Epistle from the Philippines #1 - My ample body was glazed in sweat.
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Date:
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Mon, Apr 30, 2012 2:26 am
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Hello from the Philippines! It feels so good to be at the computer writing to you after about week!
So what have I been doing since I last wrote/spoke to you? Good question!
On Monday last week our group of 5 sisters and 3 elders heading for the Philippines did just that... we headed to the Philippines. Saying goodbye at the MTC was surprisingly hard. I've said goodbye there before, but this time it was ME leaving! Leaving and knowing that I may never see some of these people again in this lifetime because we are serving in different missions and we are from distant lands. We took a MTC-owned bus to SLC where I got to call my family on the pay phone! I talked to Brian, Farina and little Wesley who occasionally cried in the background, and then I called Mom and Dad who were in the car with some relatives, and they put me on speaker phone. It was all very nice.
The flight to San Francisco was nondescript and uneventful. By the time we left SanFran for Hong Kong, it was like1 or 2 in the morning, and we were tired. I slept relatively well in the 14 hour flight. For the first half of the flight, I took several cat-naps. By about 7 hours in, I guess my sleep had been "satisfied" and I had trouble sleeping after that. This flight was also pretty nondescript. I was fortunate enough to have an aisle seat next to the toilet, so I could get up and stuff. The most exciting part of that flight was that Sister Arnold sat next to a nice Chinese man from the Hong Kong area, and she gave away a Book of Mormon.
The Hong Kong airport required security again. They confiscated terrifying nail file and cuticle scissors that I had in my carry-on. Those items were FINE in America! In this airport I saw my first ever real life Airbenders, aka Buddhist Monks. They were so cool, I wanted to take a picture. Hong Kong has some cool looking mountains outside. Anyway, we flew from Hong Kong to Manila next. On this flight I sat next to a nice Filipino man named Donald. He's a seaman; and he'd been away from the Philippines for 11 months in a ship. He was very interesting, and he also had a very good outlook on religion and tolerance. He loves the Bible, and reads it often. He and I shared favorite verses/stories from the New Testament. He shared the parable of the Good Samaritan. I shared the scripture in Matthew 7 that says, "Seek and ye shall find ... knock and it shall be opened unto you, etc." In the end I pulled out my Book of Mormon and shared a scripture from it too, bore my testimony, and I gave him my paperback Tagalog Book of Mormon. I also gave him a little Greg Olsen print of Jesus Christ (thanks, Kalenn). Looks who's being a missionary now?
Manila welcomed us with hassle. Baggage claim and customs were fine, but at this point in our journey we needed to figure out where to drop off Sister Tioti. While the rest of us had one more flight to Bacolod, she had reached her destination. We took this shuttle bus that took about a million years to load up to the domestic flights terminal. There we did a lot of waiting while Sister Arnold (the travel leader) and Elder Inlayo (actually speaks Tagalog) made some calls to Sister Tioti's mission. We eventually left her in the caring hands of a security guard to wait until the people came and picked her up. In the midst of this, I received my first 3 mosquito bites. Welcome to the Philippines. The rest of us headed up to check-in, which sort of added to the hellish feel we were already getting from the weather. They charged about ten trillion dollars for every bit of your luggage that weighed over 15 kilos (which isn't a lot of weight). The weighing and paying process took forever, and we were lucky this layover was like 4 hours long. We needed every second of it! We didn't get a chance to eat lunch or anything, we had to run onto the plane. We almost missed it. Then we flew to Bacolod. Some slight turbulence caused the guy next to me to spill his coffee before he even got the chance to drink it. I was so tempted to say, "This is a sign from God that you shouldn't be drinking coffee anymore." I didn't though. Finally after all THAT, we made it to Bacolod!
Now, I heard what to expect about a certain lack of toilet paper in the Philippines, but I wasn't expecting it so quickly! Right there, in the Bacolod airport, the CR (comfort room) had NO TOILET PAPER. On principle, I decided that I could hold it until we got wherever we were going. We were picked up at the airport by the Mission President and his wife, President and Sister Tobias, and also the APs (Assistants to the President)! They are very nice. The APs drove us to a hotel. Apparently the mission home is under renovation, so we couldn't sleep there. At the hotel we had some dinner. I ate rice. And fish. In the evening we went to the mission home/church, and had our interviews with Pres. Tobias. That night is all kind of a blur. We were very tired.
