Island Life

yooooo my area is awesome!!! So Thursday I spent pretty much the entire day riding buses and ferries to get to Zamboanguita (my new area). I was with Elder Christiansen, Mobanta, and Bowers on the way down to Dumeguete (one of the biggest cities on Negros) and ya it was great. It's so awesome here. It's so bukid and I love it. We got like rice fields, a small town, sugar cane, the ocean, and like soooo much bukid it's amazing. Our area is like huge so we actually are in a biking area so that's been super fun. I think if I were to live in the philippines I'd live here in Zamboanguita. I honestly love it so much. So about my area and companion and all that. So my area is a branch so it has a fairly small number of members here. My companion is Elder Swain and he's from New Hampshire. So since I'm his follow-up training his bisaya is still semi-limited but he's getting there. That's like the super cool thing about this area. It's like bisaya jud. In Cebu the language is all mixed with tagalog and waray waray and just like everything so it's kinda hard to understand people there but here in Zamboanguita everyone just speaks bisaya so apparently I'm like actually pretty bisdak (fluent) and I didn't even know it. Like I can carry entire conversations and totally understand everything that people say. It's awesome, I love it. Still kinda just trying to figure out how to do missionary work but ya at least I can speak the language now hahaha.

Sooo my dengue I think I got from my house in Sikatuna kay there's a ton of mosquitoes by our desks so they bite us the entire time while we study bisan kon we have bug spray on. So ya. So the pic of my back is kay I guess sometimes Dengue discolors your skin and so when I had Dengue my back was the main thing that was affected so like my back just kinda felt broken the entire time so ya I got like this random brown spot on my spine. But ya so when I had dengue my fever spiked to 39.8 degrees celsius and my platelet count dropped below 80 so ya you can ask dad about what that means but in short it was very bad.

I have not got the envelope yet, it'll probably be a while before i do kay ya it takes forever for stuff to get to negros.

I'm doing good though. Finally have another companion I can get along with. I love yall and hope that yall don't worry too much about me. I'm doing much better now and I'm starting to enjoy the mission again.

Love yall!
Elder Shirley














So the tall red head is my comp.



 The guy that we're in a lot of pics with is a priest aged young man that kuyogs us a lot.

And then the dog is like the only golden retriever in like all of the philippines. his name is Linus



The pic with the ocean behind us has Apo island in the background gihapon.

















And the sisters we are with are investigators of ours that live in a community area that is literally paradise.



So if you look at the map of negros the tiny little island is right next to my area so if you zoom in you can probably find zamboanguita







the boy with the knife is the same priest that kuyogs us



What’s on your key chain that hangs on your belt loop?
so that's called puso. It's a mini version of it though. So puso is just cooked rice that they wrap in leaves to sell. So ya I have a couple keychains that have mini puso

my companion just happened to catch a frog