Email excerpts from September 27th

The food is all right! I’m trying to learn to cook some new things.
Canned 555 tuna is getting a little old for each dinner, but its still
tasty haha we're trying some new things this week, but so far nothing
really out of the ordinary has been eaten! When they cook fish, they
just cook the fish... there is one organ they remove because it is
bitter, other than that, the guts, the fins, the eyes, the head... all
just part of the food! Yum! I’m not a huge fan of it to be honest
ha-ha.
Yes we take a tricycle to and from balasan every day, and sometimes
take it around the town too because the area is HUGE. Really spread
out. So if we have lots of appointments, sometimes we have to catch an
extra ride across town. Its sad to see us using so much money on the
travel, but it all works out. It’s pretty fun! My favorite place to sit
is sideways on the back of the motorcycle, or standing up on the back
of the sidecar. Those 2 places get the most wind (nice and cool!) and
I can just look out across the landscape better.
I got to see a baptism this weekend! The other elders, Ellsworth and
Andrews, had 2 teenage sisters baptized. We took about a 5-minute
drive down the road to a little beach area, and that’s where they did
it! It was so exciting to see! We have about 5 people right now
committed for baptism October 30, so hopefully I’ll be reporting about
those in about a month!
We live pretty close to the beach; close enough that they dry the fish
out right at the end of our street, so there is always a yummy fish
scent outside. mmm. But the ocean is very pretty, and there are a
couple islands just off the coast that are pretty.

Well, this week was really good. We had our record for lessons taught
in one week! We have a real funny 77-year-old man we're teaching that
is scheduled to be baptized end of October. He says I look like Barack
Obama. He says "Barackama!!" hahaha and he says my companion looks
like George bush. Do I really look like Obama? Ha-ha and people here
doubt whether I’m 100% American, because I have black hair. They
always ask if one of my parents is Pilipino or Mexican ha-ha that’s a
hard one to explain!
We are also teaching a 30-ish year old guy that is so excited about
the gospel. We just taught the plan of salvation, and he kept pointing
at our picture of the celestial kingdom and saying "that’s where I’m
going!!" its so great to be teaching these people that are prepared to
hear the gospel, are accepting it and progressing. It makes it a lot
easier when they aren't questioning everything we say! Ha-ha

Excerpts from another email!

9/6/2010
So, yes, I was daring with the balut, but, I probably won’t eat anything that cool really again, because it is strongly advised against. One rule of what we shouldn’t eat is "don’t ever eat something someone dares you to" hahaha I thought that was funny.
BUT
I do have a great story about something I ate this week :)
We were teaching a husband and wife investigators, and the wife said something about what she was cooking and asked if we'd ever tried it. We both said no, and I didn’t really register what she said in English at this moment. So she brought out these bowls of steamy hot soup! It smelled good, and the broth was actually rather tasty, but there were these strange things in them that I couldn’t tell what they were. They looked like... mm hard to describe, like the peel of an onion, a little square of it, but really thick. Like pieces were probably half inch thick. There was barely any meat in the soup. So I decided to eat one of those things cuz they looked like a vegetable or something. But, it wasn’t. It was really tough, rubbery ish, quite strange to try to bite and break up to swallow, and it tasted strange. The texture was really weird. so. Guess what it was? If you haven’t guessed it yet, it was big chunks of boiled COW SKIN! YUM!!!

So in the Philippines, more so in the smaller towns, there are what are called 'brown outs' where the power just stops working for, oh, anywhere from 15 minutes to 6+ hours, you just never know. We’ve averaged about 1 brown out a day. This is rough, because that means our little electric fans don’t work, so we just cook in our house. (We have a pretty nice house, I wish I could send pictures! hopefully next week I can). But, one morning, we woke up to one, and it didn’t look like it was coming on soon, so I got my first candle-lit shower! It was pretty fun. We go thru a lot of candles. But I’m buying a flashlight hopefully today. Everything is SO cheap here! Sure, its not top notch quality (ha-ha), but dirt cheap! everything! Eating out at restaurants, no more than $3 for a big meal!

It’s funny how different the weather is in just a short distance. In our town 15-20 minutes from this one, we could have a HUGE rainstorm (had an hour long ish one last week that left us soaked) and come home at night and the other elder's have had no rain at all! our area, balasan, seems to rain almost every day! so I’m getting an umbrella today too :)

The work is going well, continuing to find good people to teach, slowly but surely. Cool experience with one of them a couple days ago: he said, in his opinion we were God's instruments, to bring him the Holy Ghost, and that he doesn’t think it was coincidence that we met him in the city hall the day we did. Wow!! How incredible! We sometimes will tell people that ourselves, but he just strait up said it! That ended the day really well for us, feeling rather good about ourselves ha-ha.

The language can be frustrating. I’m understanding more, bit by bit, but I just really wish I could hold a conversation. But, I know the Lord will help me as I focus on the people, and it will come! (Hopefully before I’m transferred to an area w/ a different language! haha)

Thank you so much for your emails and love and support. I love hearing how everyone is doing.
I love you so much!
Love
Elder Pettit