First Week of Training

Hello Family!!!!

This week has flown. Just flown by. Tuesday, Sister Erandio and I drove to Tacloban, had a trainers meeting Wednesday with all of the trainers and President and Sister Maurer. There are 9 sister trainers and 6 of them are from my batch alone! Including Sister Garcia, my MTC companion. It was fun to all be together.

On Thursday, we met the trainees and got assigned to them. There was one American trainee and all of us foreigners were praying we wouldn't get her. She's very sweet, but we all know how long it's taken us to learn the languages and training someone in a language we hardly know ourselves sounds like...just thinking about it makes me want to go lay in a hole.

We did the same thing that I did for my training with my trainer - we went to this park where Sister Maurer gave the history of what occurred there in WWII and then the APs read off each new missionary and who their trainer was.

My new companion is.... Sister Angeles! She walked right up to me before we were appointed companions and told me she wanted me to be her companion. Haha she got what she asked for. She really reallly wanted an American.

She and I are very very different. Sister Erandio, my last companion, was like an Americanized Philippino, bless her heart. Sister Angeles grew up Philippina to the core. She and I struggled the first couple of days, because her English is hardly English. She knows a couple of words, that's it. Out of all the trainees, I got assigned to the one who doesn't speak English.

However, I also got assigned to the only one who knows waray waray. Our mission is the only mission in the Philippines that speaks waray waray and she grew up here. She moved out to Legaspi a couple years ago and thats where she was when she put her papers in for the mission and that's why she was able to be called back here.

Before I became a trainer, I asked Sister Folau how she did it when she trained Sister Garcia. Her words were, "You fake it. You fake it til you make it because eventually, you will start to make it".

Yep, that is exactly what I have been doing and over the last couple of days, my testimony that "God qualifies the called" has grown very strong. My waray waray ability to teach and understand is just increasing tremendously every day. And my emotional stability has been fine surprisingly. Heavenly Father is giving me strength and I can assure you it's coming from him and not me.

We've been working really hard. Trying to find people. Trying to talk to everyone. I'm doing my best to teach my trainee to be very obedient. We'll see what happens these next couple of weeks! Hopefully we can find people who are really interested in the gospel! Haha, Saturday, we taught this guy, who then proceeded to take us to a bunch of friends he knew for the next couple of hours. I asked him why he was so eager to help us, he hadn't even prayed yet to know if what we've said was true, and he said, "I trust you and I just want to be a missionary". Then I asked him what religion he was before and he said, "Catholic, but now I'm a Roman." My companion said, "You mean Mormon?" and he said, "Oh yes, that.". Haha oh great. The people you meet:) I figure it's just best to laugh at these situations because I'll likely have them the rest of my mission. 

Keep striving to strengthen your testimony in all that you do! There is always so much to learn in the gospel!

Love you all so much! More than I can say!
Love Sister Russon