Sister Arnold and I remained companions for the next few days which were spent mostly in the church being oriented about the mission rules and stuff. The rest of our "batch" flew in from the Philippines MTC on Thursday. The church and the hotel both had toilet paper and hot running water. Two things I would soon say goodbye to.
Language: It's more like guidelines than actual rules.
The Filipinos here all speak English, Tagalog, and Hiliganon (aka Ilonggo). Our meetings thus far have all been in English. On Friday we said goodbye to the nice air conditioned hotel, and we met our trainers (first companions in the field). My companion is Sister Rosina. She is from the Philippines. She speaks another dialect of Filipino along with everything else. Sister Rosina and I are like the movie The Best Two Years (a movie I've been yearning to watch) in that she is in her last transfer (like Elder Rogers) and I am brand new (like Elder Calhoon). Friday afternoon we went together to the "SM" which stands for "super market" but really it's a "shopping mall." There I bought an umbrella, and a bag for walking around. I got my first real stares and points on this day. More into that later. I rode a jeepney for the first time. A jeepney is basically a truck with an open back. It has benches on the sides like a bus, and it works sort of like a taxi. Sister Rosina and I are serving in a city called Sagay. It's on the north end of the island. Now I won't tell you about how the house that the APs dropped us off is the sort of house that would make my mother cry, because that would be mean to my mother. She'd want to clean it, yes, but she wouldn't cry. Four sisters have been called to Sagay, and we all share the house together. Then we went to sleep.
Saturday morning, I was reminded of the island of Kauai. Is it because there was shave ice? No. Was it because we went to the Smith Family Luau? No. Is it because the roosters woke me up at odd hours of the night, making it impossible for me to sleep? Yes. I started off the day with my first real shower. Seriously though, I enjoyed this experience, and I encourage you to try it. In the bathroom there's a bucket next to a spigot of water. I fill up the bucket with room temperature water, and then I use this red, plastic "Big Dipper" and I pour water on myself. Then wash your body like you normally would. It's quite refreshing. Any of you could do this with a bucket in your bathtub. Save water. ;)
Saturday was National Service Day (like Earth Day?) A group of a few dozen Mormons met up at the church and then went out to pick up garbage on the side of the road. Trust me, it needed it. The roads are so dirty here, Sagay is also covered in dogs and cats. Remember the roosters I mentioned? Unlike in Kauai, these roosters actually belong to people. They are on leashes. The people here love my blonde hair and blue eyes. They sort of look at me in amazement, as if they aren't sure if I'm real or not. I haven't been touched or stroked awkwardly, but I think someone poked me in the back once. Little kids are the biggest culprits of pointing and staring.
Sunday was so great. Sister Rosina is a rock star. At 3 we met up with some of the youth in the ward, and they walked us around to the homes of less-actives, recently baptized, and some investigators. We visited 5 or 6 homes or so, and it was so good. I did my best to understand, but Sister Rosina did most of the talking (since I don't know how to speak the language. They understand English, but I feel so guilty speaking it!) By the end of the night we had 6 baptismal commitments! Hoorah! One sister (who's already seen the missionaries) gets so much love from me. She's 21, married with a little boy about 2 years old, and her husband cheats on her. She willingly welcomes Christ into her life. It just breaks my heart. She's so young, and she's already been through so much crap. In the Philippines there is no such thing as divorce either, so when you're married and you don't like it, you either just live with it, or you leave each other, unable to technically marry anyone else again as long as you both shall live. Yikes.
We just had a "brown-out" here in the internet "arcade" which is the same thing as an electricity black-out in America. It deleted part of my email, grrrrrr.
I'll finish up now. Like one of the church members here said, "When you're in Rome, be Roman. When you're in Sagay, be Sagayan!" I'll do my best, Sister Rose. It's hot here, and the food is weird, and I don't understand people, and I sweat when I'm just standing in the grocery store, and people stare at me, and the heat/bad air quality has only aggravated my lungs further, but that's all okay. I'll get used to it. The work is good, and the gospel is true.
Hugs and Butterfly kisses,
Sister Kelli King
And everyone, keep emailing to kelli.king@myldsmail.net
So what have I been doing since I last wrote/spoke to you? Good question!
