Elder Payne in Baguio: A Week Without A Letter

Elder Payne had some technical issues with his computer this week so he wasn't able to send a group email out before his time on the computer ended. These are some pictures he sent to our family email account before he had to go. We hope to get more information about these pictures next week, but we can tell you that he was able to baptize two individuals as new members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints this last week. He's very happy for them and their families. He said he'd fill us in more about this experience in the group email, but he lost the draft of that email when his computer malfunctioned and he ran out of time to rewrite it. For now, he said he's finding his joy in service and gets to stay in his area with his current companion until the next transfer round in 6 weeks.

Here are some other things from the week that he shared with us:

We need to do a lot of finding! Our teaching pool is getting pretty low. We found some promising people last week so we will visit them this week. We have two kids who want to get baptized so all we really have to do is teach them. One will get baptized on the 14th of October and the other on the 5th of November! For door approaches, you don't knock on the door. It's kind of funny. You walk up and yell Tao po! which means "People! Haha. Sometimes, they will yell "Bakit!" which means "Why?' and we just tell them we are missionaries, ha ha. We are currently teaching this old tatay (dad, grandpa- the term for dad or "tatay" is used a lot here). We tao po'd him and it's going pretty well! Sometimes people won't open or they also like to hide a lot. You just have to be at the right house at the right time. We lost power for like all day yesterday so that was rough! Turns out the Philippines is hot and without fans, it's crazy hot. And our water depends on electricity so that was a little stressful... it came back on by the end of the day, though.