting to have people start progressing.  We are also teaching a bunch of his kids and grandkids and they are the cutest things ever. I love them so much. Mom and dad when you come we are going to visit them.  They had never seen an American before me so they were pretty excited. That is actually how we oymd them cause they were all staring so we just started talking to them. You would be amazed at how well that works. But now we are teaching them several times a week and they also came to church this week. And when we come they always run down the street towards us yelling sister van sister van sister van! it’s really cute. And then after we teach they walk us to our next appointment.  We taught them about word of wisdom and they all committed to live the word of wisdom.  So we follow up with them all the time and their experiences are so cute.  They all are reminding each other only to drink milo (hot chocolate) now. And one of the girls said her mom bought her an iced tea and she was about to drink it but then she remembered she had promised us so she didn’t drink it! :) Super awesome sila.

   Another experience with oyming.  So as we walk down the street people will sometimes point and say wow it’s an American!  Sometimes it’s annoying but it just depends on how you look at it. And what your attitude is. So some girls did that to me this week and I decided to go talk to them but I only spoke in English to them just to get them a little flustered haha. It was really funny. But then I changed back to Tagalog and we oymd them and asked if we could teach. And they said ok so we went to their house and about 100 kids followed us! joke that’s a bit of an exaggeration but when we taught the lesson and I think there were 20+ kids there.  It’s not an ideal teaching situation but it was fun and they were all so darn cute.  Sometimes OYMing is fun :)

      Those are the main things that have happened this week. My companion had her money and one of her flash drives stolen so we think someone broke into our house and took it but the weird thing was that they didn’t take the other valuable things that were out in plain sight.  So it doesn’t make any sense that they only took her money and nothing else.  Maybe it was a ghost. The sisters are convinced that there is a ghost in our house and they are freaking out. So we all slept in the same room last night.  Crazy crazy. But other than that we are doing good. Just trying to make the best out of every day.  I’m on D&C 122 today. Not sure if I told you but I’m reading the doctrine and covenants backwards.  it’s kind of like a countdown. One section every day. So it means we have 122 days left haha.  Crazy crazy.  Miss you all like crazy!  Love you all and hope you have an awesome week!

XOXO still from Trece

Sister Van Tassell