On Monday last week our group of 5 sisters and 3 elders heading for the Philippines did just that... we headed to the Philippines. Saying goodbye at the MTC was surprisingly hard. I've said goodbye there before, but this time it was ME leaving! Leaving and knowing that I may never see some of these people again in this lifetime because we are serving in different missions and we are from distant lands. We took a MTC-owned bus to SLC where I got to call my family on the pay phone! I talked to Brian, Farina and little Wesley who occasionally cried in the background, and then I called Mom and Dad who were in the car with some relatives, and they put me on speaker phone. It was all very nice.
The flight to San Francisco was nondescript and uneventful. By the time we left SanFran for Hong Kong, it was like1 or 2 in the morning, and we were tired. I slept relatively well in the 14 hour flight. For the first half of the flight, I took several cat-naps. By about 7 hours in, I guess my sleep had been "satisfied" and I had trouble sleeping after that. This flight was also pretty nondescript. I was fortunate enough to have an aisle seat next to the toilet, so I could get up and stuff. The most exciting part of that flight was that Sister Arnold sat next to a nice Chinese man from the Hong Kong area, and she gave away a Book of Mormon.
The Hong Kong airport required security again. They confiscated terrifying nail file and cuticle scissors that I had in my carry-on. Those items were FINE in America! In this airport I saw my first ever real life Airbenders, aka Buddhist Monks. They were so cool, I wanted to take a picture. Hong Kong has some cool looking mountains outside. Anyway, we flew from Hong Kong to Manila next. On this flight I sat next to a nice Filipino man named Donald. He's a seaman; and he'd been away from the Philippines for 11 months in a ship. He was very interesting, and he also had a very good outlook on religion and tolerance. He loves the Bible, and reads it often. He and I shared favorite verses/stories from the New Testament. He shared the parable of the Good Samaritan. I shared the scripture in Matthew 7 that says, "Seek and ye shall find ... knock and it shall be opened unto you, etc." In the end I pulled out my Book of Mormon and shared a scripture from it too, bore my testimony, and I gave him my paperback Tagalog Book of Mormon. I also gave him a little Greg Olsen print of Jesus Christ (thanks, Kalenn). Looks who's being a missionary now?
Manila welcomed us with hassle. Baggage claim and customs were fine, but at this point in our journey we needed to figure out where to drop off Sister Tioti. While the rest of us had one more flight to Bacolod, she had reached her destination. We took this shuttle bus that took about a million years to load up to the domestic flights terminal. There we did a lot of waiting while Sister Arnold (the travel leader) and Elder Inlayo (actually speaks Tagalog) made some calls to Sister Tioti's mission. We eventually left her in the caring hands of a security guard to wait until the people came and picked her up. In the midst of this, I received my first 3 mosquito bites. Welcome to the Philippines. The rest of us headed up to check-in, which sort of added to the hellish feel we were already getting from the weather. They charged about ten trillion dollars for every bit of your luggage that weighed over 15 kilos (which isn't a lot of weight). The weighing and paying process took forever, and we were lucky this layover was like 4 hours long. We needed every second of it! We didn't get a chance to eat lunch or anything, we had to run onto the plane. We almost missed it. Then we flew to Bacolod. Some slight turbulence caused the guy next to me to spill his coffee before he even got the chance to drink it. I was so tempted to say, "This is a sign from God that you shouldn't be drinking coffee anymore." I didn't though. Finally after all THAT, we made it to Bacolod!
Now, I heard what to expect about a certain lack of toilet paper in the Philippines, but I wasn't expecting it so quickly! Right there, in the Bacolod airport, the CR (comfort room) had NO TOILET PAPER. On principle, I decided that I could hold it until we got wherever we were going. We were picked up at the airport by the Mission President and his wife, President and Sister Tobias, and also the APs (Assistants to the President)! They are very nice. The APs drove us to a hotel. Apparently the mission home is under renovation, so we couldn't sleep there. At the hotel we had some dinner. I ate rice. And fish. In the evening we went to the mission home/church, and had our interviews with Pres. Tobias. That night is all kind of a blur. We were very tired.
