Hello Family!
This has been a really good week! Very different as well.
This week was a bit of a wake up call for me. It was so weird to be the one, not only leading the area, but also leading the companionship. I think the thing I realized the most was how much I need to improve my language. And my faith. I need a little bit more of that as well. You can never have enough faith... just like Nutella.
It was a really good week working with Elder Domantay! I love this Elder. He went into the MTC in October and so this is the start of his 4th transfer in the field. It's always a thing us Americans talk about in the field about how fast the Filipinos learn the language. My first district leader told me the other day, "Yeah, I'm going home tomorrow and the Elder I just trained my last transfer was better than me in Ilonggo by his second week..." So that's how things work here in the Philippines. And they are all these fantastic teachers, it's so crazy! A lot of them were able to work with the missionaries a lot before they went on their missions so they know how to teach and everything already. It really is a blessing for me though because he can help me a lot in the things I can't do yet.
Thank goodness I just remembered this experience because I had no idea what I was going to talk about in this letter haha!
I think it was my second day with Elder Domantay and we had just taught a lesson dealing with someone who had recently relapsed on their smoking problem. I absolutely BUTCHERED my bit of the lesson trying to figure out how to help this individual and then he shared this experience he had about someone he knew who had an addiction and fixed the lesson up all nice and pretty by the end. I was so impressed! Afterward I was like, "Elder, you are so skilled! You have been here less time than me, but you already know how to teach way better than me!" ("skilled" sounds nerdy in English, but that's essentially the translation for what I said to him) His response to my statement was this: "I'm not better than you, I just knew something you didn't. We have both have had different experiences." Very simple.
What he said to me was very simple, yet very profound to me. Here I was thinking, "Ah man, I'm already getting beat by my junior companion. He should be the senior!" But after he said that I realized how true the thing he said to me was. We all have experiences in our lives that we have learned from. Sometimes we won't realize why we have certain challenges or certain experience, but maybe someday down the road, we will have an opportunity to share that experience with someone else. And perhaps that personal experience will be the only thing that will affect the person enough to help them with solve their own concerns. So we shouldn't compare ourselves to other people. Each person has been given their strengths and weakness and we can learn from them.
That story about Spencer mixing up the scriptural names is funny. I have that same problem sometimes. Many of the gospel terms in Ilonggo and Tagalog are actually Spanish because the Christian heritage was brought by them to the Philippines. If you read an Ilonggo Bible and the Book of Mormon, a lot of the names and words are just Spanish. But a lot of people are more familiar with Tagalog and English versions of scripture anyway because the Ilonggo translations are pretty deep. Most of the structure and vocabulary have been lost in the currently used language. The way the language works, you can just drop any root word of most languages into a Filipino conjugation and it works! For example, people here don't really understand/use the Ilonggo word for "share" so when we go to someone's house we say, "Puede kami mag-share sa inyo?" "Puede" is also Spanish, so this is a really confusing place... I realized the other day that they were mixing FIVE languages in my first area! Tagalog, Cebuano, Spanish, English, and Ilonggo. But that's probably the reason that people learn new languages here so quickly. So that's fun.
Apparently they are coming out with an iWatch and a new MacBook! That's cool! I would like details on that please :) Thank you! And I will be sure to make those teacher recommendations for Ben, I will have to think about it first because I can't remember all of my stuff from sophomore year.
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