Sister Arnold and I remained companions for the next few days which were spent mostly in the church being oriented about the mission rules and stuff. The rest of our "batch" flew in from the Philippines MTC on Thursday. The church and the hotel both had toilet paper and hot running water. Two things I would soon say goodbye to.
Language: It's more like guidelines than actual rules.
The Filipinos here all speak English, Tagalog, and Hiliganon (aka Ilonggo). Our meetings thus far have all been in English. On Friday we said goodbye to the nice air conditioned hotel, and we met our trainers (first companions in the field). My companion is Sister Rosina. She is from the Philippines. She speaks another dialect of Filipino along with everything else. Sister Rosina and I are like the movie The Best Two Years (a movie I've been yearning to watch) in that she is in her last transfer (like Elder Rogers) and I am brand new (like Elder Calhoon). Friday afternoon we went together to the "SM" which stands for "super market" but really it's a "shopping mall." There I bought an umbrella, and a bag for walking around. I got my first real stares and points on this day. More into that later. I rode a jeepney for the first time. A jeepney is basically a truck with an open back. It has benches on the sides like a bus, and it works sort of like a taxi. Sister Rosina and I are serving in a city called Sagay. It's on the north end of the island. Now I won't tell you about how the house that the APs dropped us off is the sort of house that would make my mother cry, because that would be mean to my mother. She'd want to clean it, yes, but she wouldn't cry. Four sisters have been called to Sagay, and we all share the house together. Then we went to sleep.
Saturday morning, I was reminded of the island of Kauai. Is it because there was shave ice? No. Was it because we went to the Smith Family Luau? No. Is it because the roosters woke me up at odd hours of the night, making it impossible for me to sleep? Yes. I started off the day with my first real shower. Seriously though, I enjoyed this experience, and I encourage you to try it. In the bathroom there's a bucket next to a spigot of water. I fill up the bucket with room temperature water, and then I use this red, plastic "Big Dipper" and I pour water on myself. Then wash your body like you normally would. It's quite refreshing. Any of you could do this with a bucket in your bathtub. Save water. ;)
Saturday was National Service Day (like Earth Day?) A group of a few dozen Mormons met up at the church and then went out to pick up garbage on the side of the road. Trust me, it needed it. The roads are so dirty here, Sagay is also covered in dogs and cats. Remember the roosters I mentioned? Unlike in Kauai, these roosters actually belong to people. They are on leashes. The people here love my blonde hair and blue eyes. They sort of look at me in amazement, as if they aren't sure if I'm real or not. I haven't been touched or stroked awkwardly, but I think someone poked me in the back once. Little kids are the biggest culprits of pointing and staring.
Sunday was so great. Sister Rosina is a rock star. At 3 we met up with some of the youth in the ward, and they walked us around to the homes of less-actives, recently baptized, and some investigators. We visited 5 or 6 homes or so, and it was so good. I did my best to understand, but Sister Rosina did most of the talking (since I don't know how to speak the language. They understand English, but I feel so guilty speaking it!) By the end of the night we had 6 baptismal commitments! Hoorah! One sister (who's already seen the missionaries) gets so much love from me. She's 21, married with a little boy about 2 years old, and her husband cheats on her. She willingly welcomes Christ into her life. It just breaks my heart. She's so young, and she's already been through so much crap. In the Philippines there is no such thing as divorce either, so when you're married and you don't like it, you either just live with it, or you leave each other, unable to technically marry anyone else again as long as you both shall live. Yikes.
We just had a "brown-out" here in the internet "arcade" which is the same thing as an electricity black-out in America. It deleted part of my email, grrrrrr.
I'll finish up now. Like one of the church members here said, "When you're in Rome, be Roman. When you're in Sagay, be Sagayan!" I'll do my best, Sister Rose. It's hot here, and the food is weird, and I don't understand people, and I sweat when I'm just standing in the grocery store, and people stare at me, and the heat/bad air quality has only aggravated my lungs further, but that's all okay. I'll get used to it. The work is good, and the gospel is true.
Hugs and Butterfly kisses,
Sister Kelli King
And everyone, keep emailing to kelli.king@myldsmail.net
The best actual address is the mission home:
Sister Kelli Anne King
Philippines Bacolod Mission
Galo St. between Lacson & Mabini
Brgy. 22, Bacolod City
6100 Negros Occidental
Philippines
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